Back to the Basics
“When Anand came to console me, Ruma’s relatives had a scare,” he continued with apparent sadness. “Afraid of my passing on the Imperial crown to him, they even moved the courts, but when he turned down my offer, and even as they withdrew their plaint, I began to brood over their greed; and as a couple of Rajan’s relatives too called on me with their lawyers, I felt as if I was face to face with the ugliness of wealth. Ruma’s people at least had the good sense to take her back into their fold, rather made their way into hers, but none of Rajan’s relatives had the grace to pay their last respects to him; well it was then that I made up my mind to deny them all.”
He paused for a while with a smirk on his face apparently relishing his idea.
“But still I had no idea as to what to do with all that liquid cash and for a cue, I began mingling with the common folk,” he said on resumption. “Once in a city bus, the man in the front seat gave me his place, and inexplicably it occurred to me that given a chance, the same man may be no less greedy to grab all my money. As I began brooding over my supposition, I could divine that innate goodness and inherent greed are the obverse and reverse of the human nature and that wealth tends to abet the latter at least in the weak minds. Why for that matter, poverty, the product of social debilities and human constraints, is no less an evil that affects man’s ethos as money does; and as for nouveau riche, they tend to imagine that since they have the reins of wealth, they have a reign over the world of wisdom. Now as I speak to you, my irrationality, first in the accumulation of wealth and then in the destruction of it is seemingly coming to the fore; if only I had not lost my sense of balance in either case.”
“What to make out of your state of mind.”
“If only man has the hindsight of a Spanish bull, his life would’ve been a lot better,” he said. “You know, after its tussle with the matador, if let out, the mauled beast becomes wiser to his ways with the green herring, should they find themselves in the ring again, they wouldn’t be fooled any longer, and so as to avert the threat these creatures pose to the matadors they are slaughtered after the spectacle is over. Life is not as unkind to the self-introspecting man as it is to a self-reflecting bull for it lends him the scope to contain the damages the vagaries of his habit occasions; but still, save a Gary Sobers, who said he never committed the same mistake twice, man fails to benefit from the let-offs of fate, and that only proves that man is more adept at thwarting the perils without but not at averting the banes within.”