The Zamindar's Last Son and the Lord's Last Rupee

 

The Reddys were a sprawling household in Dharmarajapuram, zamindars who held vast tracts of land in and around the village. Krishna Reddy had, once upon a time, journeyed from his native Tayyuru near Chittoor and taken root in this soil. He married into a Reddy family of Dharmarajapuram, established a property agency, and in due course prospered in his trade. His household prospered too, with three less than a dozen children, most of them brought up with dignity, who unfurled their wings across the length and breadth of the country to become engineers, architects, captains of business and holders of respectable offices in the government. The last of them, Ramu Reddy, turned out to be the quintessential prodigal son of a rather indulgent father.

The old-timers of the village, however, tell another tale of the land. Quite a few of those parcels, they murmur, passed into the zamindari family when mortgaged farmlands were seized, the hapless farmers having failed to discharge their debts.

The zamindar dealt even-handedly with all his sons, and so Ramu was enrolled at the venerable Goudie Memorial School in Tiruvallur, the district headquarters, just as his elder brothers had been before him. The school dated back to the days of the sepoy mutiny of 1857 (a tumult that scarcely touched the Madras Province), when an emissary of the Scottish missionaries felt a pressing need to educate the common people and lead them out of their backwardness.

Unlike his brothers, who completed school and proceeded to reputed colleges, Ramu abandoned his studies before he could sit the matriculation examination. His mind was never in his books. He preferred to wander the rural countryside, lording it over the simple countryfolk with his social standing at his back.

Ramu gave his undivided devotion to money, the very resource for which his brothers toiled and struggled to rise in life. Ramu sought the easy road. In his early days he was perfectly content to cadge money off his brothers and visiting relatives, so that he might drift along in a happy-go-lucky haze. But such indulgence could carry Ramu Reddy only as far as his family’s patience would stretch, and not a step further.

While his elder brothers settled into plush positions, thriving lines of business and respectable government service, and were wedded into decent families in Chittoor, Madras, Nellore and Gudur, Ramu Reddy stared into a bleak future.

A worried Krishna Reddy then urged Ramu to take up his property agency. He wished to hand down the tricks of the trade, and the art of making money with little effort and a measure of guile. But the old man passed away before he could wholly bequeath his legacy to his youngest son.

With all of Krishna Reddy’s children, save Ramu, having departed the village for greener pastures, the duty of tending the local temple, and of managing its festivals and village functions, devolved upon Ramu. He seized the chance at once, for these occasions brought in a great deal of cash from devotees and village folk alike, money that had to be pooled to meet the common expenses of the festivities.

Around this time Ramu also took a bride, a girl from a respectable Reddy family of Mydukur near Cuddapah. She bore him two sons. They lived a rich and lavish life, to the envy and chagrin of the neighbourhood.

Soon Ramu Reddy grew adept in the art of mobilizing money for every occasion. There was Pongal, the harvest season revelries. There was Rama Navami, when the presiding deity was propitiated before the utsavar was borne through the village streets. There was Aadi, when folk cooked gruel beneath the open sky as an offering to Amman. There was Vinayaka Chaturthi, when the elephant God was celebrated with great pomp and splendour for three days at the very least, before a procession carried the sculpted divinity to be immersed in the Kosasthaliyar flowing past the village. There was Vaikunta Ekadasi, when the Lord granted his devotees darshan of his “Vishwaroopam”. And last of all came the Margazhi winter festivities, beginning every morning at four to rouse the Lord from slumber to the chant of “Kaushalya Supraja Rama Poorva Sandhya Pravartate”.

Thanks to the austere ways of the large household, nurtured on the modest earnings of the Reddy Patriarch, Ramu also learnt the art of containing expenses and setting aside a handsome sum from the monies mobilized for the festivities. In this manner he went on amassing cash, festival upon festival. He learnt, too, to fudge the accounts and records, inflating the expenditure so that each festivity closed with a meagre residual balance.

Wondering how to multiply the wealth thus gathered, Ramu hit upon the novel notion of lending to village folk, traders and merchants of the neighbouring villages at exorbitant rates of interest, compounded daily. Ramu never believed in formal banking, so he kept all his monies in cash, at home or in the hands of his borrowers.

Ramu put on weight, prospered, and piled up a vast fortune in the process. The village folk began to entrust him with their own savings as deposits, earning interest at twenty-four per cent per annum and above, and Ramu mobilized lakhs of rupees in this fashion. He now began depositing monies in a scheduled bank in the neighbouring village of Tamaraipakkam, and before long became a well-known and successful financier of the rural neighbourhood, whom people sought out for their financial needs and unforeseen obligations.

This drew Ramu Reddy into close fellowship with the bank managers of the day. He became the extended lending arm of the bank, facilitating farm loans, jewel loans and petty loans for the villages around, and exacted a hefty commission for all the trouble he took in securing them. He soon rose to be President of the farmers’ cooperative society of Tamaraipakkam. His weight grew. His girth grew. He bought himself a Royal Enfield, though he could only be ferried about by his confidante, for he never learnt to ride it. The thump-thump and dug-dug of that machine, anywhere in the neighbourhood, heralded the arrival of Ramu Reddy.

In due course, Ramu Reddy’s gaze fell upon lands lying unoccupied, unused and bereft of cultivation. He drew out copies of land records (patta, chitta, adangal, village sketches and the like) from his father’s collection of documents, and enlisted the local surveyor to identify those parcels. He quickly mastered the tricks of the property trade, though his father had taught him scarcely a thing, and discovered an avenue for regularizing land parcels, wetlands, drylands, poromboke and whatever the prevailing classification happened to be. Colluding with the powers that be in the offices of the sub-registrars, the Village Administrative Officers and the Tahsildar, he usurped parcel after parcel in his own name or to his order.

Before long he set up a sprawling office near the bank premises at Tamaraipakkam, with separate chambers for land dealings, deposits, banking services and a host of other tertiary services incidental to the main objectives of his business.

Of his two sons, the elder went on to become a college professor, while the younger, more or less, walked in his father’s footsteps.

And then came Covid, unannounced.

With the onset of the pandemic, the village folk who had forsaken farming and the traditional modes of life began to lose their livelihoods, or were paid too meagrely to keep their households afloat. Trade and commerce ground to a halt.

People began to throng around Ramu Reddy, clamouring for their deposits to be returned. There was a ruinous run on the informal banking he offered, and he was caught utterly unawares. He struggled to refund his depositors. Ramu had never been particular about keeping proper books of accounts, save for jotting down the names of his major borrowers on scraps and slips of paper.

His efforts to recover the monies he had lent came to nothing as the pandemic refused to relent. Either the borrowers swore that they had paid him back fair and square, or they simply pleaded their inability to repay just then.

A morose and gloomy mood settled over the Reddy household. Ramu’s attempts to sell some of his clandestinely acquired land parcels fell flat, for there were no takers when everyone was starved of cash. The village folk were content merely to buy rice and lentils for subsistence, with the small vegetables of their backyards to accompany the humble soup.

The second wave of Covid, sometime in mid 2021, proved more devastating than the first. While 2020 had scarcely claimed a couple of lives in the village, 2021 brought a grim procession of casualties. Velan, a cattle farmer who owned two bullocks, was the first to go.

Sometime in early July 2021, when the birds and bees had hardly stirred, I heard the long wail of a woman behind my village home. It was Lakshmi, beating her breast, lamenting the sudden passing of her husband, Ramu Reddy. At the inquest, I was told that he had been brought dead on arrival at the general hospital at the district headquarters in Tiruvallur.

I went early to pay my last respects to the departed soul. Having laid a wreath upon the glass box that held his mortal remains, with a circular one rupee coin stuck on his forehead, I turned back, retracing my steps homeward, when Anwar Basha, the local butcher and my errand guy, whispered into my ear:

“Sir, Korona illai onnum illai saar. Avar tharkolai senjuttaru.” (No damned corona, sir. He simply took his own life.)

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The Hillranger writes from Dharmarajapuram, where the Margazhi mornings still begin at four, and the Lord wakes, mercifully, without being billed for it.