The Financial Expert

By: R. K. Narayan;

Language: English

Quality: Good

Genre: Novel,

ISBN: 9788185986050

SKU: BE500027847181

Pages: 218

Description: A story from India in the 1950’s. Margayya is a petty moneylender conducting his business under a tree outside a bank in south India. He helps local folks, many of whom are illiterate, to fill out bank forms. Meanwhile he personally lends out small amounts and collects debts. The bank people treat him with contempt and try to chase him away. He has a wife and one son, but he’s dissatisfied with his life and feels he was cut out for better things. His only enjoyment in life is the time he spends with his son each evening. He spoils him. Margayya goes to a priest who sets him on a praying and fasting ritual to the goddess of wealth. It works. He runs into a sociologist who gives him a copy of a semi-pornographic book called “Bed Relations.” He hooks up with a publisher to print it as “Domestic Harmony” and he makes a ton of money, becoming one of the wealthiest men in the small town. He gets appointed or elected to important position such as the equivalent of the school board. Meanwhile his son is maturing. He’s a terrible student but his father’s political connections help him stay in school even though he can’t pass the exams. But the main character’s pressure on his son forces his son to run away from home. At one point the boy’s parents are even told he had died. Margayya’s mind has always been obsessed with the financial concept of interest and now he becomes obsessed with making money; so much so that he hardly eats or sleeps. He gets back into money-lending big-time and confiscates property when people can’t pay their loans on time. Even that is not enough. He starts lending money to wealthy people in a Ponzi scheme that comes crashing down due to actions by his son and the man who wrote the book. Margayya comes full circle. Now seriously ill, he’s impoverished again, doting on his grandson and dreaming of re-establishing his original small-scale lending business outside the bank.