"My Swiss Bank Account!"

Gentlemen! In full possession of all my faculties, and under no pressure or compulsion, I wish to make an announcement that I do have an account in a Swiss Bank! Don’t believe me, if you do not wish to! Even my wife did not believe me initially. Not only has she started believing it now, she has started trusting me too! You all should certainly be wondering when everyone else struggles so hard to keep such accounts a secret, why at all do I need to disclose it myself!

That day when I returned from office, my wife said, “the way you look exhausted when you return home, I think you actually work in your office.”

I said, “yes, what is so unusual about that? After all, a man is bound to get tired after all that work. That is the reason you shall never find a politico or a cleric physically tired!”

My wife said, “but if someone slogs, he gets proportional remuneration too… What results do you get out of such hard work?”

I obviously had no answer to satisfy her. So, I chose to remain silent on this. Then I realized that during my association with her over the past thirty years, all that I have ever done is give her only a daily dose of happiness. In her possession now, she does have a past resulting from the mere addition of every moment, and each day, from this period of thirty long years. What she does not have is even a single moment for the time to come that can be termed as a bright future. Consequently, that very day I decided to give her some future as well!

I said, “don’t get upset over the outcome of all my hard work. I have some good news to share with you today. I do have a Swiss Bank account!”

With an awestruck expression on her face she suddenly started shutting all doors and the windows.

“What's all this?” I said.

“Who'd talk so openly of something like a Swiss Bank account?!” she said. “By the grace of God, if you have such an account for our difficult times, you don’t have to declare it like this! If I really need to find this out, I can always hire the services of some detective agency. But tell me honestly, do you actually have such an account?”

“Have I ever lied to you?” I said.

“That’s true!” my wife said happily. “By the way, when did you open this account?”

“Four years back, when I'd travelled to Europe.”

She was even more surprised at this. She knew it well that when I had left for Europe, all that I had in my pockets was twenty dollars. Though I had the permission to take a Forex of up to 500 dollars, but for doing so, I first needed to have the equivalent money in the Indian currency! And as you know, it is not easy to earn money in India.

By then my wife had arranged a world map, “just show me where this Switzerland is…and where exactly in Switzerland our bank account is…”

I tried pointing out Switzerland on that world map, but it turned out to be so small that every time I kept my finger on it, the whole of Switzerland would disappear somewhere below it! I was finally able to show it to her with the tip of my pen.

“This is such a small place. I doubt if it can accommodate a building of some bank, let alone our account!”

“You are right,” I said. “I remember that my friend and I had entered Switzerland in a car through Southern France. We had heard so highly of this country that we'd finally decided to visit the place. My friend drives real fast.”

‘Where to?’ soon we were stopped by the police.

‘We are heading towards Switzerland.’

‘Gentlemen! You've left it behind,' we were informed.

Taking a U-turn, we had to return. This time round we were slow lest we drive into some other country.

“You'd gone there for tourism, to enjoy the landscapes; how did opening an account occur to you?”

“Listen to me, my dear wife!” I said. “Hilly and natural beauty is all an excuse. No one goes to Switzerland for that. That's just a pretext for people to visit the country. The hilltops there have been an attraction only due to the presence of Swiss banks. These renowned banks maintain such top secrecy that even a wife cannot figure out if her husband has an account there. Sometimes even the staff is totally ignorant about who has what kind of money in their banks. Remove these banks and Switzerland will lose all its charm. As a matter of fact, someone who has seen the hilly beauty of Pahalgam, Gulmarg and Panjaal, will hardly like the Swiss hills. As for the snow and ice, we see a lot of it in our refrigerator every day! So, tell me, what’s there in Switzerland then? There was, of course, a time when Swiss watches were famous. Japan has now beaten those too. As someone has rightly said, in terms of watches and watchmaking, every nation has its own time! Having lost that, it is only the time of Swiss banking. Anyone visiting there does certainly deposit some of his money there.”

“Do you mean to say, you'd visited Switzerland for opening an account?” my wife said surprisingly.

“Of course, yes! What else then? Hills?”

“But then you could have done it here, in any Indian bank!”

“Aren't you aware of the sorry plight of our Indian banks? Every other day, there is a bank robbery. The robbers keep waiting for the banks to close for business, even more than the clients wait for them to be opened. And then there is no match for a Swiss bank account. It has its own status.”

And that is how I was finally able to deliver some happy moments of a bright future to my wife. Three months have elapsed, but she has never bothered to ask me the account number, secret name of the account, or the amount I have in that account. She has certainly been very happy though, and has developed a self-confidence that I could not see in thirty long years. This, however, is a different matter altogether that my own self-confidence has gone down since that confession.

Friends! You must have understood by now what kind of relations can I afford to have with banks. At a party, a reputed banker was introduced to a renowned writer. After exchanging pleasantries, the banker said to the writer, ‘It’s my privilege to have met you, but it is my bad luck that I have never read any of your books till date.’

The writer replied, ‘even I'm pleased to meet you, but unfortunately, I have never even entered any bank till date.’

I am not such great a writer however, that I cannot even enter a bank. I do go to a bank, and I even hold an account there. Since my salary is paid through cheques, I was actually required to open a bank account. This being a joint account with my better half is a different matter. A peculiarity that this joint account has is that while all deposits are made by me, withdrawals are only my wife’s prerogative. Otherwise my personal financial status remains such that I thank anyone who happens to ask me for a loan of even twenty or twenty-five rupees. It is not that I lend them the money, but I feel elated that I am at least considered worth asking for a loan!

In spite of all this, I do have an account in a Swiss bank. And the reason for sharing it with you all is that for the last three months, I have been going through a strangely pleasant phase of my life. As you know, I’d informed my wife about this in full confidence, expecting her to maintain the secrecy (!). And I had actually believed that she would keep it to herself. But over a period of time, I’d realized that the news had been gradually spreading around. Last month I had gone to buy a pair of new socks from a local vendor. I liked the pair, but the price the shopkeeper quoted was out of the bounds of my bank balance.

Having understood my dilemma, the shopkeeper winked at me and said, “Sir, you take this pair…don’t worry about the price. You can pay the balance amount later, when you get your money back from the Swiss Bank.”

I was really surprised, but then thinking that such accounts are very much in news these days, I took it in a lighter vein. And then I gradually realized that in my locality, more and more residents had started wishing and greeting me. This included the ones who used to shy away or avoid me! Neighbors always tend to be a part of celebrations in your happy times. And if you do not have any hardships in your life, the same lot would help and ensure that you have some! Anyway, there was a sudden change in the way all such neighbors looked at me now.

One of our neighbors is a cloth merchant, but he seems to be doing his business as if he was adamant to rather bare the whole nation. He is stinking rich and I wonder where at all he keeps that kind of money. We have been living next to each other for the last twenty years, but our camaraderie is only two months old. His wife is my wife’s best and the dearest friend these days. They have invited even me to their house a couple of times, of late. And every time, they treat me like they are entertaining some corrupt minister to maintain the required business rapport. Last week my wife informed me that her best friend wants to know how to open a Swiss bank account!

“But how do they know that I already have one?” I said.

“What rubbish!” my wife clarified, “how would they ever know that you have one? Since you are a wise-learned man, they must have thought of asking you…we are neighbors, after all!”

“Neighbors we have been for the last twenty years,” I raised my doubt, “but they have started behaving like ones only two months back!” Nevertheless, I explained the entire procedure to them, as requested.

As if this was not enough, something weird happened the day before yesterday. I was shaving my beard sitting in the drawing-room of our house when a beggar appeared at our doorstep and called out for some handout. Another beggar standing at our neighbors' door told him, ‘don’t waste your time here. All their money is in Swiss Banks. There's no use troubling them.’

Having had the last straw, I immediately called my wife for an explanation, “if you remember, I had disclosed my Swiss bank account to you about three months ago.”

“What do you mean, remember?” she said, “I've never forgotten it in the first place. I remember it twenty-four by seven! But why do you ask about it now? Was it a lie?”

“No! It was true!” I said. “But I had parted with only half the information. I’d never told you about the details like account number, secret name, or the deposit amount.”

“What a big deal!” my wife said. “I know it all…The number of your account is ‘four two zero (420)’. Secret name is ‘Gobhi ka Phool (cauliflower)’ and there are only ten Swiss Francs in your account.”

“What?” I was shocked. “How do you know all this?”

“I used the services of ‘Fear-Sex’, a detective agency,” she smiled.

“What happened was,” I tried to explain, “that having found nothing worth watching or spending money on, I still had these ten francs left in my pocket while returning from Switzerland. And then it just struck me to deposit that money in some bank. In India we have this freedom that when we visit a monument, we engrave our name there as a testimonial. I did not even have that freedom in Switzerland. So, as a memorial to my visit, I opened a bank account. Don’t take it seriously. I'm planning to close it now.”

“I dare you!” she exclaimed. “Don’t ever think of closing it. And consider this too as a joint account with immediate effect. These days, people hold in high esteem only those who have a Swiss Bank Account. Four years ago, when you'd gone to Switzerland, it was not much in vogue. You had opened this account rather unintentionally, without much thought. I never knew that this act of yours could benefit us like this. Trust me, those 10 Francs are no less than 10 Crores of Indian Rupees. Can’t you realize how everyone has started respecting you suddenly! You've already enjoyed countless treats. Shopkeepers have started offering credit to you. People, who used to treat us at par, have started bowing before us. Above all, I am going to contest for the position of chairperson in the ladies’ club of our locality.”

After a pause, she added, “the elite have now started opening Swiss bank accounts, and here you are - thinking of closing one! Just thank God that without any extra efforts, you are being counted among them. You would have otherwise kept wandering as a non-existential entity your whole life. And finally, it is not a request, but my order, that you shall not close this account!”

With this concluding diktat my wife left for participating in the selection-process of the chairperson in the ladies’ club, and I started looking again for Switzerland on the world map!

“Suiz bank mein khaata hamaara” is a light-hearted, literary work by Sh Mujtaba Hussain, an Indian satirist and writer of Urdu literature. Recipient of the prestigious Padma Shri, he has several books to his credit, including many volumes of humour-journalism. While many of his books have already been translated into many languages, this is a humble attempt at translating one of his great pieces…