A moral lesson from the moneylender of Malgudi

Chennai: Margayya began his sentence again: “Guru Raj, money is the greatest factor in life, and the most ill-used. People don’t know how to tend it, how to measure it, how to make it grow, and when to pluck its flowers, and when to pluck its fruits. What most people now do is to try and eat the plant itself.”

The other roared with laughter: “I say, you seem to be a very great thinker. How well you speak, how well you have understood all these matters.” Nearly 65 years after the endearing Indian novelist R K Narayan made his protagonist, a self-made financial wizard in his celebrated work of fiction, ‘The Financial Expert’, utter those reflective gems, contemporary Margayyas may just blush now.

For the simple reason, ‘money’ as a measure of human worth in society remains undiminished. Counter factually, if Narayan’s Margayya came alive in flesh and blood to join the great demonetisation debate in the Rajya Sabha, in the distinguished company of the likes of the eminent economist Dr Manmohan Singh, he would have likely extended his money insights to the November 8, 2016, note ban also.

It is a novel to be read and re-read in our times when many are hard up for cash. “Margayya felt that the world treated him with contempt because he had no money,” writes Narayan. That people took you seriously only when you had some money (read liquidity in the wider public context of banking now), was the motivational matrix for this out-of-the-box, seemingly simple moneylender of Malgudi, who sitting under the ‘God given shade’ of an old banyan tree right opposite the ‘Central Co-operative Land Mortgate Bank’, was helping all sorts of ordinary people including peasants to meet their everyday cash needs.

But it was not for charity. Margayya had to only take advantage of the bank’s own bye-laws, to help its customers with more cash and in the process ground a couple of hundred rupees every day in the small tin box he carried. That their lands or property was in an ‘eternal mortgage’ was a different matter - like our jewel loans in cooperative banks today. But Nararyan’s amazing character was ingenious to make tiny differences in interest rates play out its dynamics outside the portals of a bank - what fund managers and stock market experts would now call ‘arbitrage opportunities’ - to make a little pile.

However, when some money comes, surely the ‘Inspector Raj’ follows. Margayya, though hurt, takes it sportingly and how he sails through to another, bigger level of financial wizardry through new friends and connections, and how his obsessive agenda-setting for his only son finally turns out to be his nemesis, forms the rest of Narayan’s story, with its undercurrents of indictment of the social values of the day.

Narayan has not only dovetailed the perils of ‘Ponzi schemes’, luring thousands of ordinary people with high yield returns at a time of great economic uncertainty. But Narayan also intuited a bigger role of futures market and other complex instruments, as even banks “were puzzled” about Margayya’s financial engineering.

Lecturing on ‘money conditions’ to his sociology friend, Dr Pal, with whom he partners to even publish an interesting book inspired by Vaatsayana’s Kama Sutra and Havelock Ellis combo, Margayya says, “the (second world) war had created a flood of inflated currency. All sorts of people were making money in all sorts of ways...This is the time I rather wish to attract deposits rather than lend.”
Ultimately, when the ‘trust’ in Margayya is suddenly lost in one seminal turn of violence, he has to contend with the paradoxes of both a self-fulfilling prophecy and its mirror image of a suicidal prophecy.

Every investor in Malgudi, who initially hoped to get life-long pension from his prompt monthly interest payouts, queues up to pull out of his scheme, just as panicky depositors on misinformation pull out of a bank, causing its fall.

The hard facts of modern life are so finely intertwined with the normative in Narayan’s work, indicating that systemic reforms has to come from each individual voluntarily, not imposed by a state authority occupying the moral high ground from above.

Last but not least, my latest revisit of Narayan’s superbly crafted novel was prompted when I ran into a retired, highly respected top state police officer outside a nationalised bank in city last week.

All the customers looked dismayed when the bank said they had no cash to dispense, even to draw a modest sum from their own accounts.

“Sir, the whole system seems to have gone for a tumble,” I mused in a hush-hush tone, to which he unhesitatingly shot back crystal clear, “Have you read R K Narayan’s The Financial Expert?” For a moment I was flummoxed, completely bowled over as it were by a vintage Chandra googly. R K Narayan is truly an understated metaphor of our times!