My driver asks me whether I’m here for ‘five-six’, a natural question, because so many "Bumbais" are. Bumbai is the word for Indians (the early arrivals came from Bombay) and ‘five-six’ is the traditional system of itinerant moneylending, in which six pesos is repayable on a loan of five. Sounds like an astronomical rate of interest, especially if the loan is just for a day, but ‘five-six’ is incredibly hard and risky work for the lender. I went around once with Jaswinder Singh (the profession is now the monopoly of the Sikhs), who was just Josip to his clients, most of them market vendors. He had to stop by at dozens of stalls to collect the small sums owed in daily repayments on 100-day loans. The women all wanted to chat and joke with him ("Hey Josip, who is your friend, is he married?"), but Josip was in a hurry, he had other markets to visit.
Advertisement
It was a common sight not so many years ago to see Sikh moneylenders doing their rounds on motorcycles with bags of cash to distribute or collect. Recent arrivals, yet to master Tagalog, they still managed to collect and disburse unsecured loans with absolutely no recourse if someone refused to pay. Clearly, they were perceived to be providing a valuable service. The next generation moved on to bigger and better things, like Ramon Bagatsing, the mayor of Manila when Marcos was president. Josip’s son was doing an MBA in Australia and his daughter was in a finishing school in Switzerland.
