When somebody in our community here dies, an envelope goes round. It has been going round since before I was born, and the arithmetic is roughly this: every household puts in what it puts in, which is understood without being stated to be a few hundred rupees from most and considerably more from the four or five families who can, and the whole thing goes to the household that has had the death, usually within two days, in cash, with no record kept of who gave what.
There is no fund. There is no account, no committee, no application. There is an aunt of mine who knows whose turn it is to carry the envelope, and there is the fact that everybody has been on the receiving end at some point or expects to be.
I have been asked, twice in the last five years by well-meaning people, why we do not formalise it. Register a society, open an account, set a contribution rate, publish the accounts, apply for matching money from one of the diaspora foundations that exist for exactly this. Each time I have said something vague, and each time I have gone home and thought about why my answer was vague, and I think I now have it.
The envelope works because it is not charity, and everything on that list of improvements would make it charity.
Look at what actually happens when you take it. You are not receiving assistance; you are drawing on an obligation, one you have been paying into for years and will pay into again, and the transaction leaves you with no debt because the debt was already there and has now been discharged in both directions. Nobody thanks anybody very much. That is the point. My uncle, who received it in 2019 and is a proud man who would have refused help, took it without any difficulty at all, because he had carried it himself in 2011.
Now put a form in the middle of it. The moment there is an application, there is an applicant, and an applicant is a person who has been assessed and found deserving. The same money, from the same neighbours, in the same amount, becomes a different object — one that requires you to present your circumstances to a committee of people you will see at Losar. My uncle would not have applied. I am certain of that in a way I am certain of very little.
The objections to leaving it as it is are not hypothetical, and I have watched every one of them happen somewhere, so here they are properly.
An informal fund is opaque. Nobody knows what came in or where it went, and that is a structure that has been abused in other communities and could be abused in ours, and the fact that our aunt is honest is a piece of luck rather than a design. It excludes: a family that arrived four years ago and does not know whose turn it is will not have an envelope come to their door, and I can name one that did not. It has no capacity — it can produce two lakhs in two days and cannot produce anything at all for a chronic situation that needs money every month for three years, and those situations are the ones that actually break families. And it cannot receive institutional money, which is the largest single argument for registering, because a foundation cannot transfer to an aunt.
All true. So what I have landed on is not that formalising is wrong, but that the two things should not be the same thing.
Register something, by all means, for the chronic cases and the institutional money and the situations that need capacity and a paper trail. Give it a committee and publish its accounts and let people apply to it, because for a three-year illness the indignity of an application is worth bearing and there is no informal structure on earth that can carry that load.
And leave the envelope alone. Do not fold it in, do not rationalise it, do not put the death payment through the new organisation on the entirely correct grounds that it would be more transparent. The envelope is doing something the organisation cannot do, which is deliver money in a form that costs the recipient nothing to accept, and that property is destroyed by exactly the improvements that would make it accountable.
I said none of this to the person who asked me last year, who works for a foundation and was being helpful. What I said was that we would think about it, which is what my mother says, and which I had always found evasive until I found myself saying it.
The envelope came to our house in February for a family two streets over. I put in what we put in. I do not know what anyone else did and I have never once wanted to.
