


The pretty girl, who seems way more liberated than the hero, has sex with him but does so the night before running away with a man who says he recognizes “her potential to be a model.” He falls in love with the pretty girl and installs her as the ideal woman in his heart, where she will remain ever after. In the big city “you” gets himself an education - another step on the ladder of getting filthy rich - and a job delivering DVDs for a video retailer, which brings him into contact with the pretty girl, a movie buff, who works at a beauty salon and is plotting her escape from her dysfunctional family. The fingers on one hand, the toes on one foot, a minuscule aggregation when compared with shoals of fish or flocks of birds or indeed tribes of humans.” He adds that the change in family dynamics was in itself “an explosive transformation,” the “supportive, stifling, stabilizing bonds of extended relationships weakening and giving way, leaving in their wake insecurity, anxiety, productivity and potential.” Where once your clan was innumerable, not infinite but of a large number not readily known, now there are five of you. Hamid writes: “As you and your parents and siblings dismount, you embody one of the great changes of your time. Of the decision of “you’s” father to move his immediate family from their small village (where “you” grew up surrounded by dozens of relatives) and their arrival in the metropolis, Mr.
