<p>R K Narayan’s exploration of money and greed, The Financial Expert, is set in the 1930s and 40s, but feels remarkably relevant in the light of the global financial crisis of the last couple of years and scams in the recent past that run into astronomical figures.<br /><br />Narayan’s eponymous financial expert is Margayya, who sits under a banyan tree in front of the Central Co-operative Land Mortgage Bank in Malgudi with a tin box and a book of accounts. He is surrounded by a “semi-circle of peasants” to whom he is a wizard who can elicit endless loans from the bank. Margayya deals in what we might today call complex financial instruments. After detailing a mind-boggling web of transactions, Narayan summarises:<br /><br />“It is impossible to describe more clearly than this Margayya’s activity under the tree. He advanced a little loan (for interest) so that the little loan might wedge out another loan from the Co-operative Bank; which in its turn was passed on to someone in need for a higher interest. Margayya kept himself at the centre of all the complex transaction, and made all the parties pay him for his services, the bank opposite him being involved in it willy-nilly.”<br /><br />But Margayya’s clients are poor, and for all his craftiness he does not earn very much. Nor is he a particularly happy man. He lives in one half of an ancestral house that has been divided after a dispute with his brother, and he is forever quarrelling with his harried wife. Margayya’s only source of joy is the pampering of his young son Balu, born after many years of marriage; but this too is inhibited by his limited means. When the bank threatens to put an end to his activities, Margayya realises just how vulnerable and insignificant he is. His frayed clothes and dented box are now a source of shame and he thinks they make him look like a “wayside barber”. He feels all of Malgudi mocks him. <br /><br />Margayya, filled with self-loathing, has an epiphany: “Money alone is important in this world. Everything else will come to us naturally if we have money in our purse.”<br />A galvanised Margayya undertakes a 40 day propitiation of the goddess Lakshmi. This leads to a serendipitous meeting with Dr Pal, a maverick journalist and self-proclaimed sociologist who has written a sex manual. Margayya buys the manuscript for a pittance and the eventual success of domestic harmony makes him a rich man. This allows Margayya to resume his old business of money-lending and financial jugglery on a much larger scale. Gold bars, bags of cash, houses and plots of land signed over by hapless debtors accumulate with Margayya making him the richest man in Malgudi.<br /><br /></p>.<p>The trouble with money, Narayan seems to say, is that it damages those to whom it comes too easily. Spoilt as a child, Balu grows into a wastrel and lives with his wife and child on an allowance in one of the houses that has defaulted to Margayya. The spartan and idealistic Dr Pal is co-opted by Margayya in a money-making scheme and turns degenerate. Margayya, constantly overruling his scruples, loses touch with fiscal reality: his increasingly complex and covetous operations turn into a Ponzi scheme.<br /><br />The nature of Narayan’s world is such that his books must end more or less where they begin. The goddess Lakshmi, Margayya had been told by his priest, is “always on the tips of her toes.” She soon flees. An attempt by Balu and Dr Pal to squeeze money out of Margayya culminates in a run on Margayya’s operation. He is forced to declare insolvency and has all his property attached, including Balu’s house. Margayya is left only with what he had when he started — his half of the ancestral house.<br /><br />But the vanquished Margayya, having lived and lost his dream, is at last at peace. “He relaxed completely,” we are told. Balu moves into the cramped house with his family. All Margayya can give his son is his old box and an account book, and the advice to sit under the banyan tree, “and anything may happen thereafter.”<br /><br />The recent global financial crisis is separated from the events in Narayan’s novel by 70 years and half the globe, but underpinning them both are the same human failings: an inflated regard for wealth, the loss of ideals, greed. At least in the novel the resultant suffering ends in the promise of a new beginning. Even if we suspect it is only the same story beginning again.</p>
<p>R K Narayan’s exploration of money and greed, The Financial Expert, is set in the 1930s and 40s, but feels remarkably relevant in the light of the global financial crisis of the last couple of years and scams in the recent past that run into astronomical figures.<br /><br />Narayan’s eponymous financial expert is Margayya, who sits under a banyan tree in front of the Central Co-operative Land Mortgage Bank in Malgudi with a tin box and a book of accounts. He is surrounded by a “semi-circle of peasants” to whom he is a wizard who can elicit endless loans from the bank. Margayya deals in what we might today call complex financial instruments. After detailing a mind-boggling web of transactions, Narayan summarises:<br /><br />“It is impossible to describe more clearly than this Margayya’s activity under the tree. He advanced a little loan (for interest) so that the little loan might wedge out another loan from the Co-operative Bank; which in its turn was passed on to someone in need for a higher interest. Margayya kept himself at the centre of all the complex transaction, and made all the parties pay him for his services, the bank opposite him being involved in it willy-nilly.”<br /><br />But Margayya’s clients are poor, and for all his craftiness he does not earn very much. Nor is he a particularly happy man. He lives in one half of an ancestral house that has been divided after a dispute with his brother, and he is forever quarrelling with his harried wife. Margayya’s only source of joy is the pampering of his young son Balu, born after many years of marriage; but this too is inhibited by his limited means. When the bank threatens to put an end to his activities, Margayya realises just how vulnerable and insignificant he is. His frayed clothes and dented box are now a source of shame and he thinks they make him look like a “wayside barber”. He feels all of Malgudi mocks him. <br /><br />Margayya, filled with self-loathing, has an epiphany: “Money alone is important in this world. Everything else will come to us naturally if we have money in our purse.”<br />A galvanised Margayya undertakes a 40 day propitiation of the goddess Lakshmi. This leads to a serendipitous meeting with Dr Pal, a maverick journalist and self-proclaimed sociologist who has written a sex manual. Margayya buys the manuscript for a pittance and the eventual success of domestic harmony makes him a rich man. This allows Margayya to resume his old business of money-lending and financial jugglery on a much larger scale. Gold bars, bags of cash, houses and plots of land signed over by hapless debtors accumulate with Margayya making him the richest man in Malgudi.<br /><br /></p>.<p>The trouble with money, Narayan seems to say, is that it damages those to whom it comes too easily. Spoilt as a child, Balu grows into a wastrel and lives with his wife and child on an allowance in one of the houses that has defaulted to Margayya. The spartan and idealistic Dr Pal is co-opted by Margayya in a money-making scheme and turns degenerate. Margayya, constantly overruling his scruples, loses touch with fiscal reality: his increasingly complex and covetous operations turn into a Ponzi scheme.<br /><br />The nature of Narayan’s world is such that his books must end more or less where they begin. The goddess Lakshmi, Margayya had been told by his priest, is “always on the tips of her toes.” She soon flees. An attempt by Balu and Dr Pal to squeeze money out of Margayya culminates in a run on Margayya’s operation. He is forced to declare insolvency and has all his property attached, including Balu’s house. Margayya is left only with what he had when he started — his half of the ancestral house.<br /><br />But the vanquished Margayya, having lived and lost his dream, is at last at peace. “He relaxed completely,” we are told. Balu moves into the cramped house with his family. All Margayya can give his son is his old box and an account book, and the advice to sit under the banyan tree, “and anything may happen thereafter.”<br /><br />The recent global financial crisis is separated from the events in Narayan’s novel by 70 years and half the globe, but underpinning them both are the same human failings: an inflated regard for wealth, the loss of ideals, greed. At least in the novel the resultant suffering ends in the promise of a new beginning. Even if we suspect it is only the same story beginning again.</p>
