How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia Read Online Free

turtles? Fending off invisible crocodiles? It is difficult to gauge the purpose of her frenetic movements. Suddenly the girl squats, pantomiming the gestures of lighting a fire. The boy calls out to her, and she tosses him one end of her shawl.
    You grip the shawl firmly. In your hands it becomes the rope you will use to ford the river. But before you can do so, and without warning, the spell breaks. You follow your sister’s altered gaze and see that a formerly shuttered window is now open. A tall, bald man stands inside, staring at your sister intently. She takes her shawl from you and throws one end over her head, the other across her still-small-breasted chest.
    She says, “Let’s go home.”
    Your sister has worked as a cleaning girl since shortly after your family moved to the city, your father’s income unable to keep up with the rampant inflation of recent years. She was told she could go back to school once your brother, the middle of you three surviving siblings, was old enough to work. She demonstrated more enthusiasm for education in her few months in a classroom than your brother did in his several years. He has just been found employment as a painter’s assistant, and has been taken out of school as a result, but your sister will not be sent there in his stead. Her time for that has passed. Marriage is her future. She has been marked for entry.
    Your brother is sitting in the room when the two of you return. He is exhausted, a fine white dusting of paint on the exposed skin of his hands and face. It is also on his hair, like a play actor’s makeup, and he resembles a boy about to go onstage as a middle-aged man in a school drama. He looks at you wearily and coughs.
    Your sister says, “I told you, you shouldn’t smoke.”
    He says, “I don’t smoke.”
    She sniffs him. “Yes, you do.”
    â€œThe master does. I’m just around him all day.”
    The truth is that your brother has smoked on several occasions. But he does not particularly like to smoke, and he has not smoked this week. Besides, smoking is not the reason for his cough. The reason for his cough is paint inhalation.
    Each morning your brother walks over the train tracks, using the crossing if it is open, or if it is not and the train is moving slowly, making a dash for it with the urchins for whom this activity is a game. He catches a bus to the century-old, and hence in city historical terms neither recent nor ancient, European-designed commercial district. There he enters, through a tea stall, an open space that was formerly a public square, or public trapezoid rather, but is now, because of illegally built encroachments that have filled in its entryways, an entirely enclosed courtyard.
    The courtyard is a marvel of mixed-use planning, or non-planning to be more precise. The upper floors of its constituent buildings contain family and labor residences, guest rooms of a run-down hotel, workshops occupied by tailors, embroiderers, and other craftsmen, and also offices, including two belonging to a pair of aging private investigators who harbor an abiding hatred and can be seen watching each other through their windows from either side of the divide. At ground level, the fronts of the buildings, which is to say their non-courtyard-facing sides, are given over to shops and unprepossessing restaurants. Their courtyard-facing backsides, on the other hand, are devoted to small-scale manufacturing, to operations that because of their sonic, aromatic, visual, or chemical noxiousness are unpopular in a high-density neighborhood such as this one, and therefore utilize the enclosed courtyard as a partial veil.
    The painter your brother assists is an air-gun spray painter, and their work today was an assignment for an interior designer of remarkable valor and renown. Your brother began by unloading a set of custom-made, built-in bookshelves, still unpainted and yet to be built in, from a tiny flatbed