Hello and welcome to the Discourse. The Financial Expert is a novel by R. K. Narayan that was published in the year 1952. It is set in the fictional town of Malgudi and tells the story of British-ruled India in the 1930s. It is a tale of ambitions, desires, greed, corruption, and karma.
Characters of The Financial Expert:
Margayya is the protagonist of the novel. He is an ordinary middle-class man struggling to make a significant life. He is the younger brother of the family and his elder brother is an established money lender with better financial status. Margayya is very keenly interested in finance and he has a niche in investment and banking. He works independently as a financial advisor helping customers with loan applications and other financial procedures; he charges a small fee for this assistance. In his town, Malgudi, he has a stand under a tree outside the main bank, Central Co-operative Land Mortgage Bank. Margayya is married and the father of a son named Balu who is a spoilt child. Being the only child, his parents try to fulfill all his wishes while he gets trapped in bad habits and bad company. Arul Dass is the peon of Central Co-operative Land Mortgage Bank. Dr. Pal is a conman who pretends to be a sociologist and psychologist. Madan Lal is a printer and publisher who came from North India and settled in Malgudi. Brinda is the daughter of a rich tea plantation owner. Margayya manages to arrange the marriage of Brinda with Balu to ensure his better future.
Summary of The Financial Expert:
The Financial Expert is divided into four chapters. The story revolves around Margayya, a young man who begins his career as a money-lender doing his business under the Banyan tree, in front of the Central Co-operative Land Mortgage Bank in Malgudi. He works as an unauthorized middleman between the bank and the borrowers. He helps the shareholders of the bank to borrow money at a small interest and lends it to the needy at a higher interest. In the process, he makes money for himself. Margayya is too much interested in money and interest. Money is not just coins and currency for him rather, he believes that money is the greatest wonder of creation which contains the mystery of birth and multiplication within itself.
The secretary of the bank realized that Margayya is making money out of nowhere by manipulating the rate of interest and thus, he catches Margayya with the help of Arul Dass, the peon with many blank loan application forms that he was not authorized to keep. The secretary and peon humiliate Margayya. Margayya believes that his persecution is motivated by a lack of means and lower social status, and vows to become a wealthy man; a financial equal of the bank’s secretary.
Later on, when he reaches home, his elder brother who is financially better than him also humiliates him for his corrupt practices of trying to make use of a loophole in the banking sector. This further angers Margayya. He and his brother live in the same ancestral house partitioned by a wall between the two families. Margayya lives with his wife and only son Balu on one side while his brother lives on the other side.
Being a single child, Balu is a spoilt brat who is very adamant. Because of the bank secretary’s opposition, his business gets temporarily halted for a while. He keeps a record of all the money that he has lent to various borrowers and all the entries of his transactions with his clients. One day, Balu demands some candy and when he fails to get any, he gets angry and throws the register containing all the business entries of Margayya into a gutter outside the house running with dirty water, and it disappears down the drain. This is a big loss to Margayya as without proper written records, many of his borrowers cheat him and weasel out of what they owed him. It becomes difficult for him to return to his cheap practice of dodging the loophole of the Cooperative bank.
Margayya feels that despite his hard work and acumen, he isn’t getting the rewards as if his fate is stopping him from attaining success.
He then meets an astrologer and shows his horoscope to him. The astrologer says that Margayya is going through the bad run of Saturn and suggests him a puja to Lakshmi, the Goddess of wealth. The astrologer also instructs him to offer honey to the priest of a temple dedicated to Saturn (Shani), God of Justice). Margayya visits the Shani temple and offers honey to the priest of the temple. Then he dedicates himself to the worship of Goddess Lakshmi which has to be done for forty days, with ash from a red lotus and ghee made of milk from a grey cow. His wife assists him appropriately. The red lotus is a rare thing that Margayya could attain only from a pond in the other town. Margayya visits and takes a lotus from the pond every day. During his visits to the pond, he meets Dr. Pal who is working as a journalist but also claims to be a sociologist and psychologist. One day, Dr. Pal shows a manuscript of a book titled “Bed-Life; Or Science of Marital Happiness.” Dr. Pal says that the book contains the essence of his research and experience as a psychologist and he is seeking a publisher for publishing that book. Margayya takes the manuscript with a promise that he will arrange for a good publisher. After reading the book, Margayya feels that though the topic of the book is off the mark, it can be a successful book. He meets Dr. Pal and says that he is willing to buy the manuscript from Dr. Pal for Rs25 to which Dr. Pal agrees. Margayya expects to sell at least 100,000 copies year after year at 1 rupee each, thus making a profit of Rs 100, 000 minus Rs 25, the price at which he bought the manuscript.
On the fortieth day of his puja, Margayya meets a publisher Madan Lal and persuades him to publish the book. Madan Lal reads the manuscript and says that the book can be successful but publishing it may trap them in the legal issues of obscenity. Thus, he suggests that the title of the book should be changed to “Domestic Harmony.” Madan Lal says that he is willing to publish the book if Margayya agrees to a 50% share in profits to which Margayya agrees. The book is at once popular and sells like hotcakes and Margayya hits a fortune. Everything improves for Margayya and his brother also starts talking to him cordially. However, with the success on the business front, Margayya starts living a better life with all the luxuries stacked at his home for his wife and son. He takes the help of his elder brother to get Balu admitted to the best school in Malgudi. Everyone starts respecting Margayya. As Margayya’s profits from the book increase, he gets enough money saved to restart his business of money-lending. He fails to control his lust and gets involved in the dodgy schemes of finance and money lending again. While he makes good profits in the financial sector too, he starts losing at his home base. His only son gets trapped in bad habits and bad company. His teachers complain that Balu is doing very bad in his studies. Margayya decides to donate a large amount of donation to the school and becomes a member of the school board and hires the school teacher as a private tutor for Balu. Yet Balu doesn’t improve, rather he starts cheating during the exams to get better grades, and nobody opposes him as he is the son of a member of the school board.
Margayya’s only dream is to send Balu to college and then to further studies in Europe or America. While he is making good money through Dr. Pal’s book, he doesn’t wish to continue burdening himself with the ignominy of being the publisher of a pornographic book. Thus, he makes a deal with Madan Lal and sells his share in the book for a good amount of money. He then uses that money to start his own private bank.
While Margayya gets busy in his new bank, Balu flunks in his high school graduation examination conducted by the state board that Margayya couldn’t manipulate. Margayya feels frustrated and tells Balu to reappear for the exam and study hard. But Balu is no more interested in education. He forcibly enters the office of his school and tears off the School leaving certificate register and takes it away to throw it in the same gutter where he threw Margayya’s account book. Then Balu runs away from the home. Margayya tries to search for his son but fails. One day, he gets a letter from Madras, informing him about the accidental demise of Balu. His elder brother comes to him to help him in this difficult time but Margayya denies taking his help and decides to visit Madras and take the dead body of his son alone. On the train to Madras, he meets a man who happens to be a police inspector in plain clothes and shares his ordeal with him. The police inspector asks him to show the letter to him. After seeing the letter, the police inspector says that it is fake and his son must be alive. After reaching Madras, the police inspector investigates the case and finds that Balu is living with a rich but crazy man who has employed him. Margayya takes his son back to Malgudi, alive. After reaching home, he and his wife spoil Balu even more than before.
Margayya realizes that Balu has no future in education so he decides to marry him off to a beautiful girl named Brinda who is the daughter of a rich tea plantation owner. However, when Margayya takes the horoscope of Balu the astrologer whose help he took in past, to match it with Brinda, the pundit declares that their horoscope doesn’t match. Margayya gets angry over the pundit and decides to meet another astrologer. Dr. Pal takes him to another astrologer who demands a high fee of Rs 75 to do a puja that will help match the horoscopes of his son with Brinda. Margayya agrees and the astrologer manipulates the horoscope of Balu to make it appear matching with that of Brinda.
Margayya succeeds in arranging the marriage of Balu with Brinda and then he takes a huge amount of loan from his clients to buy a new house for Balu and Brinda in the Lawley Extension. While he is making good business, he observes that Balu is tilting toward Dr. Pal too much and decides to draw Dr. Pal away from his son. To do so he hires Dr. Pal to attract deposits from black marketeers who have become rich in the wartime economy, by promising high-interest rates. He starts taking loans from such people at a handsome interest and then re-lending the money to the needy at an even higher interest. However, soon he realizes that he is not getting enough borrowers ready to take loans at such a high-interest rate. Yet, he calculates that If he got Rs. 20,000 deposit each day and paid Rs. 15,000 in interest, he had still Rs. 5,000 a day left in his hands as his own. However, it is not his money that he starts spending, he is just running a Ponzi scheme and spending other people's money. Soon he buys a new car and other amenities. He remains in the good books of the police in administration by giving donations to the War Fund.
Meanwhile, Balu is doing nothing but wasting all the money he gets from Margayya and Brinda’s family on alcohol and prostitution. One day, Balu visits Margayya’s office and claims that Margayya made all his fortune from his ancestral property. Now when Balu is an adult and married, he demands his share in ancestral property. Balu gets baffled by this demand but persuades Balu to go away and promises him to think about it soon. Soon he finds out that Dr. Pal is instigating Balu and he has trapped Balu in luxurious bad habits of alcoholism and prostitutes for which Balu needs more money. He goes to Balu’s house at Lawley Extension that night and finds that Brinda and her infant child are alone. When he asks about Balu, Brinda starts crying and informs him about Balu’s daily routine at night. She says that he hardly visits home and spends nights with other women. Margayya is saddened by knowing all this. As he comes out of the house, he notices a car stopping at the gate from which Balu emerges out. Margayya observes that Dr. Pal is also sitting in the car along with two prostitutes. He gets enraged and takes Dr. Pal out of the car and starts beating him. He scolds the girls and makes them run away.
The next morning, Dr. Pal goes to the police and lodges a complaint of assault against Margayya. He also starts whispering bad words against Margayya and his Ponzi bank. This creates mistrust in Margayya’s client base and they start to demand their deposits back. The Ponzi scheme quickly collapses. Margayya has to declare bankruptcy. The house shared by him and his brother cannot be attached, but all other assets are seized, and Balu and his family are thrown out of their house, and back to the small half-house where Margayya lives. Then Margayya shows Balu all his ancestral property, the half-house where they live, and the tin box in which he kept his ink, pen, and paper to take every day to his place under the banyan tree in front of the cooperative bank. He offers Balu all his ancestral property and tells him to go to the banyan tree and start working. But Balu is afraid of doing so as he worries about what people would say about it. So Margayya decides to go back to his old work himself and restart his struggle. Narayan ends the novel after this whole circle that began from the banyan tree and ended in its shed.
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of Indian English literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards!
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