The lady is
around 75 years of age , living alone nearby. She owns a small house. She does
odds and ends job to make ends meet. Her daughter-in-law and grandson live in a
nearby town.
The grandson
is a school drop out , in his mid thirties , without any stable job or rather
without any job. One day he came to visit his grand mother with a request –
that he got a job as a cashier in a nationalised bank and had to pay a deposit
of five lakhs.
When the
lady mentioned this, no amount of
explanation about the process of recruitment in banks would convince her – she
so believed her grandson. She brushed aside the educational qualification of
her grandson . He had once before taken money from her on the pretext of going
to Chennai to write some test. So that test , according to her was to get this
job . So straightaway , her grandson has been offered a job in this bank to
handle cash, according to her . And the posting she was told was in another
town and her grandson would commute from his home everyday. The salary was
fixed at Rs.18,000 per month.
The
happiness of the lady knew no bounds. She started dreaming about the marriage
of her grandson , now that he had a stable job in a bank.
Overpowering
that was , how to arrange for the five lakhs deposit ? She sold the few
sovereigns of gold. That was not enough. She pledged her small house to add to
the amount. That also did not add up. Then she borrowed heavily around her on
interest for the balance – after all, her grandson was going to work as a
cashier in a bank – and she will payback the loans, will redeem her house and
maybe buy back the few sovereigns with his stable salary.
Not heeding
to the repeated words of caution, she managed to gather the amount and gave the
entire sum in cash to her grandson who said he will join duty from the start of
the next month .
The Big day
came and he started ‘working’. The lady was told, he would pack lunch and take
the bus to go the place of work. Work was hard and was for long hours and by
the time he came back home it was nearly dark. The story continued for the
week. First week of next month, the lady was eagerly waiting for the grandson
or her daughter in law , to tell her something , anything about the ‘salary’
and was eagerly waiting on Sundays (since he was working on all other days) for
them to visit her with a token of some monetary gift.
Nothing like
that happened . Spent a miserable month , after having decided from next month
onwards she was going to ask him to take care of the repayment.
It was only
during the middle of the third month, when the calls from her daughter in law
and grandson reduced and her calls were not answered, she decided to visit and
find out what was happening.
Well , she
was not very well received and she found out that he was not working anywhere
and they had taken the money because they had to pay some overdue loan and
things were going rough in that transaction. Their logic now being, anyway, all
the money she had belonged to her grandson – what was the difference, at what
point in time they took it .
After a month
of grief, the lady then decided to and sold off her house – the only roof over
her head , paid off all the loans and has desposited the small remaining amount
in the bank.
Now the
would is too raw she says she will not give any more money to her grandson. If
he comes back in a year or two with
another cock and bull story , I am sure she is going to hand over the money she
has and may even take more loans to pay for his next ‘job’.
