Columns

Imagine this Sunday morning you had arisen from your bed to discover that you had a secret off-shore bank account in Dubai. Shocked? Surprised? Then imagine further it had one billion US dollars stashed in it in your very own personal name. The account is so hush-hush that, until this morning when you stumbled out of bed, even you did not know of its existence or that Ali Baba’s treasure trove was deposited in it.

Comic character Richie: Will he sink or swim?

While you are still wondering whether it’s all part of a dream that had cruelly outstayed its nightly visit, your eye catches the Sunday newspaper the cat had brought in. It states on its masthead 25th October 2015 as its date. You pinch yourself and it hurts. You force a smile before the mirror. That hurts too; and confirms this is no dream, this is for real.

With the billion-watt jolt you had just received out of the blue, you start fumbling to get your bearings. Dubai? Now where’s that darn place? Somewhere in the Middle East, isn’t it? The desert oasis where all the housemaids go? Who is the kind soul who took all that trouble to set up an account in your name? And who is the Fairy godmother who deposited one billion US dollars in it for you to enjoy as you wish?

One billion dollars? US, you say? Hang on, you tell yourself. Isn’t that an awful lot of money, even for the Mother of All Fairies to give to one undeserving bloke to live it up in sheik style when she could have spread the dough around and made the world a lot happier? Like alleviating mass poverty, for instance? Why me, you ask? Why am I singled out, what did I ever do to deserve such a billion dollar bonanza, you ask yourself repeatedly but from the voiceless lips of the silent phantoms answer comes there none.

Then the penny drops. You suddenly realise just how much a billion dollars truly means, the enormous purchasing power of the sum you hold in your kitty in Dubai. The entire project cost for the Port City funded by the Chinese is a little over US dollars 1 billion. Why did the Lankan government have to go on bended knees to an oriental power and have sovereignty issues over its air and land space to build this port city when you, a true son of the soil, as Sinhala as Dutugamunu can get, could have financed the whole operation out of your own pocket, with no strings attached?

Nay, with the dropping rupee at Rs 140 to the dollar at the last count, you would have Rs 140,000,000,000 or 140 billion bucks in your Arabian piggy bank. Enough to buy the entire country lock stock and barrel twice over, minus of course the Chinese port in Hambantota and the Chinese airport in Mattala which have already come under the hammer and are no longer on the market.

But as you flick through the Sunday paper seated on your new found gilded throne, you feel the first rumblings begin. Tucked away in the inside pages is a news item which beats the crap out of you. Apparently you are not alone with your billion dollar secret. Someone has ratted; and apparently the Government’s secret agents had been busy two Sundays ago to move a Dubai judge in his chambers to freeze your billion dollar windfall. You wipe the sweat falling over your brow as you think what to do next. It is learnt that the judge in closed door proceedings had turned down the agents’ request to put the clampers on the account stating that a criminal conviction of the account holder must be shown before the request can be met. But questions are being asked in the highest quarters and in the humblest hamlets. Embarrassing ones involving incriminating answers.

The first question the people, constipated with curiosity, ask is: who is the lucky man? On that score, a horde of eligible but ungallant Lankans had taken a rather negative attitude and had come forward to say their head size is different and that the cap doesn’t fit. Imagine that? Twenty million citizens in the country, many of them below the poverty belt, and not a single beggar can be found to claim the biggest Mahajana Sampatha pay out of all time? Why, no takers?

That’s what worries you. Apparently the government agents suspect that the billion bucks in your bank account are the spoils of corruption. Wasn’t it Parakrama, the great tank building Parakrama who once said that not a drop of rain that falls on Lanka should go to the sea without being channelled to water the land? Well, these meddlesome sleuths seem to think that every dime of investment that was to flow to the island had been channeled to fatten your Dubai account. And now just when you stand on the billionaire threshold, someone out there is trying to swipe the carpet under your feet.

Why you, you scream? Why must misfortune always dog and damn the good and meek? Is this the malice of the gods that they humour you with one hand and rob you with the other? Here you have been, apart from trying to solve national problems on your facebook account, generally minding your own business, doing a spot of welfare services to help the poor, volunteering for shramadana work in the locale, sitting in the village death and funeral committee assisting the bereaved to bury or burn their dead with some financial assistance collected from the society members — oh, my gosh, would they think you embezzled the funeral money to bolster your account? Don’t they realise that you, having not earned any qualifications in any field, are only paid a measly stipend for your part time job at an institute for the mentally differently abled where the privileged inmates are generally given to talking through their hats?

Suddenly the truth stares starkly in your face. You are in deep trouble. Having a foreign account and not declaring its existence to the local authorities is itself an offence. But will anyone believe if you say it’s not your account? Will they cease to believe in fairy tales anymore if you say the billion is not yours and that someone else, the good fairy or the Wizard of Oz perhaps, may have deposited it in your name?

Suddenly what had seemed a miracle has turned into a curse? The billion dollar question now is how to get rid of a billion bucks? It seems more difficult than acquiring it which often entails no more than passing a note with a set of numbers written on it.

Of course you could write to the bank and say it’s not yours. But will that pass the creditability test locally? All that the bank will do in that instance is to probably transfer the sum to a suspense account and hold it on trust and await fresh orders from you. Will that get you scot free? No. Furthermore, twenty four hours ago a billion bucks seemed the stuff of pipe dreams and giving it away meant nothing. Many are generous to the hilt when it comes to giving away things they don’t have. Altruism leaps and bounds in the meadows of the charitable breast of those who say with sympathetic eye, “if I only had the money to give you to overcome your problem, I would give it without batting an eyelid.”

But these last two hours of knowing you had a billion under your belt in your own private account had put you under the spell of money. Your problem now is how to keep it, not give it away as easily as you would have given away an imaginary billion bucks yesterday. Now that it is for real, you have bit off the forbidden fruit and you stay serpent stung.

Can you transfer it to another similar bank? Yes but the problem is that the flight of money, like the flight of aircrafts, is closely monitored by many international agencies. Thus a destination like Switzerland will be tracked and the same problem will arise again. The only option is to send it to a shady third world bank that doesn’t ask awkward questions from you and doesn’t answer impertinent queries from snoopy investigators. But then the risk of the host country impounding it and using it to build their battered economies or their tin pot dictators confiscating it to line their pockets always exist. So what then?

The only silver lining in the dark cloud of hopelessness you can see is to take up Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake’s recent proposal to grant an amnesty to all those who hold such secret accounts abroad to bring the monies to Lanka. His planned offer is limited to Lankan and Indians to stash their dough in Lankan banks without any questions being asked as to its origin.
But won’t India put a spanner in the works? Will India not object to Lanka being used as the Laundromat of the Indian Ocean to cleanse India’s black money? Will Lanka be not accused of running a money laundering racket even for drug barons to make their narcotic loot legit?

So what can be done when the supposed benevolence of a misanthropist await its Mephistophelian climax; and its malicious import becomes clear when the demand for the soul Faustus bartered for undreamt wealth is made?

It’s not much fun, is it, to have a billion bucks in a secret account and not be able to use a dime of it but carry it around like the mark of Cain for the world to condemn you and for a whole battalion of investigators to pursue you and the booty to the ends of the earth? The sudden shock of realisation blitzkriegs your mind and you fall to the floor and find you have been in a mystic trance, engaged in a bizarre flight of fancy showing the tragedy that await every potential Dr. Faustus.

And thus with relief you return to your pedestrian life leaving the anonymous wretch to bear his billion problems alone; you leave without regret your imagined billion booty to that lost soul traversing incognito in samsara, to whom money which had once seemed his sole genie to wring happiness had suddenly become his Frankenstein monster to wreak horror.

Imagine then the abject plight that has befallen Lanka’s still unacknowledged Richie Rich, Jr. – the poor little rich boy who this Sunday morning finds his Dubai billion dollars but a mirage in the Sahara desert. Rich by a billion dollars. Yet poor for he can’t spend it. As the aged lothario said of his flaccid self, there is nothing’s so pathetic than when desire outruns performance. As Richie Rich would put it, picturing his unusable paper money, nothing’s so pitiful than when toilet paper outsoars vaulted cash. At least toilet tissue can be used.

His only consolation maybe is that, perhaps one day in the future when time has swept the sandy dunes and buried in dust a people’s memory, his children and his grandchildren and their children may be able to richly enjoy the spoils of corruption and live like the ancient Pharaohs of Egypt in a modern setting. Their wealth, rightfully belonging to Lanka, would have kept the wolf of poverty from the nation’s doors and spared her children from malnutrition and sickness today; and lit the flame of her people’s prosperity. But until such fabulous times, far beyond his life span maybe, dawn for his progeny, he will have to suffer the stuff of dramatic irony found in Greek tragedy, life stages once in a while for the edification of the audience.

Alas, such are the twists of fate; the mischief of the gods, the malice that mocks the covetous. Like entering heaven and finding the 13 virgins as promised on earth only to discover that chastity belts shield them all and that the magical key — the open sesame to Ali Baba’s cave –that will unlock each trove is irretrievably lodged in burning hell.