Great souls do not go about saying how much money they have spent on a noble deed. For instance, if you asked Mangaraj the cost of building his house, he would exclaim, “Oh, a lot of money, I was ruined!” Our readers should not become disheartened or grow restive.

Such matters are best left to historians and archeologists, who provide accurate information on all things ancient. Nine hundred years after the Puri temple was built, a Sahib was able to figure out exactly how much money had been spent on its construction. If documents exist recording the sales of vegetables from Mangaraj’s orchard, can it be that difficult to locate records indicating how much was spent on his house? No one in India performed a funeral on a grander scale than did Dewan Ganga Gobind Singh when his mother passed away. The governor-general instructed the collector of the district to send rice, dal, flour, oil, ghee, coconuts, and bananas free of cost to the dewan. When the Raja of Nabadwipa, Sibachandra, wanted to perform the last rites of his mother in a similar style and requested the dewan to send him the list of expenses, Dewan Ganga Gobind mentioned only the expenses incurred for peripheral items such as cannabis, opium, and tobacco, expecting the raja to arrive from this at an idea of the total expenditure involved. A sum of seventy-two thousand rupees was spent on the funeral, not taking into account the free labor and provisions supplied by local zamindars.

We are going to give a similar sort of account of the expenditure for the construction of Mangaraj’s house; intelligent readers will be able to draw their own conclusions from the following figures, obtained from the account books. The records of the granary are the only available source of accurate information on the cost of the construction, and these tell us that fifteen bharanas and twenty-two noutis of rice were given out as provisions for the bonded laborers who built the house.

On several occasions we have heard Mangaraj say that he loaned out money and grain only because he could not bear to see others suffer, that he made no profit at all from these transactions. We would maintain that, in fact, the business involved considerable losses for him. After all, not much profit is to be made by lending grain at 50 percent interest. Not just that; whereas he lent out old husked grain, he took in only new juicy grain in return. Dear reader, if you have ever compared the weights of dry and wet clothes you can easily understand Mangaraj’s situation. On last year’s accounts the bookkeeper had written off the sum of eight rupees and six annas. He was taken to task for forgiving such a huge amount. A summary of the bookkeeper’s explanation is as follows: Bhikari Panda took a loan of five rupees. The compound interest on this comes to twelve rupees five annas and eleven paise. The amount collected from Bhikari Panda was seventeen rupees five annas. The remainder was written off.

Chapter Three

Vanijye Vasate Laksmis

Tadardham Krsikarmani

Commerce makes you rich;

Agriculture does too, though somewhat less so.

These must be the words of an old-fashioned bard, since a con-temporary poet would say, “Commerce makes you rich; a bache-lor’s degree in law does too, though somewhat less so.” Some naive types might mistake Mangaraj’s house for that of a lawyer holding a law degree and think sixty-two families must have been impoverished to raise a house so big. But fate, as you know, determines everything. The turbaned lawyer you see lounging in the courthouse corridors can ruin a mere twenty-five families.

The zamindar boasted he needed no one’s help; he had made the earth yield gold through his own efforts, through the sheer forceof his will and his God-given intelligence. According to rumor indeed we know it to be the truth—our Mangaraj, when he began as a humble sharecropper, received only two acres of land from the village headman. Now he had eighty-six acres under his own plough, and about another sixty given out to sharecroppers.

He paid very little on this property, most of it being either rent-free or forfeited by poor Brahmins and only partially taxable. He had fifteen pairs of bullocks and, to look after the fields and orchards, twelve farmhands, all untouchables—Bauris, and three Panas. Mangaraj had infused into them the spirit of hard work and a sense of dedication. Health manuals advise us to get out of bed before dawn, and Mangaraj followed this advice to the letter.

The Shastras say: “All rivers run to the sea, where they lose their sweetness and become salty.” How right that is! In the same way, wives and servants lose themselves in their master. We have come to know the truth of this by observing Mangaraj’s servants.

Every day, he would rise before dawn and brush his teeth. Then, from the verandah, he would call out to the farmhands in a loud voice. Just like the cannon shot marking the beginning and close of day in Calcutta, this would rouse the villagers from their sleep and set the young daughters-in-law to their household chores.

The villagers had never been able to fathom the mystery of clocks. All they knew was that when the sun reached the middle of the sky, it was time to unyoke the bullocks. At about the same time every day, farmers working in the fields would watch for Mangaraj’s big palm-leaf umbrella to appear from behind the ridges.