The Financial Expert

No, Balu is not responsible. It is Margayya’s own attachment to money that impoverishes his life and leaves him without money in the end. Because Margayya is obsessed with money, he refuses and fails to see the importance of converting his capital into property. Rather than investing money or using it to acquire other material objects, such as real estate, he simply wants to “keep it”: “You know I’m a man who has had to work hard to make money and keep it” (351-2). Margayya fails to see the wisdom of investing in property: “‘What am I to do with property?” he said. ‘I want only money, not brick and lime or mud’” (353). This comment reveals that Margayya’s pursuit of wealth and money was never about providing financial security for his family, as he once claimed, but rather about his own myopic and monomaniacal pursuit of the status that money can provide. Too obsessed with money itself, Margayya ends up in the end with neither wealth nor property to pass on to his family.