But these musings of mine are perhaps rather dry! I do not mean to imply that I did not enjoy my initiation to the realm of high finance. On the contrary, I did. I felt empowered, and besides, all manner of new possibilities were opening up to me. I will give you an example: expense accounts. Do you know how exhilarating it is to be issued a credit card and told that your company will pick up the tab for any ostensibly work-related meal or entertainment? Forgive me: of course you do; you are here, after all, on business. But for me, at the age of twenty-two, this experience was a revelation. I could, if I desired, take my colleagues out for an after-work drink — an activity classified as “new hire cultivation”—and with impunity spend in an hour more than my father earned in a day!
As you can imagine, we new hires availed ourselves of the opportunity to cultivate one another on a regular basis. I remember the first night we did so; we went to the bar at the Royalton, on Forty-Fourth Street. Sherman came with us on this occasion and ordered a bottle of vintage champagne to celebrate our induction. I looked around as we raised our glasses in a toast to ourselves. Two of my five colleagues were women; Wainwright and I were non-white. We were marvelously diverse…and yet we were not: all of us, Sherman included, hailed from the same elite universities — Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale; we all exuded a sense of confident self-satisfaction; and not one of us was either short or overweight.
It struck me then — no, I must be honest, it strikes me now—that shorn of hair and dressed in battle fatigues, we would have been virtually indistinguishable. Perhaps something similar had occurred to Wainwright, for he winked and said to me, rather presciently as it would turn out, “Beware the dark side, young Sky-walker.” He had a penchant for quoting lines from popular cinema, much as my mother quoted the poems of Faiz and Ghalib. But I suspect Wainwright made this particular allusion to Star Wars mostly in jest, for immediately afterwards he, like I — like all of us, for that matter — drank heartily.
Sherman left when the champagne was done, but he told us to continue to our hearts’ content and to charge our bill to Underwood Samson. We did so, staggering out into the street around midnight. Wainwright and I shared a cab downtown. “Hey man,” he said, “do you get cricket?” I asked him what he meant. “My dad’s nuts about it,” he said. “He’s from Barbados. West Indies versus Pakistan”—and here he slipped into a Caribbean lilt—“best damn test match I ever saw.” I laughed. “That must have been in the eighties,” I said. “Neither team is quite so good now.”
We were both hungry, and I suggested we stop at the Pak-Punjab Deli. The man behind the counter recognized me; he had given me a free meal that morning when I mentioned it was my first day of work. “My friend,” he said, spreading his arms in welcome. “Jenaab,” I replied, bowing my head, “do you never go home?” “Not enough,” he said. “This time I insist on paying,” I told him, unsheathing my credit card and leaning forward — both conspiratorially and drunkenly — to add, “I have an expense account.” He shook his head and informed me, to the visible amusement of the exhausted cabdrivers present, that he was sorry, and I could always pay later if I did not have the money, but he did not accept American Express.
Although we were speaking in Urdu, Wainwright seemed to understand. “I have cash,” he said. “This stuff looks delicious.” I was pleased he thought so; our food, as you have surely gathered in your time here, is something we Lahoris take great pride in. Moreover, it is a mark of friendship when someone treats you to a meal — ushering you thereby into a relationship of mutual generosity — and by the time fifteen minutes later that I saw Wainwright licking his fingers, having dispatched the last crumb on his plate, I knew I had found a kindred spirit at the office.
But why do you recoil? Ah yes, this beggar is a particularly unfortunate fellow. One can only wonder what series of accidents could have left him so thoroughly disfigured. He draws close to you because you are a foreigner. Will you give him something? No? Very wise; one ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty rather than to him, a creature who is merely its symptom. What am I doing? I am handing him a few rupees — misguidedly, of course, and out of habit. There, he offers us his prayers for our well-being; now he is on his way.
I was telling you about Wainwright. Over the following weeks, it became clear that he was in strong contention for the top position in our rankings. All of us analyst trainees were competitive by nature — we had to have been for us to have acquired the grades necessary for consideration by Underwood Samson — but Wainwright was less overtly so; he was genial and irreverent, and was as a consequence almost universally well-liked. But there was no doubt in my mind that my friend was also extremely talented: his presentations were remarkably clear; he excelled in our interpersonal exercises; and he had an instinct for identifying what mattered most in a business case.