Mr Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, the Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma (27 page)

‘Thanks. I’m going to the railway station. I’ll manage there.’ Srinivas forbore to ask ‘Why railway station?’ He told himself: ‘He may meet someone, or go away somewhere or have a dozen other reasons, but I’ve nothing to do with any of them.’ So he merely said: ‘All right then. Goodbye,’ and passed on resolutely. While turning down Anderson Lane he looked back for a second and saw far off the glow of a cigarette end in the square where he had left Sampath; it was like a ruby set in the night. He raised his hand, flourished a final farewell, and set his face homeward.

From time immemorial people seemed to have been calling him ‘Margayya’. No one knew, except his father and mother, who were only dimly recollected by a few cronies in his ancestral village, that he had been named after the enchanting god Krishna. Everyone called him Margayya and thought that he had been called so at his naming ceremony. He himself must have forgotten his original name: he had gradually got into the habit of signing his name ‘Margayya’ even in legal documents. And what did it mean? It was purely derivative: ‘Marga’ meant ‘The Way’ and ‘Ayya’ was an honorific suffix: taken together it denoted one who showed the way. He showed the way out to those in financial trouble. And in all those villages that lay within a hundred-mile radius of Malgudi, was there anyone who could honestly declare that he was not in financial difficulties? The emergence of Margayya was an unexpected and incalculable offshoot of a co-operator’s zeal. This statement will be better understood if we watch him in his setting a little more closely.

One of the proudest buildings in Malgudi was the Central Cooperative Land Mortgage Bank, which was built in the year 1914 and named after a famous Registrar of Co-operative Societies, Sir – –, who had been knighted for his devotion to Cooperation after he had, in fact, lost his voice explaining co-operative principles to peasants in the village at one end and to the officials in charge of the files at the Secretariat end. It was said that he died while serving on a Rural Indebtedness Sub-committee. After his death it was discovered that he had left all his savings for the construction of the bank. He now watched, from within a teak frame suspended on the central landing, all the comings and goings, and he was said to be responsible for occasional poltergeist phenomena, the rattling of paperweights, flying ledgers, and sounds like the brisk opening of folios, the banging of fists on a
table, and so on – evidenced by successive night watchmen. This could be easily understood, for the ghost of the Registrar had many reasons to feel sad and frustrated. All the principles of cooperation for which he had sacrificed his life were dissolving under his eyes, if he could look beyond the portals of the bank itself, right across the little stretch of lawn under the banyan tree, in whose shade Margayya sat and transacted his business. There was always a semi-circle of peasants sitting round him, and by their attitude and expression one might easily guess that they were suppliants. Margayya, though very much their junior (he was just forty-two), commanded the respect of those who sat before him. He was to them a wizard who enabled them to draw unlimited loans from the co-operative bank. If the purpose of the co-operative movement was the promotion of thrift and the elimination of middlemen, those two were just the objects that were defeated here under the banyan tree: Margayya didn’t believe in advocating thrift: his living depended upon helping people to take loans from the bank opposite and from each other.

His tin box, a grey, discoloured, knobby affair, which was small enough to be carried under his arm, contained practically his entire equipment: a bottle of ink, a pen and a blotter, a small register whose pages carried an assortment of names and figures, and above all – the most important item – loan application forms of the co-operative bank. These last named were his greatest asset in life, and half his time was occupied in acquiring them. He had his own agency at work to provide him with these forms. When a customer came, the very first question Margayya asked was, ‘Have you secured the application form?’

‘No.’

‘Then go into that building and bring one – try and get one or two spare forms as well.’ It was not always possible to secure more than one form, for the clerks there were very strict and perverse. They had no special reason to decline to give as many forms as were required except the impulse to refuse anything that is persistently asked for. All the same, Margayya managed to gather quite a lot of forms and kept them handy. They were taken out for use on special occasions. Sometimes a villager arrived who did not have a form and who could not succeed in
acquiring one by asking for it in the bank. On such occasions Margayya charged a fee for the blank form itself, and then another for filling in the relevant details.

The clerks of the bank had their own methods of worrying the villagers. A villager who wanted to know his account had to ask for it at the counter and invariably the accounts clerk snapped back, ‘Where is your passbook?’ A passbook was a thing the villager could never keep his hand on. If it was not out of sight it was certain to be out of date. This placed the villager fully at the mercy of the clerk, who would say: ‘You will have to wait till I get through all the work I have now on hand. I’m not being paid to look after only your business here.’ And then the peasant would have to hang about for a day or two before getting an answer to his question, which would only be after placating the clerk with an offering in cash or kind.

It was under such circumstances that Margayya’s help proved invaluable. He kept more or less parallel accounts of at least fifty of the members of the bank. What its red-tape obstructed, he cleared up by his own contrivance. He carried most of the figures in his head. He had only to sight a customer (for instance Mallanna of Koppal, as it now happened to be) to say at once: ‘Oh! you have come back for a new loan, I suppose. If you pay seventy-five rupees more, you can again take three hundred rupees within a week! The bye-law allows a new loan when fifty per cent is paid up.’

‘How can I burden myself with a further loan of three hundred, Margayya? It’s unthinkable.’

Now would begin all the persuasiveness that was Margayya’s stock-in-trade. He asked point blank, ‘What difference is it going to make? Are you not already paying a monthly instalment of seventeen rupees eight annas? Are you or are you not?’

‘Yes … I’m paying. God knows how much I have to –’

‘I don’t want all that,’ Margayya said, cutting him short. ‘I am not concerned with all that – how you pay or what you do. You may perhaps pledge your life or your wife’s
saris
. It is none of my concern: all that I want to know is whether you are paying an instalment now or not.’

‘Yes, master, I do pay.’

‘You will continue to pay the same thing, that is all. Call me a dog if they ask you for even one anna more. You fool, don’t you see the difference? You pay seventeen rupees eight annas now for nothing, but under my present plan you will pay the same seventeen rupees eight annas but with another three hundred rupees in your purse. Don’t you see the difference?’

‘But what’s the use of three hundred rupees, master?’

‘Oh! I see, you don’t see a use for it. All right, don’t come to me again. I have no use for nincompoops like you. You are the sort of fellow who won’t –’ He elaborated a bawdy joke about him and his capacity, which made the atmosphere under the tree genial all round. The other villagers sitting around laughed. But Margayya assumed a stern look, and pretended to pass on to the next question in hand. He sat poring over some papers, with his spectacles uneasily poised over his nose. Those spectacles were a recent acquisition, the first indication that he was on the wrong side of forty. He resisted them as long as he could – he hated the idea of growing old, but ‘long-sight’ does not wait for approval or welcome. You cannot hoodwink yourself or anyone else too long about it – the strain of holding a piece of paper at arm’s length while reading stretches the nerves of the forearm and invites comments from others. Margayya’s wife laughed aloud one day and asked: ‘Why don’t you buy a pair of glasses like other young men of your age? Otherwise you will sprain your hand.’ He acted upon this advice and obtained a pair of glasses mounted in silver from the V.N. Stores in the Market. He and the proprietor of the shop had been playmates once, and Margayya took the glasses on trial, and forgot to go that way again. He was accosted about it on the road occasionally by the rotund optician, who was snubbed by Margayya: ‘Haven’t you the elementary courtesy to know the time and place for such reminders?’

‘Sorry, sorry,’ the other hastened to apologize, ‘I didn’t intend to hurt or insult you.’

‘What greater insult can a man face than this sort of thing? What will an onlooker think? I am busy from morning to night – no time even for a cup of coffee in the afternoon! All right, it doesn’t matter. Will you send someone to my house? I’m not able to use those glasses either. I wanted to come and exchange
them if possible, but –’ it trailed off into indefiniteness, and the optician went away once again and soon ceased to bother about it. It was one of his many bad debts, and very soon he changed his commodity; gradually his show-case began to display powder-puffs, scents, chocolate bars – and the silver-rimmed glasses sat securely on Margayya’s nose.

He now took off his spectacles and folded the sides as if disposing once and for all of the problem of Mallanna. He looked away at a man on his right and remarked: ‘You may have to wait for a week more before I can take up your affair.’

‘Brother, this is urgent, my daughter’s marriage is coming off next month.’

‘Your daughter’s marriage! I have to find you the money for it, but the moment my service is done, you will forget me. You will not need your Margayya any more?’ The other made several deprecating noises, as a protestation of his loyalty. He was a villager called Kanda who had come walking from his village fifteen miles away. He owned about twenty acres of land and a house and cattle, but all of it was tied up in mortgages – most through Margayya’s advice and assistance. He was a gambler and drank heavily, and he always asked for money on the pretext of having to marry his daughters, of whom he had a good number. Margayya preferred not to know what happened to all the money, but helped him to borrow as much as he wanted. ‘The only course now left is for you to take a joint-loan, but the difficulty will be to find someone as a partner.’ He looked round at the gathering before him and asked, ‘All of you are members of the Co-operative Society. Can’t someone help a fellow creature?’ Most of them shook their heads. One of them remarked, ‘How can you ask for our joint-signature? It’s risky to do it even for one’s own brother.’

‘It’s most risky between brothers,’ added Margayya. ‘But I’m not suggesting it for brothers now. I am only suggesting it between human beings.’ They all laughed and understood that he was referring to an elder brother of his with whom he was known to be on throat-cutting terms. He prepared to deliver a speech: ‘Here is a great man, a big man, you cannot find a more
important man round about Somanur. He has lands, cattle, yes, he’s a big man in every way. No doubt, he has certain habits: no use shutting our eyes to it: but I guarantee he will get over them. He must have a joint-loan because he needs at least five hundred rupees immediately to see him through his daughter’s marriage. You know how it is with the dowry system –’ Everybody made a sympathetic noise and shook their heads. ‘Very bad, very bad. Why should we criticize what our ancestors have brought into existence?’ someone asked.

‘Why not?’ another protested.

‘Some people are ruined by the dowry.’

‘Why do you say some people?’ Margayya asked. ‘Why am I here? Three daughters were born to my father. Five cart-loads of paddy came to us every half year, from the fields. We just heaped them up on the floor of the hall, we had five halls to our house; but where has it all gone? To the three daughters. By the time my father found husbands for them there was nothing left for us to eat at home!’

‘But is it not said that a man who begets a son is blessed in three lives, because he gives away the greatest treasure on earth?’ said someone.

‘And how much more blessed is he that gives away three daughters? He is blessed no doubt, but he also becomes a bankrupt,’ Margayya said.

The talk thus went on and on, round and round, always touching practical politics again at some point or other. Margayya put his spectacles on, looked fixedly at Mallanna, and said: ‘Come and sit near me.’ The villager moved up. Margayya told the gathering, ‘We have to talk privately.’ And they all looked away and pretended not to hear although all their attention was concentrated on the whispering that now started between the two. Margayya said: ‘It’s going to be impossible for Kanda to get a joint-loan, but he ought to be ready to accept whatever is available. I know you can help him and help yourself – you will lose nothing. In fact, you will gain a little interest. You will clear half your present loan by paying seventy-five rupees and apply for a fresh one. Since you don’t want it, give it to Kanda. He will pay you seven and a half per cent. You give the four and
a half per cent to that father-in-law’ (Margayya always referred to the Co-operative Bank with a fresh sobriquet) ‘and take the three per cent yourself. He will pay back the instalments to you. I will collect and give them to you.’ Mallanna took time to grasp all the intricacies of this proposition, and then asked: ‘Suppose he doesn’t?’ Margayya looked horrified at this doubt. ‘What is there to be afraid of when I am here?’ At this one of the men who were supposed to be out of earshot remarked: ‘Ah, what is possible in this world without mutual trust?’ Margayya added, ‘Listen to him. He knows the world.’

The result of all this talk was that Mallanna agreed to the proposal. Margayya grew busy filling up a loan application form with all the details of Mallanna’s heritage, etc. He read it out aloud, seized hold of Mallanna’s left thumb, pressed it on a small ink pad he carried in his box and pressed it again on the application form and endorsed it. He took out of the box seventy-five rupees in cash, and handed them to Mallanna with: ‘Why should I trust you with this without a scrap of paper? Now credit this to your account and halve your loan; and then present that application.’

‘If they refuse to take it?’

‘Why should they refuse? They have got to accept it. You are a shareholder, and they have got to accept your application. It’s not their grandfather’s money that they are giving you but your own. Bye-law –’ He quoted the bye-law, and encouraged by it, the other got up and moved on.