The First Salary

Aditya's first salary hit his account on a Friday, and by Saturday morning he had already, in his head, spent it three times over. His aunt, a retired banker, offered instead to spend an hour teaching him what to do with it.

She began with a word he'd only half understood: compound. Money left to grow, she explained, earns returns on its returns; start at twenty-three instead of thirty-three, and the same rupee does astonishing, quiet work over decades.

Her second lesson was about capital — treating a portion of every salary not as spending money but as seed, wealth set aside specifically to make more wealth rather than to be enjoyed and gone.

She warned him, too, about the thief nobody sees. Each year, prices inflate, and cash under a mattress quietly loses value while doing nothing; standing still, financially, is really walking backward.

Then came the boring, essential things. A health-insurance premium, she insisted, was not wasted money but a small regular payment standing between him and a ruinous hospital bill.

And she taught him to keep every work receipt, because a decent employer would reimburse genuine expenses — money he'd otherwise simply eat out of ignorance.

He listened, mostly. He still blew a chunk of that first salary on headphones and a good dinner, as he probably should have. But something had lodged. The next month, before he could spend it, he moved a slice of his pay somewhere he couldn't easily reach — and felt, for the first time, faintly adult.