How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid

and air-conditioning, or for that matter the clean walls and floors, of the private hospital.
    The doctor you are taken to see examines your mother quickly, looks at her test results, and shakes his head. “We can’t help her,” he says to you.
    â€œYou don’t treat cancer?”
    â€œSometimes. Surgically. But we don’t administer hormones or radiotherapy.”
    â€œWhat should we do?”
    â€œYou should pray. It’s out of your hands. The thyroid has been removed. She might be fine.”
    Your mother is quiet throughout, as she tends to be in her interactions with medical professionals. They are unusual in their capacity to cause this behavior in her. Their power to kill in the future by uttering mysterious words today robs her of her confidence and she, a customarily confident woman, resents this. She longs to resist them but has no idea how to do so.
    For a time, your mother’s condition seems neither particularly good nor bad. The wound of the surgery heals, darkening and puckering under its protective dressing of gauze. She endures headaches stoically, refusing for the most part to admit to them but unable entirely to mask in her eyes signs of the discomfort they cause. She also has muscular twitches, little spasms thrusting beneath her shawl like fish feeding below the surface of a pond. You recognize these from your online investigations at the university computer center as being symptoms of her thyroid hormone deficiency.
    Eventually your father beseeches his employer for further assistance. But the matriarch explains to him that life is one long series of illnesses, that she has intervened to save his wife, successfully and at great expense, but cannot be asked to keep intervening, again and again, for where would it stop, she is not made of money, and in the end, as she knows only too well herself, certain things are up to fate, and we can struggle, but fate is fate, so it would be best for him and his family to do what they can, since it is after all their responsibility, and to accept that she has already helped them more than anyone could reasonably have expected that she would.
    In the coming months your mother’s suffering is extreme, her cancer having metastasized to her bones and lungs. This is accompanied by a transformation in her appearance and personality. She is gripped by fear, surprised both by her unyielding attachment to life and by the failure of her imagination to conceive of a proud ending to it. Her death, in the absence of modern palliative care, is preceded by agony, only partially mitigated in her final fortnight by street heroin procured by your brother and administered by your father through slender, long-filtered women’s cigarettes, from which your mother, wheezing, attempts to inhale in tiny gasps.
    Your sister arrives from the village to comfort her. Neither woman has previously thought of your sister as your mother’s favorite, that honor being yours, but it is to your sister that your mother turns most naturally at this time, perhaps because she is her eldest, or because they are both women, or because your sister is the only one of her children to herself be a mother, and in your sister your mother perceives echoes of her own mother, whom she last saw the same age your sister is now, when your mother was a little girl. In the moment she ceases to live, your sister is holding your mother’s hands, your mother like an infant struggling to take its first breath as it transitions from aquatic life to terrestrial, but in reverse, with her lungs filling with water, and the breath never coming.
    As you and the men of your family carry her white-shrouded body on your shoulders to the open, dusty pit of her grave, you are struck by how light she is. The speed of her progression from solid heartiness to ephemeral fragility has been so strange as to be almost fantastic. Rose petals are thrown, incense lit, entreaties to the divine offered,