The only wealth you accumulate in this lifetime is karma.

My grandfather died with almost nothing in the bank. He had been a schoolteacher for forty years in a small town in the hills of Kerala, and the family joke was that he taught for love because there was no other plausible reason given the pay. His funeral was held in the little concrete church he'd attended his whole life. I expected maybe forty people.

Two hundred came. Halfway through the service a stranger in his seventies walked to the front, his hands shaking. He introduced himself as Thomas. He said that in 1974, when his own father had refused to co-sign a loan for him to open a small printing shop, my grandfather — who barely knew him — had walked to the bank with him the next morning and signed.

He had never once, in the fifty years since, mentioned the loan or asked to be repaid beyond the bank's terms. That shop had put his three children through college. One was now a doctor. Thomas had driven eleven hours through the night when he heard the news, just to stand in that church. After he sat down I looked around at the crowded pews and realized what I was actually looking at. My grandfather's bank account had been almost empty. His ledger, the real one, was completely full.