The ₹999 Man

A unit of measurement

Paresh Solanki did not believe in prices. He believed in ₹999.

It had started, as these things do, with an air cooler. The cooler cost an amount he could no longer remember, because the shop had never really said it. What the shop said, on a board the size of a door, was ₹999 A MONTH, and below that, in letters the size of ants, for how long.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine rupees is a beautiful amount. It is not a thousand. A thousand is a decision; a thousand you discuss with your wife. Nine ninety-nine is a rounding error with a nice personality. Paresh processed motor insurance claims for a living, and he knew a rounding error when he saw one.

So the cooler came home, and Bapuji, his father, who was seventy-four and felt the Vadodara summer in his knees, slept through an afternoon for the first time since March. This matters. The cooler was a good idea.

After that Paresh began to see ₹999 everywhere, the way you notice a word once you have learnt it. A phone upgrade plan: ₹999. A watch that counted his steps and judged them: ₹999. The gym, which he attended in the sense that he was a member: ₹999. A spoken-English course for Hetal’s tuition students, which she had actually wanted and which brought her four new children by Diwali: ₹999. An orthopaedic mattress for Bapuji’s back. A television in the festival sale, on a plan the shop called no-cost.

He developed a theory, which he explained to his colleague Mistry over tea.

“Everything is ₹999,” said Paresh. “The trick is only the number of months. A scooter is just a lot of months.”

“And a house?”

“A house is a great many months.”

Mistry said that by this logic a funeral was also ₹999. Paresh told him not to be morbid, and then went quiet for a moment, clearly pricing it.

The eighth

The second week of June

The eighth one was a robot vacuum cleaner. It was round and determined, and it moved across the showroom floor bumping gently into things, like an uncle at a wedding. ₹999 a month for eighteen months.

He brought the brochure home the way a cat brings home a bird.

Hetal was at the dining table marking fractions. She taught maths to Classes 5 to 8 in the front room, twelve children in two batches, and she had the particular calm of a person who spends her evenings explaining that you cannot add things until they have the same denominator.

“It mops also,” said Paresh.

“How much?”

“Nine ninety-nine.”

“I asked how much, not how often.”

He did not know. She held out her hand for the brochure and then, instead of reading it, went to the steel cupboard and came back with the plastic folder where the warranty cards lived. She laid them on the bed in a row. The cooler. The phone plan. The watch. The gym. Her own course. The mattress. The television. Seven cards. She put the robot’s brochure at the end, a little apart, like a boy who has not yet been admitted to the school.

“Each one,” she said. “How many months are left? Write it on the card.”

It took him twenty minutes and two phone calls to find out, which was itself information. Then she added up the months, because adding is what she does.

99

“Ninety-nine,” said Hetal. “You have ninety-nine nine-ninety-nines.”

Paresh, who loved a pattern, was briefly delighted. Then he did the multiplication.

“That is almost a lakh.”

“It is ₹98,901. It is a lakh with a nice personality.”

Here is what Paresh said next, and he was right to say it. “But we are managing. Nothing is late. I have never missed one.”

This was true. Every instalment went out on its date. Their commitments came to about a fifth of what they earned, which no bank would blink at. Nobody was coming to the door. If you are looking for the disaster in this story, there isn’t one, and Hetal knew it.

“I am not saying we are drowning,” she said. “I am saying, look how little water is under the boat.”

The bathroom step

The following month

The water was tested five weeks later. Bapuji slipped on the bathroom step. It was not serious in the way hospitals use the word: a hairline fracture of the wrist, two nights of observation because of his age, a scan to be sure. The bill came to ₹26,000. Their insurance paid none of it, because of a waiting period that Paresh could have recited in his sleep and had never thought to apply to his own father.

They paid it. This also matters. They had ₹12,000 put by, and two months of what was left over from their salaries, and when the hospital had been settled there was ₹2,714 in the account until the next payday.

Paresh sat in the hospital canteen with a paper cup of tea and the bill, and for once ran the arithmetic the other way round. Without the seven plans, this would have been an annoyance. With the eighth, they would have walked out with ₹716 and a robot. Nobody would have gone hungry. But he noticed that he had spent a morning being afraid of a number, and he was a man who worked with numbers and was not usually afraid of them.

“It wasn’t any one of them,” he told Hetal that night. “I checked. Each one is fine. Each one is ₹999.”

“Yes.”

“They are only a problem together.”

“Like relatives,” said Hetal.

He went through the cards again, more slowly, and stopped at the television. No-cost. He had been proud of that one. He worked at a company that sold certainty for a fee, and he knew, when he made himself think about it, that nobody lends money for two years as a hobby.

A lot of months

They did not cut up any cards. Nobody took a vow. Paresh returned the brochure to the showroom, where the robot was still bumping into things, and felt disloyal.

What they did was duller, and Hetal’s idea. She wrote the seven end dates on the kitchen calendar, the one from the dairy with a different god for every month. When a plan ended, its ₹999 did not drift back into the general fog. It went into the savings account, on the same date, as though the plan were still running.

“We keep paying,” she said. “We only change who we pay.”

The watch finished first. Paresh, who had been dreading it, found that he enjoyed the transfer more than he had ever enjoyed the watch. The cooler was next, in the month the heat came back, and Bapuji slept through the afternoon under a machine that now belonged to them completely.

He still thinks in ₹999. He can’t help it; it is his native currency. But he has added a second column. When a salesman tells him the monthly amount, he asks for how many months, and then he asks the price, and he watches the salesman’s face do what his own did that evening on the bed.

If the Solankis add nothing new and let every plan run out, the calendar says the last ₹999 leaves in 24 months. If they manage to bank everything that is left over along the way, the same two salaries will have put ₹3,12,999 in the account by then. They probably won’t manage all of it. There will be a wedding, a school trip, another bathroom step. But it is a different amount of water under the boat.

The robot vacuum, for the record, is a good machine. Mistry bought one. He says it has changed his life, and that it was only ₹999.