BENGALURU : I was out buying my weekly supplies from my neighbourhood kiraana shop. The shop uncle, who has witnessed globalisation, the influx of supermarkets, and the transition to Internet banking - handled the pandemic quite well. His shop was open even during the most stringent phases of the lockdown, and he handled the various modes of payment with the swiftness of a youngster.
Ahead of me in the line was a teenager who bought a bar of chocolate, some toffees and some household items. He carefully counted his toffees, placed them in his bag, and used a smartphone to pay for the items. Out of curiosity, I enquired to find that his parents deposited his pocket money into a digital wallet that he was allowed to spend. As is common with most writers, the incident took me back to my childhood and the concept of money.
In our lower-middle class household, money was never spoken about. I was fascinated by villains in movies who walked around in bath-towels and smoked pipes. Since they were usually politicians or zamindars, I assumed it was evil to be wealthy. I never knew how much my parents earned and wasn’t allowed to ask such questions. All I knew was that they both went to work and were paid a salary, on which our household was run.
During a family vacation, my parents refused to let us watch the movie Richie Rich when they heard it featured a rich kid blowing away money. But I was already obsessed with a Doordarshan tele-film called Karamati Coat, in which a kid finds a magical coat that gives him a rupee every time he slips his hand into its pocket! While there was no direct discussion around it, money was always spoken about in proverbs. ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees’. Or that ‘Money comes and goes, morality comes and grows’.
In such a scenario, the only way out was the underground ‘Relative-Gift’ economy. Relatives would often give us money during Dussehra, Diwali and birthdays. My parents kept the money, of course. When I spoke to my cousins, I found that their parents kept their money too. Which meant that we kids were being given money all through the year, but none of us had any money. It was a banking scam ahead of its time, an economy that was perennially in recession!
My parents did encourage the habit of putting money into savings boxes though. We were given clay pots with slits on the top to slip in money (mostly loose change). This economy functioned as a service sector offering, where I ran to the shop to pick up a few items, and was allowed to slip in the loose change into the box. The pot was cracked open to be used for banal stuff like toffees, stickers and tennis balls. But there was a great joy in the ritual of slipping in a coin, shaking the clay pot, and listening to the jingle-jangle of coins inside. A sound that the present generation would never listen to.
As the kid patted the dog lazing in front of the kirana shop and left, I wondered if it was a case of an older man romanticising the past. The kid might never hear the jingle-jangle of coins in a clay pot, but perhaps he would be exposed to concepts like netbanking, savings account, and deposits in a much better sense than we were. For money might not grow on trees, but it could certainly be harvested in branches of various banks.