I thought I understood balance sheets.
I have spent twenty years reading other people's balance sheets. I have read them at dawn in the orange half-light of Mumbai newsrooms when the city was still sleeping. I have read them in taxis crawling down the Western Express Highway, cross-referencing footnotes against memory. I have read them well enough to write a book — The Market Mafia — that tore open the NSE co-location scandal and showed India how its most powerful stock exchange had been quietly looted by men in ties.
Many told me I rattled boardrooms. Some said I made powerful men sweat.
On Monday, May 11, I discovered I was a failure.
— ◆ —
Every balance sheet rests on one immovable principle: assets must equal liabilities plus equity. If they do not tally, the entire structure is wrong.
For twenty years, I believed my personal balance sheet was sound. I had made good investments. I could read complex financials without a chartered accountant or AI. My CA occasionally corrected a misclassified item, but broadly, I thought my numbers were clean.
I was wrong. I had committed the most catastrophic accounting error possible.
I had left the most valuable asset off the asset side entirely.
The Balance Sheet — As It Reads Now
Investments, house, savings: Accounted for
Career — bylines, investigations, a book: Accounted for
Knowledge from twenty years on Dalal Street: Accounted for
Mother — her time, her voice, her sacrifice: [color=hsl(0, 75%, 60%)]Never recorded
Total — balance sheet cannot tally
[color=hsl(0, 75%, 60%)]Permanent deficit
— ◆ —
My mother did not read me fairy tales. She opened the Gujarati newspaper and read me the "Andhari Alam" — the underworld columns. Dawood Ibrahim. Chhota Rajan. How the gangs operated, who gave orders, where the money moved. My father read Gujarati short stories and tales of Bharat Varsh Kings and Shivaji Maharaj’s valour. The day I finished my 11th standard, he sent me straight to veteran crime reporter Pradeep Shinde’s door.
The compass that pointed me toward journalism was set in a small home in Chembur. I just never put that on the balance sheet.
From 7th to 10th standard, I won the elocution competition four years straight. What nobody in the auditorium knew: I memorised those speeches pacing our house for hours. She never asked me to be quiet. She listened while cooking, correcting me from memory when I faltered.
I had a coach. I just never called her that.
I was two years old the night the robbers came. My parents were returning late from a party. As my father fumbled with the keys, quarry workers from vicinity — powerfully built men — trying to break into another house, saw my mother and changed their plan. My father, holding me in his arms, was struck with a rod and fell unconscious. She was dragged down three flights of stairs. As they dragged her, she opened every latch on every door the robbers had closed on the way up. She screamed with purpose, not panic — loud enough to wake four buildings. They fled. When it was over, she went back into the dark stairwell and found her pendant. Then came upstairs.
I wrote about courage for twenty years. I was living inside it.
She was the one who fought for my admission into the top school in Chembur. When my father refused and the local corporator demanded a bribe, she gathered a small group of women and marched to his office in late 1980s Bombay. A woman staring down a powerful man. She won. She always won quietly.
Even after I became a journalist, my mother had sharp opinions. This woman who had studied only till the 10th standard analysed events with devastating accuracy.
I kept the investigations. I should have kept more of the afternoons.
In accounting terms: she was not merely an asset. She was the equity. The foundational capital on which everything else was built. Without equity, there is no balance sheet. There is only debt.
— ◆ —
The investigative reporter’s cardinal sin is to miss what is hiding in plain sight. I have written about regulators who could not see scams in their own corridors. I have been unsparing with auditors who signed off on fraudulent accounts. I asked in print: how did they not see it?
But I did not see it.
I was scanning the financial jungle for the next big opportunity while the most valuable asset sat right there — asking only for my time.
She is gone now. And I, who made a career of finding what others hide, cannot make my own numbers tally anymore.
— ◆ —
There is a concept in accounting called impairment — when an asset’s carrying value exceeds its recoverable amount. The loss must be recognised immediately. It cannot be deferred.
I am recognising my impairment now.
No amount of wealth, no portfolio, no palace can fill this hole. Her sweetness. Her voice. Her silent sacrifices. Her love demanded nothing in return. These were the priciest assets. And they were never in my books.
I wrote The Market Mafia to expose those who got away scot-free. Today, in the silence that follows a mother’s death, I realise I am the one who got away scot-free — and should not have. I was too busy holding the powerful accountable to account for myself. Too busy watching the market to watch what mattered. Too fluent in the language of assets and liabilities to recognise the one asset that required no language at all — only presence.
Careers are not balance sheets. And balance sheets are not lives.
A life’s balance sheet has only one equity line that matters. Mine is gone. And no future asset will ever restore it to balance.
I am a failed financial journalist.
Not because I could not read a balance sheet... But because I could not read the one that was always right in front of me.
When my book was published, she wrote me a poem. She said I should shine like the sun. I wish I had told her she was the light. |
