ProblemUdhaar
When a customer passes away and the udhaar is open
A customer has died and his udhaar is still open. What the first weeks must be, who you speak to and how, and when to accept the money is gone.
After a death: what the next three months look like
- 1The first weeksYou go, you sit, you drink the tea, and you say nothing about a balance.
- 2Around one monthThe street shows you whether his work continues and who has stepped into his place.
- 3One quiet conversationWith that one person, alone, with the page in front of you, and a question rather than a demand.
- 4Whatever is left after thatYou say the number out loud, close it in your record, and keep the page instead of erasing it.
A man who owed you money has died. For the first weeks you do nothing about the balance: you go, you sit, you say nothing about money. Later, one quiet conversation with the person now running his household or his work. Some of it comes back over months. Some of it will not, and you close that honestly.
The first weeks are not about the money
You hear it early. Ibrahim, who brings the milk, tells you at seven in the morning that Karamat is gone. Karamat bought from your counter for eleven years, and his khata is open at Rs 46,000.
What you do that week has nothing to do with Rs 46,000. You pull the shutter down for an hour, you go, you sit in the lane on a plastic chair with the other men, you drink the tea somebody puts in your hand, and you come back. You do not mention a balance. Not in the second week either, and not in the third.
This is not softness, and it is not you being generous with your own money. It is the one thing that keeps you a person that family can face later. A shopkeeper who arrives with a number in the first week becomes, in that street, the man who came about money. Nobody in that house talks to him properly again, and your balance is the first thing they refuse.
Why the balance neither vanishes nor simply moves
Two wrong ideas go around a street after a death, and both of them cost the shopkeeper.
The first is that the money died with him. It did not. Goods left your shelves and were used by a household still living in that house and still eating. Nobody there believes it vanished either, whatever is said in the first month.
The second is that the balance now belongs to his son, or his brother, or whoever opens the door. It does not work that way in practice, and treating a young son as your new debtor on day one turns a recoverable balance into an argument that lasts years.
What actually changed is the question. It used to be about a man: will Karamat pay. It is now about a household: how much can this house carry, and who there can talk about it at all. That sits close to the one-khata-per-house question every shop meets when four people buy on one name.
Read the household before you say anything
What one month shows you without asking anybody
You do not have to ask anybody. Within about a month, the street shows you.
Look at his work first. If he had a shop, a stall, a delivery round, does it open again? Very often somebody takes it on inside six weeks, and that person is the answer to everything that follows. If the work stopped on the day he did, this is a different house.
Look at the earning. Was he the only one, or is there a son already working, a daughter teaching, a brother in the same trade?
Then look at where they are. A family still in the same house on the same street settles what it can, because it has to live in front of you. A family that has moved to relatives in another town has made a decision about its whole life, and your balance is near the bottom of a very long list.
None of this is you judging a family. It is you seeing what is actually there, so that what you eventually say fits it.
Who you go to, and what you actually say
There is usually one person now holding the household or the work. Go to that person and nobody else.
Never a group. Never at the house while it is full of visitors. Never through a cousin who will carry your words down the street with two sentences of his own added on. And never a message to four relatives at once.
Six weeks on, Karamat's older son Waseem opens his father's cycle shop again. You go on a Tuesday at eleven, when the lane is empty. You take the printed page with you and you set it on the bench facing him, not in his hand.
Then you say the whole thing in three sentences, and the third one is a question.
"Waseem, your father's page with me stands at Rs 46,000. I am not asking for it today, and not all of it. Tell me what is possible for the house, and we will do it that way."
The one conversation, word for word
Say this
- Your father's page with me stands at Rs 46,000.
- I am not asking for it today, and not all of it.
- Tell me what is possible for the house, and we will do it that way.
- If nothing is possible for now, the page simply stays open.
Never this
- Your father owed me. It is on you now.
- Everybody is saying money came into the house.
- I have carried this long enough.
- Ask your uncle, he knows the amount.
What that sentence does is leave him room to answer. He can say Rs 3,000 a month. He can say give me three months first. He can say he did not know, show me the page. All are working answers, and a man told to pay Rs 46,000 has none of them.
The guarantor, if there was one
If somebody stood for this balance, be honest with yourself about what that means here.
A guarantee is a promise made about a living man who was expected to pay. Most guarantors never pictured this. Some pay the whole amount without being asked, because their word matters to them more than the money does. Others feel they guaranteed a delay, not a death. How you speak decides a great deal of which one you get.
Go to the family first anyway. If the street hears you went around the house, the house closes.
Then tell the guarantor early. Not to demand, to inform. "Anwar, you stood for Karamat's Rs 46,000, and I want you to hear this from me before you hear it from somebody else. I have spoken to Waseem. He is going to try Rs 3,000 a month, and I will keep you posted." A guarantor told early stays in it, and often quietly helps the family pay. One surprised at the end feels trapped, and a trapped man stops answering. If you never worked out when to take a guarantor at all, this is the day that question earns its keep.
When the honest answer is that this money is gone
Some of it will not come back. Deciding that number honestly is a job of its own, and doing it late is expensive.
Say Karamat's page stood at Rs 46,000. Over six months Waseem pays Rs 3,000 a month, which is Rs 18,000. Two unopened sacks come back to your shelf, worth Rs 4,000. That leaves Rs 24,000 with nowhere to go.
Say the open page stood at Rs 46,000
Now say it out loud to Waseem, once. "The rest of it I am closing. It is finished, it is not sitting over you, and you are welcome at my counter." That sentence costs you nothing you still had, and it buys back a family that can walk past your shop with its head up. In a street where everybody knows everybody, that is worth more than Rs 24,000.
Do not tear the page out. A balance you erase is a name you will serve warmly in three years with no memory of why. Close it in the record and leave the dates where they are, the same discipline any balance sitting for a year needs. Wasoolo keeps a khata and every entry on it after you close it, marked closed rather than deleted, so the page is there on the day you need it.
The ceiling that was set long before any of this
Whether a death like this hurts your shop or breaks it was decided months earlier, on an ordinary evening, when you let one name climb.
Rs 24,000 is real money. Say your shop clears about Rs 60,000 of profit in a month; that loss is twelve days of profit. Heavy, and survivable. Had Karamat's page been allowed to reach Rs 180,000, the same event closes shops.
So take one rule out of it, not five. The useful one is almost always the ceiling: the highest number any single name may reach, fixed in advance, on a calm morning, and applied hardest to the customer you like most. That is the whole of how much udhaar to give, and it is the only part of any of this that is in your hands.
The other half is that you knew the balance to the rupee on the day it mattered. Sitting in front of a grieving son, the gap between "about forty thousand something" and a dated page showing what was taken and when is the gap between a conversation and a fight. Wasoolo holds that record with dates and amounts, backed up rather than sitting only in a notebook behind your counter.
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Common questions
How long should I wait before saying anything about the balance?
At least a month, and usually longer than feels comfortable. The mourning weeks belong to the family, and a shopkeeper who turns up with a number inside them is remembered for it for years. Wait until somebody has visibly stepped into his place, then speak to that person alone.
The son says he is not responsible for his father's udhaar. What now?
Do not argue it, because you will lose the money and the family both. Say calmly that the page stays open with no pressure on him, and leave. Plenty of households that refuse in the first weeks pay something six months later, once the shock has passed.
Should I go to the guarantor if the family pays nothing?
Go, but keep it a conversation rather than a demand. Tell him what you tried with the family and ask what he thinks is possible. A guarantor who feels respected often pays part of it or gets the family to. One pushed hard in front of others simply disappears.
Can I add anything on top for the months the balance sat there?
No. Never charge for waiting, not here and not anywhere else. There is no late fee in a khata and no penalty for delay, because the moment money grows on its own the family stops seeing a debt and starts seeing a wrong. What he took is what he owes.
The family offers goods back instead of money. Should I take them?
Take anything unopened and still saleable, value it at what you would sell it for, and write it on the page the same day. Do not take opened stock, worn items or anything you would struggle to move. Dead stock is a second loss on top of the first.
How do I stop one death taking such a bite out of my shop again?
Fix a ceiling per name in advance and hold it, hardest of all for the customers you trust most, because those are the balances that quietly grow. A house that owes Rs 20,000 is a sad month. A house that owes Rs 200,000 is your shop's whole life sitting inside somebody else's.