Mr Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, the Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma (48 page)

‘After all, she was the only person in their house. You have included the feeding of your own children,’ her husband said; which enraged her so much that she stabbed his cheeks with her fingers screaming: ‘Go and lick their feet for love of that wonderful brother of yours, you will do anything for him I am sure.’

Balu devoted himself to the art of cultivating leisure. He was never in any undue hurry to get out of bed. At about nine o’clock, his father came to his bedside and gently reminded him: ‘Had you not better get up before the coffee gets too stale?’ Balu drank his morning coffee, demanded some tiffin, dressed himself, and left the house. He returned home at about one o’clock and sat down to his lunch. His mother waited for him interminably. He came home any time after one. Sometimes he came home very late. Even then he found his mother waiting.

‘What are you waiting for, mother?’ he asked. She never answered the question but went on to serve him his dinner. After dinner, he went up to the shop opposite, bought betel leaves and areca-nut, chewed them with great satisfaction, and sat down on a dealwood box placed in front of the shop, watching the goings-on of the street for a while and smoking a cigarette, after making sure his mother was not watching. If he saw any elder of the house or of the next house coming out, he turned the cigarette into the hollow of his palm and gulped down the smoke. After this luxury, he suddenly got up, crossed the street, and went back to his house. He spread a towel on the granite floor, in the passage from the street, and, cooled by the afternoon breeze blowing in through the street door, was overcome with drowsiness and was soon asleep. He was left undisturbed. He woke from sleep only at five in the evening, and immediately demanded something to eat and drink, washed himself and combed his crop and went out. He returned home only after ten, when the whole town had gone to sleep. By this time, his father had already come home and was fretting, bothering his wife to tell him where Balu had gone. He had got into the habit of feeling panicky if Balu absented himself too long from home. But the moment the door opened and Balu came in, he became absolutely docile and agreeable.

He said: ‘Oh, Balu has come!’ with tremendous enthusiasm, and as he went in to change, asked with the utmost delicacy: ‘Where have you been?’ avoiding to the best of his ability any suggestion of intimidation or effrontery.

The boy just said: ‘I’ve been here and there – what should I be doing at home?’

Six months of this life and the boy became unrecognizable: there were fat pads under his eyes; his chin was doubling, and his eyes seemed to shrink down to half their original size. Margayya wondered what to do with him. ‘Must do something so that he is able to grow up like other normal boys of his age – otherwise he will rust.’ He thought that the best solution would be to marry him. He sent out his emissaries, and very soon the results became evident. From far and wide horoscopes came in, and letters asking for his son’s in return. Margayya carefully scrutinized the status of those who clamoured for his alliance. It was like the State Ministry scrutinizing the wedding proposals of a satellite Prince. The chief assistant in this business was his accountant Sastri. He had acquired a new status now as a matchmaker. As he sat in his corner copying in his ledger, Margayya said from his seat: ‘Sastri, do you know anyone with a daughter?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Sastri said, pleased to have an opportunity to look up from his ledger. ‘Yes, sir, quite a lot of inquiries have been coming my way, sir, for Balu –’

‘Then why didn’t you mention the matter to me?’

‘You may be sure, sir, that when the right party comes they will be brought to you. Till then it does not seem to be very necessary to trouble you, sir.’

‘Quite right,’ said Margayya, pleased with his accountant and feeling his own eminence unquestioned and clearly placed. ‘You are right, Sastri – I’m very keen that if there is to be an alliance it must be with a family who have a sense of –’

‘I know, sir, they must at least be your equal in status, sir.’

‘Status! Status!’ Margayya laughed pleasantly. ‘I don’t believe in it, Sastri … it’s not right to talk of status and such things in these days. You know I’m a man who has had to work hard to make money and keep it. But I never for a moment feel that I am
superior to anyone on earth. I feel that even the smallest child in the road is my equal in status.’

‘Very few there are, sir,’ said the other, ‘who are so wealthy and are so free from vanity or showiness. I have known people with only a tenth of what you possess, sir, but the way they –’

‘How do you know it is only a tenth of what I have?’ Margayya asked, his suspicions slightly roused: for he let the other keep only one set of accounts: the other set which gave a fuller picture of his financial position was always in his possession. Had this fellow been peeping into his private registers? The man gave a reassuring reply: ‘Any child in the town can say who it is if he is asked to name the richest man.’ It was very flattering and true, but Margayya hoped that the income-tax people would not take the same view. Further development of this conversation was cut off because three clients from a far-off village came in asking: ‘Is this Margayya’s?’ At once Margayya and his assistant fell silent and became absorbed in their work. When anybody entered with that question on his lips, it meant that he was a new client, he had been sent in by one of Margayya’s agents, and he would want ready cash before departing for the evening.

Margayya said: ‘Come in, come in, friends. May I ask who has sent you along?’ They had come with the right recommendation. The three villagers came in timidly, tucking in their upper-cloth. Margayya became very officious and showed them their seats on the mat: it was as if he had reserved for them special seats on fresh carpets and divans. He then said: ‘Will you have soda or coffee? Or would you care to chew betel leaves?’ He turned to Sastri and said: ‘Send the boy down to fetch something for them: they have come a long distance. You came by bus?’

‘Yes, paying a fare of twelve annas; and we want to catch the evening bus, if possible.’

They went by the evening bus, but leaving their mortgage deed behind, and carrying in their pouches three hundred rupees, the first instalment of interest on what was already held at the source. The first instalment was the real wealth – whose possibilities of multiplication seemed to stretch to infinity. This was like the germinating point of a seed – capable of producing hundreds of such germinating points. Lend this margin again to
the next man, as a petty loan, withholding a further first instalment; and take that again and lend it with a further instalment held up and so on … it was like the reflections in two opposite mirrors. You could really not see the end of it – it was a part of the mystic feeling that money engendered in Margayya, its concrete form lay about him in his iron safe in the shape of bonds, and gold bars, and currency notes, and distant arable lands, of which he had become the owner because the original loans could not be repaid, and also in the shape of houses and blocks of various sizes and shapes, which his way of buying interest had secured for him in the course of his business – through the machinery of ‘distraint’. Many were those that had become crazed and unhappy when the courts made their orders, but Margayya never bothered about them, never saw them again. ‘It’s all in the business,’ he said. ‘It’s up to them to pay the dues and take back their houses. They forget that they asked for my help.’ People borrowed from him only under stress and when they could get no accommodation elsewhere. Margayya was the one man who easily lent. He made the least fuss about the formalities, but he charged interest in so many subtle ways and compounded it so deftly that the moment a man signed his bonds, he was more or less finished. He could never hope to regain his possessions – especially if he allowed a year or two to elapse.

There were debt relief laws and such things. But Margayya nullified their provisions because the men for whom the laws were made were enthusiastic collaborators in his scheme, and everything he did looked correct on paper. He acquired a lot of assets. But he lost no time in selling them and realizing their cash again, and stored it in an iron safe at home. ‘What am I to do with property?’ he said. ‘I want only money, not brick and lime or mud,’ he reflected when he reconverted his attached property into cash. The only property he often dreamt of was the one at the foot of the Mempi Hills, but somehow it was constantly slipping away: that fellow, Kanda, came again and again, but always managed to retain his ownership of his lands.

Sastri turned up with quite a score of offers for Margayya’s son. Margayya felt greatly flattered and puffed up with conceit.
This was evidence that he had attained social importance. He had never thought that anyone of consequence would care to ally with his family. There was a family secret about his caste which stirred uneasily at the back of his mind. Though he and the rest were supposed to be of good caste now, if matters were pried into deeply enough they would find that his father’s grandfather and his brothers maintained themselves as corpse-bearers. They were four brothers. The moment anyone died in the village, they came down and took charge of the business from that moment up to dissolving the ashes in the tank next day. They were known as ‘corpse brothers’. It took two or three generations for the family to mitigate this reputation; and thereafter, they were known as agriculturists, owning and cultivating small parcels of land. No one bothered about their origin, afterwards, except a grand-aunt who let off steam when she was roused by declaring: ‘It’s written on their faces – where can it go, even if you allow a hundred years to elapse.’

It was Margayya’s constant fear that when the time came to marry his son, people might say: ‘Oh, they are after all corpse-bearers, didn’t you know?’ But fortunately this fear was unfounded. At any rate, his financial reputation overshadowed anything else. Horoscopes and petitions poured in by every post. It produced a sense of well-being in Margayya, and a quiet feeling of greatness.

Sastri had done his part of the work efficiently. He had set aside all ledger work for the moment, and had written out scores of letters to men known to him within a radius of about two hundred miles. He was a compendium of likely parties with daughters to marry. He went out and saw in person quite a good many locally, as an ambassador. In all his correspondence and talk he described Margayya as the ‘Lord of Uncounted Lakhs’ or as one who was ‘the richest in India’; and he spoke of Balu as inheritor of all this wealth and an apprentice in his father’s own business and a young man whose education was deliberately suspended because his father, having his own idea of education, was more keen on training the young fellow in business than letting him acquire useless degrees. Margayya scrutinized
quite a file of applications and horoscopes. He rejected most of the proposals. They were from quite unworthy aspirants. Margayya felt, ‘Why should these people waste my time and their own? Are they blind? I have a certain position in life to keep up and I naturally want only alliances which can come up to that expectation.’

Finally he picked up the horoscope of a girl who seemed to him desirable from every point of view. Her name was Brinda. She was seventeen years old. Her father in his first letter described her as being ‘extremely fair’. He was a man who owned a tea-estate in Mempi Hills. At once it biased Margayya’s mind in his favour. It was not a very large estate but yielded an income often thousand rupees a year. Margayya sent Sastri out to fetch an astrologer. There was one practising in the lane behind the Market Road. A man presently entered with beads at his throat and sacred ash on his forehead, wrapped in a red silk toga and dressed every inch for his part. There were a few of Margayya’s clients waiting for him, and he had to dispose of them before he could attend to the astrologer. He seated the astrologer and made him wait for a few moments. The astrologer fretted at having to wait. He sat shifting uneasily in his seat, cleared his throat, and coughed once or twice in order to attract attention. Margayya looked up and understood. He interrupted himself in his work to tell the astrologer: ‘Hey, Pandit, can’t you remain at peace with yourself for a moment?’ The astrologer was taken aback, but curbed his restlessness. Margayya disposed of his clients, looked up and said: ‘Come nearer, Pandit.’ The astrologer edged his way nearer.

By his manner and words, Margayya had now completely cowed the man. It seemed necessary as a first step to dictate to the planets what they should do. Margayya had made up his mind that he was going to take no nonsense from the planets, and that he was going to tell them how to dispose their position in order to meet his requirement: his requirement was the daughter of a man who owned tea-estates in Mempi Hills, and he was consulting the astrologer purely as a formality. These were not days when he had to wait anxiously on a verdict of the stars: he could afford to ask for his own set of conditions and get them. He no longer believed that man was a victim of
circumstances or fate – but that man was a creature who could make his own present and future, provided he worked hard and remained watchful. ‘The gold bars in the safe at home and the cash bundles and the bank passbook are not sent down from heaven – they are a result of my own application. I need not have stayed at my desk for ten hours at a stretch and talked myself hoarse to all those clients of mine and taken all that risk on half-secured loans! … I could just have sat back and lost myself in contemplation –’

His mind sometimes pursued such a line of thought. But he at once realized that it was not always quite safe to think so and added the rider: ‘Of course Goddess Lakshmi or another will have to be propitiated from time to time. But we must also work and be able to keep correct accounts and pay for what we demand.’ This was no doubt a somewhat confusing and mixed-up philosophy of life, but that was how it was – and its immediate manifestation was to say to the astrologer, as he pushed before him his son’s horoscope and the tea-estate daughter’s, ‘Pandit, see if you can match these horoscopes.’

The Pandit put on his glasses and tilted the horoscopes towards the light at the door and studied them in silence.

Margayya watched his face and said: ‘What is your fee for your services?’

‘Let my fee alone,’ the other said. ‘Let me do my work properly first.’