It could have gone either way. A haven-distributed, largely tax-free windfall of over two hundred and fifty million Euros can have a delirious effect on anyone. To a centless decon worker from the crushing fields of Chittagong it was initially mostly beyond comprehension.
A slightly more culture-saturated target of benefaction would have gone through the standard stages of lottery burn rate. By the 30s, LBR was an established, observable, behaviour meme—infinitesimally marginal lottery variants had been evolved and honed to maximise their pacification effect. Simultaneously micro-taxing and distracting, the reality show, the phone-in, the lotto, the raffled home had all cohered into a mass-participatory amalgam of hysterical, shrieking bullshit that underpinned a billion-euro cable market, and a thousand cock-sucking remora-peripheral outfits eager to cash-in to one of the few growth markets left.
Latterly legitimatised via a number of degree and post-graduate level courses in the subject, Lottery Studies had carefully identified the typical response stages from the (typically) low income recipient of a lottery win:
Elation: Characterised by intoxicant consumption and list making. Anxiety denial: OCD levels of concern about security of winner designator (ticket/estub/SMS etc). Discretion flip-flop: Elation stage, wild promises regretted in a fug of hangover. Belief curve: Dawning realisation that the recipient can now purchase any amount of shiny crap they want. Consumer phase: Profligate period of conspicuous consumption, characterised by scant regard for tastes, appropriateness or dimensional suitability for the pre-win living space.
Janahara was not particularly intrinsically more discreet, or tasteful, or psychologically balanced than the average winner; it was just that nine years of a slum dwelling childhood, followed by nearly twenty five years of adulthood under the thumb of Iqbal Karim at the Madhom yard had equipped him with only a very specialised set of societal tools. He could have discussed at some length the importance of territorial boundary maintenance in male-only habitation environments, or drone level workplace ingratiation techniques—he could not however name this year’s Big Brother contestants (possibly though he might have approved of the current show format: contestants were now vying for critical medical procedures for both themselves and their families).
The result of his privation and relative isolation meant that Janahara was a kind of a cripple, mostly lacking in the ability to consume correctly. As a result, his quarter billion euros paradoxically lacked some of the impact that it might have for another, more media-reflexive winner.
He had a shit phone, a small boat, a dumb computer that was mostly left switched off in his small office, and he had stayed in Dhaka. This had not made him invisible (off-grid living was a paranoid survivalist wet dream with no scope in the current reality): his boat was routinely pinged by the creaky Dhaka ANPR network when he went out (as were all legal vehicles), and a record of his postaghar purchase was logged and easily accessible at the government database at Curzon Hall.
But in a world of cheap, fat, wireless bandwidth availability, Janahara was somewhat of a throwback. He used a quasi-sentient enabled maildrop that handled the vast majority of his email (he was no crackberry whore), and most of the time his shit phone was switched off. This made him a frustrating manager in some ways, but the face-to-face courtly business etiquette he had unselfconsciously developed won him a lot of respect with a lot of the old guard in the Dhaka business world, and the more contemporary wave of ultra-paranoid, physical key exchanging tech start-ups admired the intrinsic security that his style allowed.
As a result, Janahara maintained an open office surgery at his postaghar clave every Thursday morning. There he met with reps from hydrodynamic and flood management outfits (both local and foreign), local rotary groups curious about this business newcomer (in Dhaka you need to be established for over twenty years before you stop being the “new guy”); he also ejected about ten attendees each week claiming to be part of his family (a saliva swipe always took care of these familial claims, but sometimes it made for good sport to hear the latest fictional claim on his wealth).
So, in a relentlessly online and endlessly recursive, semantically webbed globe, Janahara developed a curiously solid physical presence that propelled him, in only several short years, to the forefront of the Dhaka small business world.
Janahara is not complacent; hard-wired by poverty to assume nothing and expect little, he is hobbled slightly by a tunnel vision that was born from the need to address the immediate—the next meal, the latest untreated infection, the uncertain ownership state of his slum hovel. This focus on minutiae has stayed with him, a pocket-slapping nervous tic that sometimes blinds him to the larger picture all around. It took him a while before he got the message.
A dawn boat jam in Amligola, all the air horns inexplicably synchronising at once into a bellowing assonance: Jaaaaaannaaaaaaa.
A cute lead-out human interest item on the local news, showing a series of cloud formations shot by a butcher from the Gulshan market—each one a near perfect rendering of the Bengali glyph of the letter J.
A call from his bank manager asking him (with barely contained glee) if he was going to be keeping the recent despot of ninety million takas in his current account; and then the subsequent call from the same manager apologising for an unaccountable database error—there was no such deposit.
Eventually, it took the hijacking of an infomercial idoru to smash the message home to Janahara. Unable to sleep in the crushing humidity, he was blearily watching an endless demonstration of a pointlessly over-engineered kitchen mandolin on one of the shopping channels when the screen momentarily glitched.
The beautifully rendered (ostensibly female) demonstrator dropped its plasticky gee-gaw and looked straight to camera:
“Janahara, read your fucking email.”