A Million Ringgit

What would you do if you found a million ringgit? I think I’d keep it.

I found a one-ringgit note in the corridor today. All right, one ringgit is only one millionth of a million ringgit , but it has been a while since I last found cash in a public place.

When I was little, I found a small bundle of cash in the front yard that belonged to an elderly neighbor. Not too long after, I found another bundle of cash stashed behind a kitchen cupboard. It was my grandmother’s grocery money. The theory then was that the money, stuffed in a small plastic bag along with her stash of sweets, was stolen by rats. My grandmother liked to eat sweets. She used to tell us that the sweets were actually medicine and that they were charmed (berjampi). In both occasions I showed the money to my parents, who figured out the owners and returned the money. In school, I found three hundred ringgit on the hostel staircase. It was the first day of a new school term, so it was somebody’s one or two months’ worth of allowance. I let the word out, and that somebody turned out to be a fellow classmate. He never thanked me. A five-ringgit note I found in the corridor paid for lunch for me a few friends.

The general rule is that you return things that don’t belong to you to their proper owners or surrender them to the authorities. An ustaz once suggested that we make an announcement during Friday congregation for four consecutive weeks (!) before declaring an item unclaimed, but I’ve never seen that happens. When it comes to small amounts of cash like five ringgit, however, it will only annoy the already overworked police officers if you bring it the police station. So for practical reasons nobody feels bad about pocketing a small amount of money they found on the street, though the more moral amongst us would give it away as charity instead. My question is: what is the upper limit to pocket the money you found – ten ringgit, fifty, ninety-nine ringgit and ninety-five sen? While you dwell on that very important, life-defining question, let me get back to my first question.

What would you do if you found a million ringgit? Ordinary people do not go around carrying a bag with one million ringgit to lose it. So I’d keep the money, and be very careful about how I’d spend it.