The cultivators rarely get fair treatment from the Banias, as the odds
are too much against them. They must have money to sow their land, and
live while the crops are growing, and the majority who have no capital
are at the moneylender's mercy. He is of a different caste, and often
of a different country, and has no fellow-feeling towards them, and
therefore considers the transaction merely from the business point of
view of getting as much profit as possible. The debtors are illiterate,
often not even understanding the meaning of figures, or the result of
paying compound interest at twenty-five or fifty per cent; they can
neither keep accounts themselves nor check their creditor's. Hence
they are entirely in his hands, and in the end their villages or land,
if saleable, pass to him, and they decline from landlord to tenant,
or from tenant to labourer. They have found vent for their feelings
in some of the bitterest sayings ever current: 'A man who has a
Bania for a friend has no need of an enemy.' 'Borrow from a Bania
and you are as good as ruined.' 'The rogue cheats strangers and the
Bania cheats his friends.' 'Kick a Bania even if he is dead.' "His
heart, we are told, is no bigger than a coriander seed; he goes in
like a needle and comes out like a sword; as a neighbour he is as
bad as a boil in the armpit. If a Bania is on the other side of a
river you should leave your bundle on this side for fear he should
steal it. If a Bania is drowning you should not give him your hand;
he is sure to have some pecuniary motive for drifting down-stream. A
Bania will start an auction in a desert. If a Bania's son tumbles
down he is sure to pick up something. He uses light weights and
swears that the scales tip up of themselves; he keeps his accounts
in a character that no one but God can read; if you borrow from him
your debt mounts up like a refuse-heap or gallops like a horse; if
he talks to a customer he debits the conversation in his accounts;
and when his own credit is shaky he writes up his transactions on
the wall so that they can easily be rubbed out." [131]