The excerpt from the novel How to get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid takes place in a city in Asia. The name of the country and the city is not mentioned in the story. This may hint that the events could happen in any Asian city.
The country where the action takes place appears to be a poor, developing country. The narrator is a teenager, but he works late evening to night (6 pm to 1 am) to add to his family’s income. The narrator’s family is not rich enough to afford good, filling meals for a teenager who needs protein to help his growth.
The environment where the events take place also appears to be unsafe and disreputable. The DVD store owner makes a lot of money from the illegal sale of pirated DVDs. The pretty girl’s father is regularly beaten by gangsters. It is implied that this sort of business is seen as normal because nobody questions it, and the police do not intervene.
As well as this, the country seems to have conservative and traditionalist views, especially when it comes to how they perceive women. People talk about how the pretty girl dresses and acts, because she does not conform to societal expectations. When she has to wear a shawl, she is “disdainful” (p. 9, l. 12) of the practice. The admiration that the narrator’s mother seems to feel at the end for the pretty girl also stresses that this is the society in which women rarely escape the roles imposed on them ...
