Summary

Margayya earns a modest living by providing financial advice and

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. When the bank official decides he
is being a nuisance, the guard chases him away.

Margayya decides that divine intervention, specifically his devotion to

the Hindu goddess concerned with wealth, Lakshmi, will aid him in
his endeavors. He increases his rituals of devotion and soon his affairs
improve. Margayya's interpretation of this devotion, however, is
slanted more toward money than towards the goddess or holy works.
As the author reveals this flaw, he foreshadows Margayya's future
(negative) experiences.

Margayya's new friend Dr. Pal, author of a sex manual that combines
the classic Kama Sutra with modern Western psychology, inspires a
change of business direction: to publish this manual. He enlists a local
printer, Madan Lal, who quickly sees the commercial value of the
work that they title Domestic Harmony. Its great success sparks
Margayya's social and financial rise.

Meanwhile, Margayya barely heeds his wife's counsel or his son's

education, paying attention to the latter only when he fails to gain
admission to university. It turns out that Balu, the son, has grown up
self-centered and lazy, interested only in a sinful life. Finally,
Margayya listens to his wife's fears that Balu may have died in the
city of Madras. He is found alive there, however, and returns to
Malgudi to get married. His father's new moneylending business
makes him truly prosperous

Dr. Pal plays an active role in helping Balu get matched to a lovely
wife, and it seems that all is well. However, Pal is actually a bad
influence on Balu, encouraging him to waste his time and money at
Pal's club. When Margayya finds out, he becomes furious with Pal
and physically attacks him. The doctor in turn spreads lies about the
moneylender, lies which cause his business to collapse. When Balu,
unsympathetic, asks for his inheritance, his father tells him it is his
heritage to be a financial expert and tells him that he should begin
afresh under the tree; Margayya himself has retired.

Summary

Margayya who adopted his name, which means “one who shows the
way”), a financial expert, is one of the minor businessmen who are to
be found in most Indian towns and cities. Neither a moneylender nor
really a banker, he is a manipulator of others’ affairs who accumulates
a modest income by giving financial advice, selling forms, and
showing illiterate farmers and peasants how to obtain loans from the
Central Co-operative Land Mortgage Bank in Malgudi. His role as
middleman is lucrative, for he has almost no overhead: His pen, ink,
blotter, and account book are contained in an old, gray tin box that he
carries with him and that constitutes his office when he sits under a
banyan tree across the lawn from the bank. When he is rebuked by
Arul Doss, the chief peon of the bank, for being a nuisance on the
premises (normally trying to obtain loan application forms or even
new clients), Margayya decides that large sums of money—necessary
for the type of life and position in society of which he judges himself
deserving—are not to be made from villagers’ small transactions;
rather, they are to be made by devotions to Lakshmi, the Hindu
goddess of wealth, whose favors to the elect are almost boundless.

A priest from a run-down local temple prescribes special rituals for

obtaining the favor of Lakshmi: mixing the ashes of a red lotus with
the milk of a smoke-colored cow, exorcising rodents and cockroaches
from his house, decorating the doorways with mango-leaf garlands,
and repeating a special mantra a thousand times daily for forty days.
The result is that Margayya becomes a devotee not of Lakshmi but of
money itself.
During his search for the red lotus, Margayya meets Dr. Pal, author of
a 150-page manuscript, “Bed-Life, or the Science of Marital
Happiness,” and he decides to become the publisher of his manuscript
rather than a seller of snuff or tooth powder—two possibilities that
attract him now that he is almost penniless after his forty-day absence
from his banyan-tree “office,” during which his son, Balu, has thrown
his account book into a sewer canal.

Madan Lal, the proprietor of the Gordon Printery on Market Road,

reads Pal’s manuscript and offers to publish it in partnership with
Margayya under the title Domestic Harmony—though it is really an
amalgam of the Kama Sutra and the writings of Havelock Ellis. Sold
at one rupee a copy, Domestic Harmony (promoted as sociology but
in reality a work of prurience) becomes Margayya’s means to
unexpected riches and position (as secretary of the town elementary
school—through a manipulated election).

Yet in spite of his newfound social status resulting from his increased
wealth, Margayya is distressed by the lack of academic progress by
his son Balu. Even after teachers are pressured, Balu fails to gain
admission to a university and so runs away to Madras, confessing that
he hates studies and examinations.

Word is received that Balu has died—but the cause is unknown.

Margayya (to economize) takes a third-class train to Madras, where,
with the help of an inspector of police, he learns that Balu is alive and
that the postcard announcing his death was written by a madman, who
is a cinema owner; Balu is the supervisor of street urchins who wear
sandwich-board advertisements for films. After reconciliation,
Margayya and Balu return to Malgudi.

After preliminary inquiries about a bride for Balu, Margayya is aided

by Dr. Pal, who persuades an astrologer to manipulate horoscopes.
Balu and his bride, Brinda, move into a fashionable new house, and
Dr. Pal becomes a tout for Margayya, who decides to become a
deposit-taker rather than a lender. He quickly achieves celebrity
status, and he is virtually a currency-hoarder.
Balu has fallen under the influence of Dr. Pal, however, who is part
owner of a “house of debauchery,” and Margayya assaults Dr. Pal,
who then spreads rumors about Margayya’s bank being insolvent.
There is a ruinous run on the bank, and even Balu’s house and
property are attached. In about four months, Margayya, crushed,
suggests that Balu take up the old, gray tin box and set up office under
the banyan tree while he plays at home with his grandson.