Ghaṭṭakuṭīprabhāta nyāyaḥ (toll-collector's booth)
One night a traveler was traversing a road on which was a toll point. Because he was niggardly-minded, he wanted to escape the tax payment by making detour. Thus he walked throughout the whole night. At dawn, to his great astonishment, he arrived right before the eyes of toll-collector, and to his won displeasure he had to pay the toll.
This is another appropriate illustrative story of mechanism of karma. A materialistic-minded people are naturally niggardly-minded. How is that? Well, they are misappropriating, piously or impiously, property of Supreme Lord. After all, that is their brand mark of being hostile to God, of which they are so proud. Therefore they consider the law of karma to be some kind of machine-like mechanism, which can be tricked by some evasive action. However, the fact is that the karma-phala, meaning what is due to us, is supervised by council of persons, at whose center sits Kṣīrodakaśāyī Viṣṇu, the paramātmā, all-present, and all-omniscient Lord. This council makes sure that everyone gets what he deserves, according to his actions and desires, even it is quite unpleasant, too often to mention, or plausible, sometime. This is not done because of taking pleasure of passing punishing sentences to rascal living entities, but rather to attract them to the personal understanding of the mechanisms behind the impersonal workings of the material nature. The way of a good son is that he gladly gives a portion of his own wealth to his father in gratitude, because he understands that it is only thanks to his father that he has any at all. So a pious living entities does not see any harm in spending lesser or larger portions of their wealth as toll-sacrifice of gratitude, to be used for the spreading the glory of the Śrī Hari.
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