“Like passing your hat around at church,” Jules says.
“Exactly. You don’t get less church if you pay less.” Cyrus was getting more comfortable with the religious metaphors. “Asha, could you get Ren to mock up a few designs of how we might introduce this? And Destiny should come up with a marketing message. You’ll know what to do around the back end.”
Ren and I had already come up with a way to take payments and track subscriptions. But we would have to find a way to allow people to pay whatever they wanted instead of a set amount.
“Let’s call it membership,” I say. “That way we can use things like GoFundMe to let people donate whatever they want.”
“It’s not a donation. But yes, we could call it membership.”
We’ve reached a truce. In five weeks, we’ll see what it yields.
* * *
When I come out of the meeting room, I find my sister sitting at my desk, her hands wrapped around a mug. “This place is unbelievable,” she says when she sees me.
“I’ve been asking you to come visit.”
“What, and get seduced by your capitalist wet dream?”
“Toba Toba,” I say, mimicking the way our mother slapped her own cheeks whenever we used the f-word at home. “Do you want a tour? We have a chocolate fountain.”
“No, thanks. I came to tell you I’m pregnant.”
Everything else melts away. I try not to knock her over. “You did it!”
“It’s horrible timing. I won’t have time to finish my manuscript, so I won’t have a book when my tenure review comes up, and then they’ll hire someone else and make me an adjunct.”
“Never mind about that. How are you feeling?”
“Like shit, but apparently, that’s a good thing. It means I’m more pregnant.”
“What does Ahmed say?”
“He’s already starting talking to my stomach.”
“I’m really happy,” I say, hugging her again and again. “I’m going to be such an awesome aunt.”
* * *
Mira is pregnant for thirty-five weeks after I hear this news, and in those thirty-five weeks, WAI becomes, in the words of Rupert and his endless sports metaphors, the Patriots in 2002. In other words, we hit the big time.
The subscriptions are a success. People begin to donate to the platform in huge numbers. We draw graphs and bell curves and pie charts, but they all tell us the same thing, which is that, far from giving people the impression that they can get away with contributing as little as possible, the voluntary donation has made the WAIs reach deep into their pockets. They send us twenty, thirty dollars a month, sometimes more. They pay us when they don’t have to, in the middle of the month, two weeks before their money is due. They ask if they can donate for others, if they can give the gift of WAIsdom to their friends. Yes, WAIsdom is a thing. It’s the opposite of wisdom in that it makes no fucking sense at all.
So as my sister goes nervously to her twelve-week scan, her jeans starting to get a little pinchy around the waist, we turn our first ever profit. And by the time she’s had all her blood tests and knows she’s having a girl and that the girl has a near perfect set of genes, WAI is generating $3 million a month in subscriptions, a subscription rate of 47 percent with an average rate of $14, which is 44 percent higher and $7 more than we’d projected. In other words, while the baby is perfectly average, as one wants a baby to be at that stage in its life, WAI is breaking all of our average-size predictions and doubling its growth every month. And by the time little Gitanjali comes into the world, twenty-two hours of pushing accompanied by much cursing, and her father whispers the opening lines of the Quran into her left ear and my mother whispers into her other ear, “And though she be but little, she is fierce,” we are spinning with the strangeness of it all. And Gitanjali, suffering from colic or from an abundance of fierceness, cries for the next three months, keeping her parents up at night and harassing the neighbors, and at the end of those three months, we are all transformed, our entire tribe, not only Mira and Ahmed and my parents and Ahmed’s father, who sits up and cradles the baby all night long as she wails into the heavens, but Cyrus and me and Jules and all the people who work at WAI, all two hundred of them, crowding into the top two floors of Utopia, and the rest in the Valley, and London, and Hong Kong.
Eleven
FFS
When Li Ann gets an invite to the Girls Who Boss networking night, Destiny and I tag along. It’s at a bar called Composite, and when we walk down the stairs to the basement and enter the windowless room, it is already full of women in skinny jeans and blazers. Destiny and I hover around the edges while Li Ann gets us drinks. “What are we supposed to do here?” I ask.