Greed Overcomes All

           As a child I was thrown into religion before I even had the chance to think of act for myself.  In this time I was taught about the different values of life.  How one should always act proper while in a public setting, or about how stealing was wrong and in fact very punishable.  A lot of the time these lessons came from a television show I might have been watching or a story that I was listening to from the priest who was performing a Sunday mass.  These stories all had meaning behind them helping me learn right from wrong without having to learn from experience.

            The short story “The Prophet’s Hair” by Salman Rushdie can also be looked at as a story of meaning with a lesson hidden inside.  The story starts out in the streets of Srinagar where young Atta was looking to hire a thief.  Through carelessness and lack of planning, Atta was attacked and robbed by a couple of thieves and left grasping for life.  After being returned to his house, Atta’s sister Huma set out on the same mission previously failed by her brother (to hire a thief).  With a plan that was more thought out than the previous one, Huma was successful in her attempt to come across a thief willing to take the job while keeping herself safe through clever planning and threats of a letter “Lodged with the Deputy Commissioner of Police, my uncle, to be opened in the event of my not being safe…”  The old thief wanted to know the details of the job and Huma wanted him to hear the whole story before he could decide if he still wanted the job. 

            Huma starts out by telling a story of a very happy and well-off family.  Hashim, her father, was a wealthy moneylender who was “living honorably in the world.”  On his way to work Hashim, about to step onto his own personal shikara, noticed a vial floating in the water.  This vial ended up containing a “famous relic of Prophet Muhammad, that revered hair…”  Although Hashim new that it was wrong to keep such a relic to himself, he was over come with a notion of greed and started convincing himself otherwise.  He reminded himself that the Prophet disapproved of relic worship and that it was not the hair that he was really interested in but rather the silver vial that he desired.  Hashim revealed this secret to his son Atta “who was deeply perturbed” with his fathers actions knowing it was not the right thing to do.  The Prophet’s hair then seemed to take control of Hashim’s actions and feelings of religion.  Hashim proceeded to rid his body of all the lies and unfaithful actions that he had been living with for all these years.  The hair changed his whole outlook on life and started making his family pray five times a day and making them only read passages from the Qur’an on a daily basis.  Hashim went from being a comforting father to an evil dictator who contained no compassion what so ever.  Hashim’s actions convinced his son Atta that something had to be done with the Prophet’s hair.  Atta and his sister decided that the hair must be returned so he proceeded by stealing the hair while his father was out collecting unpaid depts only to have it fall out of his pocket and be found by his father in the same place as before.

            A criminal was going to be the only person that could be successful in getting rid of the now well guarded vial containing the hair.  Huma was able to find a suitable person willing to perform such a job.  During the robbery attempt things ended up going from success to travesty in the matter of seconds.  After being woken up by Atta’s dying words of “thief, thief, thief,” Hashim proceeded by charging out of his room and unknowingly stabbing his daughter Huma and then took his own life due to his feelings of remorse.  His wife went crazy because of the whole affair and was later put in an institute by her brother the Deputy Commissioner of Police.  The Deputy learned of the whole event through the letter left to him by Huma before she went to hire the thief.  He then went down to the streets of Srinagar and killed the thief who was thought to be responsible for all of murders that had occurred.  In the end everyone who came in contact with the vial containing the hair was either dead or ruined.

            The moral of the story is that greed is the rout of all evil.  Hashim displayed greed in keeping the vial for himself.  Something over took the logical part of his brain and it ended up ending the existence of his own family.  Often times in this world people our forced into similar situation that Hashim found himself in.  Whether it’s the foul ball that you push an eighty year old woman out of the way to get at a ball game or that box of cookies you hide in your room so no one can steal them away, greed overcomes us all.  A switch turns in our brains and we don’t even realize what we are doing or even why.  All that we know is that we want it and are willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish our goal.  In a perfect world there would be no such thing as greed but instead the truly successful person tries to minimize it as much as possible in a path to a clear soul.