A few weeks after the nation was reeling under the shock of demonetization, like a white flag appearing from a trench, after a pitched battle, the two- thousand- rupee note appeared. It was like a truce declared between digital payment and cash. Truce, because though it was legal tender, still two thousand was too huge an amount to be regularly used.
Another reason was that the rich looked at with suspicion, after all they had been brutally betrayed by it’s fallen sister the thousand rupee note, and all thousanders they had stored carefully and hidden in lockers and stitched into mattresses and secret walls were now useless. They wondered whether this was another decoy to trap their black money again, and were not taken in by it’s innocent baby pink look.
The poor on the other hand did not know what to do with it, because it was absolutely beyond their means. They knew it existed, had seen flashes of it in banks when they had gone to withdraw their life savings and wondered why a note which they could not use, which meant billions of them, had been printed by the government. The government on its part was happy they had fulfilled their obligation of filling the vacuum left by their drastic ban on the old thousand and five hundred they had withdrawn.
Ah well, there was a lot of pride that the note had and yesterday at the bank, as two Two-Thousand-rupee notes stared at me helplessly from the bank’s counter where they had been brought to be exchanged, their eyes bleak and bleary, they screamed “How could this have happened to us? Yesterday we were the most powerful notes in the country, today we are garbage! Kachra! We thought we were the greatest! That there was nothing more desired by anyone than us!”
“Many people think that way!” I said quietly, “not just those who use you but those who created you too, who feel they know everything about how to flush out money, flush in money into your bank accounts, how to govern, how to look down with scorn at those who are not like them, and then one day the very ones they make fun off watch them fall!”
“Who are you speaking off!” cried the two notes. I didn’t say anything as I watched the decimation of a party in Karnataka, and saw a dimpled cheeked boy who was derided by another, called Pappu by his foes, suddenly like the lowly notes of five hundred, hundred and fifty, showing the two thousand he was the one that mattered. All this, while the two notes stared dejectedly at one another from the bank counter. Even the cashier had no time for them..!
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