MONEY TREE

by Gordon, Ferris,

  Ted sucked at his teeth. ‘Some idea maybe.’

  ‘He picks us off one by one. Makes each of us think we’re his right hand man and swears us to secrecy. Bribes us with promises and bonuses. Then he makes an example of one of us at meetings. An uncanny knack of picking on whoever’s got something to hide. We’re all spineless. I’m disgusted with myself and with my colleagues if you must know.’

  Ted emptied the bottle and caught her look. Teetotallers were so prissy.

  ‘Fine, gimme facts, evidence; documents, emails, tapes. If you’re going to be a whistle blower, you need to do it properly.’

  Erin snorted. ‘Like Mission Impossible? Burgle Warwick’s office at midnight? That kind of thing. Seriously?’

  ‘I didn’t say it was easy.’

  ‘Our office is thick in security measures. Everything is in silos and covered in passwords and need-to-know measures.’

  Ted had been thinking about this all day and weighing up the odds.

  ‘Erin, there’s a guy I know. He’s got special talents around computers. He makes them talk, sing – hell, sit up and beg. He’s weird and operates on a very fine line between legal and deserving of twenty years in the pen. I don’t know if he’s still around, nor on which side of the bars, but it’s worth a call.’

  ‘A hacker? Christ. None of the Wikileaks crew, I trust?’

  He smiled and shook his head.

  ‘No loose cannons here. I’ll give him a call and then you go meet him and see what you can come up with. That is, if he’ll take a call from me.’ Ted looked guiltily at her. ‘After our last outing, once the excitement died down, I kind of let things drift. And before you know it ten years goes by. What do you think?’

  A frown was gathering across her eyes. She looked down at her barely touched fish and then straightened her shoulders.

  ‘What would I have to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe slip him a password or something.’

  ‘How could I trust him not to milk us?’

  ‘Meet him and decide.’

  ‘As an officer of the bank I could get twenty years.’

  ‘You have to decide how much this matters to you.’

  He said nothing, just waited. She nodded her head a couple of times as though she was agreeing with something inside herself.

  ‘What skin are you putting into this game, Mr Saddler?’

  He sighed. ‘I’ll see if I can find my passport and go check out People’s Bank on their home turf. God help me. I’ll also put out feelers to see who knows what in the market. GA can’t do it all without bumping into other folks.’ He paused and held her eyes.

  Her voice took on her customary confidence and certainty. The thinking was done, the decision taken. Next came execution. That’s how she operated.

  ‘It’s the least you should do. OK, Ted, I’ll talk to your hacker friend. No promises. But you and I shouldn’t meet anymore. I’ll have him set up untraceable email addresses for you and me. Private cell phones. I’ll text you a number. Anything he finds, I’ll have him send directly to you.’

  Ted agreed, perhaps a little more enthusiastically than he felt. Despite her pressure tactics, he wouldn’t have minded a return match at Giovanni’s Room. Especially if he could guarantee approbation from her questioning eyes. It had been a while since he cared what a woman thought of him.

  TEN

  As usual, in the comparative cool of early morning, the women drifted down the twisting central street and gathered round the two water pumps and the wooden trough. They stepped daintily over the nuggets of goat dung. The Dalit women hadn’t swept the area yet. The five spreading neem trees ringed three sides of the small central square and formed a bank of shade for much of the day. The trees were laden with fat seeds, soon to be harvested.

  The neems had stood for as long as anyone could remember. Some said they were the survivors of a forest that used to fill the valley. Younger versions of this great oak-like tree had been nurtured all over the village. Even now, in the hottest time of the year, with water so scarce that they had to crank the hand pumps for almost a minute to get the first splash of water, the trees held their leaves. They were a talisman for the survival of the village. Though the river had been taken away, so long as the neems still stood, the village would continue.

  It was a full turn-out – maybe forty in all - and most got there early to grab favoured spots between the roots of the trees. Even a few of the Dalits had now shown up, but were standing well to the back of the main group so as not to offend. Everyone was trying hard to look casual, and talked of their men or their children or the new sari one had made. No-one mentioned the great journey of Divya and Leena and Anila, or discussed what they might have done and seen. They knew how to savour news.

  Some passed the time usefully by taking their turn on the handles of the pumps, sending gurgling gouts of water into their friends’ vessels. But when finally – at the breaking point of patience it seemed – the last of the three wanderers arrived with her plastic pail and earthen pot, pretence vanished and they quickly squatted in a tight ring around the story tellers and waited. The others deferred to Anila. It had been her idea and she had pushed the others and had dared them to do it.

  ‘Well, we did it. After all. We went to New Delhi and we saw the bank and we got the loan.’

  There was a sigh of collective disappointment. This was no way to tell a story. Too fast, and without any build up. Details were needed, to relish and discuss today and for weeks and years after. The time the three women went to the city of sin and came back unscathed with a sack of gold.

  One said, ‘Come now Anila, tell us about the journey. How did you get to Delhi? Was it hard and was the train very dreadful and full of eve-teasers and loose women?’ A few giggled. ‘And where did you sleep?’ There was a chorus of approval. This was what they wanted. And if it had to be coaxed out of the three, then so be it! They would ask questions until they had got all that they wanted.

  Anila saw how it would go, and smiled to herself. Divya and Leena were bursting to shower their friends with all the details. She therefore thought it better if she told the story. At least it would have a beginning, a middle and an end. Leena would have them all over the place and Divya would forget and have to be reminded. So she began. . .

  ‘Well… there is no bank round here.’ She waved her arm round the village for effect. It drew giggles. As if a bank would come here.

  ‘We heard that the People’s Bank was putting offices in all the towns and villages, but we are not yet on their plan. So we had to go to the main bank in Delhi. We met a manager of the bank, Mr Kapoor, who was very kind. Soon there will be a bank person in this area, and she – they told us they prefer to give the jobs to women, can you believe it? – she will collect the repayment of our loan every week and will find if other women want loans. As long as there are a group of at least three women who want to borrow and they have a good reason then they can get the money without collateral.’

  ‘What is collateral?’ asked one.

  Divya answered proudly, ‘It’s when you have to promise to give them something in case you can’t pay the loan back. Other banks would take our donkey or our field or our house. That is collateral.’

  Anila shook her head to confirm her friend’s grasp of the complexity of the banking system. ‘We said that the three of us had different ideas. But it was all work we were already doing.’

  Divya explained, ‘I told Mr Kapoor that my husband was crippled in an accident and now I had to support the family. I wanted to buy two cows and sell the milk and make cheese and sell the cheese. I told him I already worked for one of the rich men in the village and was very good at looking after cows but I only got paid in milk. So I could never save any money to buy a cow or even a goat.’

  Leena blushed harder and told them, ‘I said I wanted to buy the little field that my husband and I rent from Mr Patwardhan. Then we would be able to buy more seeds and plant more vegetables and maybe sel
l some to our neighbours or other villages.’

  Now it was Anila’s turn. ‘I was planning to buy a mobile phone and rent it out. But as you know, the elders have banned all women from using phones.’ She lowered her voice, ‘in case we are talking to men.’ That caused giggles and a rustle of comment through the ranks. Anila went on, ‘So, you know my mother and I make stools. And every day we have to get a loan from the money lender to buy the reeds and the straight wood. You know how the money lender works: we have to buy the wood from him and sell the stools to him. And he only gives us 50 rupees for each one. It is just enough to buy food and pay off his loan every day. So we can never stop. And we can never save anything.’

  She saw the head shaking all round. ‘If we just had a small loan at a good rate we could buy the reeds and the wood direct from the wood gatherer. Then we could sell the stools to the agent and not have to go through the money lender. That way we would keep all the profits and save some money and get a proper roof for our house.’

  The listeners were hushed by the audacity of these women. To think in such grand terms! To go all the way to Delhi and ask a bank for a loan. To have such notions! Some thought they were above their station and no good would come of it. Others put the ideas away in the back of their minds. If this bank really did send a person and if it was all as good as Anila said it would be, then maybe. . .

  For over an hour the seated women held the three of them there until they had the main points of the story thoroughly understood. They milked every detail of the city crowds and the traffic. They drained from them all the smells and excitement and noise. They saw themselves sleeping on the station platform of Gwalior, huddled together, their saris swept over them like gay shrouds. They lived the journey vicariously, mile by mile, and marvelled at the brazenness and resourcefulness of the travellers.

  They would now digest what they’d heard and talk about it with their closest friends and relations and then they would ask for more details. And the cycle would continue until their curiosity was sated. Soon there would be more to chew over; the women had gone all the way to Delhi and had come back with piles of money, but they still had to make the money work. And everyone knew how difficult it would be with the men. They would not like it to happen. Making money was a man’s job.

  As Anila finished her tale she felt the terrors return. She didn’t feel brave. She knew she was standing up against tradition and power. She was now in more debt than she could ever have imagined. She owed the bank 1000 rupees, or as Mr Kapoor had described it, nearly 20 dollars in American money, which was how the bank operated internationally. She had to pay all this back within a year at 20% interest. The weekly collections of 23 Rupees including interest would begin in a few weeks and apart from the loan itself, neither she nor her mother between them had enough to buy food for more than a week. Because of the trip, she’d lost almost a full week’s earnings – tiny though the amount was - but at least it had been a certainty. Moreover, the money lender would be very displeased and would refuse to lend her any more or would lend her at a rate of 50% per week!

  She’d gambled everything – including her mother’s savings – on the plan. What if the wood gatherer refused to sell her the reeds? What if the agent refused to buy the stools she made? What if the village men ganged up and made the elders order her not to get above herself? Like the ban on phones for women.

  Anila had asked both the wood gatherer and the agent who came each week to pick up the chairs, if they were prepared to work directly with her. Both had joked about it and told her not to be so silly. Then when they saw she was serious, they laughingly agreed to deal with her direct. They were sceptical, but at the same time they were practical men, she hoped. Well, she would soon see. The agent was not due for his weekly trip for another five days. But the wood gatherer was due to arrive today and she would approach him with her offer. He came every day in a truck that blew filthy smoke everywhere and made bangs like a firecracker.

  Anila stood up, and rubbed at the muscles in her stomach. Despite the crowd she felt alone. She hadn’t told them she’d worn the regalia of marriage during the journey in the hopes of deflecting the eve-teasers. Nor about pausing under the skinned branches of a tree on the way back so that she could take out a cloth and wipe the Sindoor from her forehead and parting. Nor how she’d laughed, as Leena helped her to unhook her necklace, to show she was glad to have the weight off. In one sense she had felt free again without it. In another, it had been a reminder of the lost years behind her and the empty ones still to come.

  She embraced Leena and Divya who seemed to be going through a similar turmoil. She saw by the length of the shadows that her first encounter would take place in an hour or so with the wood gatherer. She would go home and try to eat a little something and have a drink and then go and see if she could make the first part of her plan work. She hoped she wouldn’t be sick.

  She was half way back to her hut when the money lender accosted her.

  ELEVEN

  Mr Chowdury had been waiting for Anila behind one of the huts. With him was Mr Bhandariti, the village sarpanch, the headman. They stood in her path. The money lender had a very single-minded approach to life; money was the only thing that mattered, the more the better. Anyone who got in the way of his making more money – or much worse, losing him money – was ground underfoot. Mr Chowdury’s financial antennae had been twitching for weeks ever since he’d heard the rumours of the wickedness planned by this woman. It was scarcely credible that anyone, far less a woman, should be threatening his monopoly of borrowing in Chandapur. It went against the order of things. He seethed with a sense of injustice.

  Anila’s breath stopped. She tried to look nonchalant. She put her water jugs down.

  ‘Namaste, Mr Chowdury,’ she said clasping hands and bowing politely to the money lender and the headman. ‘And Mr Bhandariti? Did you want to talk to me? I am going home to my mother and my daughter with water.’ Anila showed them her two brimming plastic jugs.

  Chowdury gave her a perfunctory namaste in return, as custom demanded, but he threw his hands away from himself in annoyance. ‘Yes, we wanted to talk to you. You are right we wanted to talk to you!’ Mr Chowdury was quickly getting himself furious. He seemed to have been working on his anger for some time.

  Mr Bhandariti was feeling more uncomfortable by the minute. He wasn’t sure why he’d been dragged into this but wanted out of it as fast as possible and with minimum fuss.

  ‘Now, now Mr Chowdury. We do not want a big scene at this time. Mrs Jhabvala, we wanted to ask a few questions that is all. Do you mind if we do that?’

  Anila saw the sarpanch’s discomfort and grew a little more confident.

  ‘Why did you not come to my house then? Why are you stopping me in the lane like this? You have no right.’

  ‘See! See I told you! She is acting up, she is above us all now! She has been off to Delhi to set up in business against me! That’s what she’s up to! I tell you she is trying to ruin me, this woman.’

  The sarpanch’s distress was growing. He and his colleagues on the village council had never recovered their authority since the disaster of the dam. They had taken a cautious line throughout the planning stage and had kept the unruly elements from mounting an unseemly protest against the State officials. Why, they even had a minister visit them. How would it have looked if they had let protesters wave banners at him and shout at him? As though suggesting that the minister was lying to them? The elders had pounded out the official line - promises of reparation and better drinking water – long after it was clear that neither was going to happen. But what else could they have done? And they had been well paid for their stance. Yet here was another issue that seemed to be unpicking the fabric of the village life. Damn the woman for not staying with her husband, and damn her for not knowing her place!

  ‘Mr Chowdury, please! Mrs Jhabvala - Anila, is this true that you are setting up your own money lending business? And that you will be taking the c
lients of Mr Chowdury? The village elders cannot allow one of our esteemed villagers to be treated with disrespect and to be ill-used in this way. What do you have to say for yourself?’

  Anila looked at the two men. The money lender was red in the face and clutched his long stick as though he wanted to strike her with it. He was dressed like a poor man, for all his hidden riches. The sarpanch was tall and grey haired but despite his pomp he was nervous. Anila had expected encounters like this and was steeled for them. But she had not expected such an accusation. She stood up straight and faced the men. The injustice of the lie gave her strength.

  ‘Yes, I went to Delhi. But what you say is nonsense. I went to the People’s Bank and got a loan.’

  Chowdury cut in excitedly, ‘You see, you see! She admits it!’

  ‘I got a loan for my own use. I got a loan to let me buy good wood and cane from the wood gatherer. And my mother and I will make the chairs now and we will sell them to the agent. And we will do all this without going through you Mr Chowdury. That is what you really fear, isn’t it? It means you won’t get the fat profit from selling the chairs I make. That’s what you really care about it, isn’t it?’

  As she said this, Anila knew that every word was a brick, and she was building a wall higher and higher between herself and any future loans from Chowdury. If she was desperate and if this bold enterprise of hers didn’t work, then there would be no going back. She was amazed at her own effrontery and even more amazed at the feeling of confidence that was beginning to burn through her. However crazy this idea was, it was her idea and she was taking her own destiny in her own hands. For the first time in her life Anila tasted freedom. She found it a heady liquor.

  Mr Bhandariti was torn. He could see trouble no matter which way he went. All he could do was to appear even-handed so that there would be no accusations of taking sides when this came before the council, as he was certain it would. He turned to the money lender.