The ways Mammon manipulates our lives

“If a woman calls a man ‘Honey’, it’s just because of his money.” 

So go the opening strains of an early 1950s song. Those old enough must have been reminded of these lines on seeing the play, ‘Latri Jo Lafro’, put up at the National Academy of Performing Arts at their theatre this past week. 

The play makes it so clear that whatever one may think of life, how philosophic in his approach one may be, it all boils down to money.

Seth Bachu Bhai is a once-upon a-time millionaire who’s been reduced to bankruptcy and has a whole lot of creditors who are after his blood including the butcher and the washerman. 

Bachu Bhai has a young nephew, Zubair, living with him and he also has to be exposed to infamy so often by the creditors. Both nephew and uncle have to contrive ways and means of dodging the creditors every now and then.

Then one day from out of nowhere, arrives a cable from Nigeria to tell Bachu Bhai that he is the lucky winner of an internet lottery and is going to be the owner of $50 million. Both are besides themselves with joy and are deluded into golden dreams of the future and the return of booming prosperity.

The butcher and the washerman, however, are still coming daily and asking for their due in the most threatening of manner. Over time, they are made to believe that they’ll get their money back and all of them rejoice. When this continues indefinitely, the creditors begin to lose their patience. 

At last, one day it turns out that the internet lottery was a fraud. Now both uncle and nephew are in a fix and contrive more ways to keep the creditors at bay.

The play has a doubled-edged theme to convey.  Firstly, it tells us how all our relationships, all our transactions pivot around money. It tells us how money is the chief motivating factor in our lives and our relationships.

As a by-product the play also conveys a very unsavoury reality of modern technology, of the way, information technology, which started out as a boon for modern living, has turned out to be a real bane. It was a profound pointer in that direction.