The allegory of the evil father
The father-in-law is an arbiter of death in the novel, since he works as a funeral director and cremator. He owns taxis, so when Ganesh needs to get about, he can extort Ganesh by arbitrarily raising the taxi fair. When Ganesh defeats him, it is because he became more financially powerful than the tyrant, but the question is whether it was worth it in the end, given that it cost him his integrity. In both ways, he met evil with more evil and won, but at what cost?
The moody wife
Nothing causes more frustration than a difficult spouse. If the reader wants to know how dismal the affair seemed to Ganesh, he literally makes the father pay him extra to take her off his hands. This symbolically represents the universe's distaste for Ganesh's behavior. One must imagine Leela is something of a fair judge of character, and she seems to think he's a fraud. She likes when he earns money though.
The allegory of the dirty politician
By the time Ganesh realized that he had personally exploited the poorest and neediest of his own people, he has literally become a politician. This beautiful, seemingly accidental story of the birth of a crooked politician is tied together with religious authority, because that culture's opinions of church and state are blended, making the public especially vulnerable.
The books as symbols
Ganesh publishes two books in the novel: "`101 Questions and Answers on the Hindu Religion," and "The Years of Guilt." Those two books go hand in hand as symbols, because the first book is a demonstration of Ganesh's laughable relationship to religious enlightenment. A true religious mystic isn't writing pulp religious texts for the masses. And that leads Ganesh through years of guilt, appropriately, because he's guilty of extorting his people, just because he can.
The massage miracle as a symbol
The actual religious miracles are dubious at best. Even the narrator starts the book with a joke about how, no, actually the mystic didn't heal his ankle at all. He just tricked the boy's mother into believing that he deserved credit when the ankle healed on its own. That's a symbol for why religious hypocrisy works, because people are gullible and religious men are willing to exploit that.
