The Mammaries of the Welfare State Read online

  ‘Payṇcho! Free shoe polish! Payṇcho rush for a Payṇcho patent!’

  The above conversation takes place in Punjabi-Hindustani, in the dark, in the corridors of frequent powerlessness of Aflatoon Bhavan. The venue is typical, Punjabi Hindustani being the unofficial official language of the Welfare State. Available statistics indicate that seventy-eight per cent of the officers and staff of the national government speak it or have officially stated either Punjabi or Hindi to be his or her mother tongue. Further, ninety-six per cent prefer to curse and exclaim in it. Therefore, since the servants of the Welfare State generally are literate, middlish-class and respectable, Payṇcho becomes the most-often heard exclamation in Aflatoon Bhavan, a proposition easily proved by a stroll down its corridors, by candle-light, amongst the monkeys, inhaling the aromas of urine and tea. Balwant’s half-sister’s rechristening of his sculpture was thus, in more than one sense, inspired.

  Pashupati Aflatoon did put up a black marble plaque beside Payṇchom. Engraved on it were a Deputy Secretary’s version of the sculptor’s explanation of the significance of his creation given to the Minister on the occasion of its unveiling. On the understandable artistic grounds that his work needed no written exegesis, Balwant Chhabra refused to have anything more to do with the plaque, the Complex or the Ministry. Hence, at the Deputy Secretary’s suggestion that it would reinforce his cultural credentials, Pashupati Aflatoon agreed to have his own name engraved under the interpretation.

  On the afternoon of the last day of the Getting-to-Know-the- Cutting-Edge-of-Administration conference, the father of all fires broke out in—and engulfed almost half of—TFIN Complex. Though the Enquiry Commission that was subsequently set up could not tell, after six months, precisely how and when the fire started, it was universally felt that the stars had been propitious in that it—the fire—had, as it were, warmed up, and got cracking, only well after office hours; thus, no lives had been lost, just some property worth a handful of crores. The engineers of the Public Works Department, in anticipation of the repair work to be distributed, were wined and dined for weeks on end by the contractors on the Approved Emergency Shortlist. Some of the engineers were even congratulated on their good fortune, as at the birth of a son.

  A short-circuit in the wiring, guessed an onlooker. An electric heater left carelessly on long after the chapatis for lunch’d been warmed up, opined another. Sabotage, there are wheels within wheels, asserted a third, sagely. ‘My God, can we do nothing right?’ fumed Prime Minister Bhuvan Aflatoon, shocked, angry and depressed, ‘has some ass thought of a second venue for tomorrow or do I have to think of everything?’

  The happening slated for the following day was particularly dear to the PM because it was entirely his baby, conceived exclusively by him, without any inspiration or input from any member of the Coterie. ‘Look, the New Industries Policy and peaceful nuclear bombs in mid-ocean and Revised Strategies for Increased Milk Production are all right—but what about the People? That’s whom I want to meet. They’ve voted for me and they wave and smile and look so warm and welcoming despite the awful lives they lead. About five hundred million of them are illiterate, isn’t that right? Well—how many of them have never seen a colour TV or a washing machine? Have never used a telephone? Leave alone understood the concept of a laptop? Do we have the figures? . . . I want to be in touch with them all the time, not once in five years, just to seduce them with my smile for their vote, from some open-air jeep, surrounded by AK-47s. I want them to see TFIN Complex—for which we’ll have to think up a new name, at once, something Sanskritic and full of cultural resonance—you know, the latest in science merely carries on our rich, continuous cultural traditions, that science is in our rivers, our blood and our festivals—that kind of jazz. TFIN is a totally unacceptable acronym. It conjures up a tower of dented aluminium boxes—dal at the bottom, topped by, in order, greasy bhindi, raw onions, green chillies and cold, fat, spongelike parathas squeezed like the godforsaken into a train compartment en route to Auschwitz . . .’ He waited, pleased, for the New Men—all his old school chums who had sucked up to him even then—to stop chuckling. ‘ . . . Could we get some modern Sanskrit whizkid cracking on the new name? . . . But the People. I want to set up an exchange programme for them. They should all be brought here in trucks or something. They should see, understand, feel the new world in their own backyard—TFIN Complex, the National Information Coordination Plan, the Age of Science Pavilion, the Central Computer Institute, the Space Research Organization—I want those five hundred million illiterates to experience the wonders of technology and all that in their own country, behind which stand their own countrymen . . . and then, and then—we’ll reverse the movement. All these Steel Frame fellows, for example, who focus all their energies on wangling for themselves junkets in the fleshpots of the world—let them all instead go and spend a week in one of our typical villages. Let them crap in the fields with stray dogs sniffing at their bums—and bathe at the well with some buffalo, dream of electricity and a radio, irrigation for their dining-table plots of land and cows as dowry for their sons. Let them get their heads blown off in some ancient, unending, mystifying, caste war—off-the-record, of course . . . What do you fellows think of the idea?’

  The Old Chums had been enthusiastic. They loved spending the money of the Welfare State, issuing instructions, supervising the scurrying around of a city of officials, and holding leisurely brainstorming sessions to which they wore hand-woven, off-white kurtas and batik saris and at which they, to soothe their sensitive throats, sipped tepid boiled water in which floated a piece or two of lemon. After a couple of these sessions, a week later, Rajani Suroor returned to Bhuvan Aflatoon with the details of the OYE-OYE Happening.

  Each of the five hundred-plus districts of the country would identify four sane, adult citizens—at least two of whom had to be women—who had never visited the capital city, had never ridden in a car and—mindful of the Prime Minister’s befuddled outpouring—had never used a telephone or seen or touched a washing machine. The regional governments would ferry all the citizens selected to the capital where, for four days, they—the chosen—would experience some of the wonders of the modern world. The New Men adored this, this senseless mobilization of an enormous number of humans and a vast amount of resources and energy simply to satisfy the whim of the powerful. It was like being in the court of an emperor in the golden age. On all the evenings, Vyatha, Rajani Suroor’s theatre group, would interface with the chosen to explore, through the medium of popular street entertaimnent—enacted by the communal fireside, as it were, with the more extrovert amongst the visitors in the key roles—their world, minds, their reactions to the whole trip, ideas on caste, gender equality, modernization, politics, the country. At the end of their sojourn, the chosen, as a climax, would meet, dine—and freely exchange views and ideas—with the Prime Minister. The entire programme could be officially called—if the PM permitted, of course—The Open Your Eyes, Open Your Eyes Happening. To which select representatives of the Steel Frame would certainly be invited.

  The PM was ecstatic. He too like his coterie loved the ease with which the seed of an idea blossomed into a flower that could be touched and seen. When it grew unexpectedly into a monstrous weed, one needed solid chaps around one who’d continue to convincingly describe it, for example, as a stunningly beautiful, a perfect, orchid. One needed that sort of encouragement all the time, to get on with Progress, the happenings. He remembered perfectly that when his grand- uncle Trimurti Aflatoon had been Prime Minister and they had fought their fourth border war with their dear neighbours, they had celebrated their victory in a befitting manner, with holidays, awards, promotions, triumphal processions, glorious war memorials and an attitude of warm munificence towards the fresh demands of the armed forces, ignoring—naturally—at the same time, all the reports that described with some fervour how the unmentionables across the border too were celebrating their victory in similar style. This was the Information Age, d
ammit; one would drown if one didn’t select what one wanted to hear—and one had to arrange for the right voices—it wasn’t as straightforward as having a quick shower, you know—to pick and choose amongst those media barons and lords of industry with their salivating slippery tongues and tails that wagged like a battery-operated toy’s.

  ‘Rajani,’ Bhuvan Aflatoon purred with affection, ‘you might well be a visionary but for me, you also need to be a micro-level planner. Open your eyes yourself! Those wretched regional governments where we aren’t in power would never pay for this show. Hunt around for some funds without dragging me into it. And where will those two thousand countrymen of ours stay? A camp somewhere, sanitation, transport, food and all that—alongside your campfires, of course. See if you can link it up with the Centenary.’

  Off-White Paper

  Dr Srinivas Chakki didn’t in the least like the ward of the Madna Civil hospital in a bed of which he lay. Mouldy walls, cobwebs, window panes opaque, with grime, a dirt-encrusted floor, bedpans strewn all anyhow like a child’s playthings, the electricity supply as wayward as a politician’s ethics. His bed had no linen. Its mattress was stained and stank; its cotton had been dementedly gouged out in parts. His side-table was rusted and somehow furry with some kind of fungus.

  The bed on his left was occupied by a young woman with tears in her eyes and dressing and plaster all over the right side of her face. She was a new neighbour in that he couldn’t recall seeing her when he’d last been awake, though he couldn’t remember either how long ago that had been. He was mentally awake enough to wonder why a victim of accidental or intentional violence had been dumped beside him.

  ‘Aren’t we in the Infectious Diseases Ward of this hospital?’ demanded he of the hall. No one responded, perhaps because no one heard him save the woman in the next bed and she could make nothing out of his slurred mumble. Hazily, he puzzled over where Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha could be. Perhaps the awesomely humid heat of the ward bad metamorphosed them into a couple of the pigeons roosting on the dingy ventilators high up near the ceiling.

  The forceful stink of the room—disinfectant, medicines, urine, rotting matter—reminded him that he wanted to piss but he didn’t have the guts to confront the visualized filth of the toilet. Its yellow door, four beds down and opposite Dr Chakki, lay permanently ajar, perhaps because nobody wished to touch it. With reason, since in the few minutes that he spent gazing at it, three pissers shuffled up to—and not daring to cross its threshold, relieved themselves against—it.

  The nurse on duty, whose duty it was to stride manfully through the ward and out the door that led to the canteen, doughtily ignoring the groans, whines and other types of summons from different beds, appeared at that point in his field of vision. She moved like a willowy dragon.

  ‘Bedsheets, Sister Joseph!’ bayed Dr Chakki valiantly, ‘and a bedpan!’ he added to her back. His vexation at her disregarding him suddenly spurred him into sitting up in bed. She had stopped to note something down on the chart at the foot of the second last bed from the door. ‘Not having had, in my twenty years of public service,’ he declared to her, but in a voice that didn’t carry beyond his uncomprehending neighbour, ‘the pleasure of being a guest of the Welfare State in any of its jails or asylums, I cannot comment on the cleanliness and hygienic conditions of those institutions—but my God, why don’t we combine them with our State hospitals? How could anyone tell the difference?’ He watched Sister Joseph disappear through the door and then turned to his female neighbour, who’d been observing him for the past few minutes with dryer eyes, ‘Faecal matter, mouldy bandages, cockroaches, enormous spiders and rats. Rats at every step. Scurrying up your leg! Heavens—down which drain does the crores of rupees allocated to Public Health every year go? Does anybody here know what it takes to keep a hospital toilet clean?’ He surveyed the ward. ‘Some detergent. Some disinfectant. Water, a broom, a sweeper. How many sweepers does this hospital have? Seventeen. And what is its Maintenance budget for the year? Eleven lakh rupees. I am determined that the light of reason should pierce at least one skull in this place.’ Exhausted, he flopped back onto his pillow and dropped off almost immediately.

  He surfaced about an hour later to find Sister Joseph and the doctor on duty standing beside his bed, solemnly scanning his case history. ‘Hello, Doctor Blue and Sister Moon, I presume.’

  The doctor was bald and fleshy, with a stoop. Clearly a no-nonsense person, he, without glancing at his patient, shushed him—or tried to—with a commanding wave of his hand.

  ‘I’m so glad that you’ve showed up because we in the ward had begun to think that we’d all been abandoned, like sinking ships.’

  Without saying a word, the doctor thrust a hand out at Sister Joseph, who demurely slipped into it, from a sheaf that she carried, an X-ray, which he then examined with eagle eye.

  ‘The patient is suffering from an advanced stage of pneumonic plague,’ he announced.

  ‘Thank you, but I ought to point out that that X-ray in your hand is that of a female. I’m a doctor myself, an entomologist. I can tell a woman’s X-ray from a man’s. You need to return to medical college, Eagle-eye.’ To himself, Dr Chakki added, ‘Time to go.’

  Half an hour later, fatigued but free, he was in his own clothes and at the Qayamat Road gate of Aflatoon Maidan, mildly bewildered by the exertion of walking and the three- in-one hunger strike in progress before him.

  Exiting from the hospital had not been easy. Two cops at Reception had barred his way and without saying anything, had simply looked as sceptical as boulders. He’d explained in English that he wasn’t at all a plague case trying to cut loose but a patient of murine typhus which, as they no doubt knew, was not even remotely as lethal even though it exhibited similar symptoms. When their faces hadn’t changed, he’d shown them a relevant newspaper clipping that he’d extracted from the clutter in his shirt pocket. The balder one had expressionlessly scanned it upside down while he, weak with excitement, had continued to gabble, ‘Who indeed knows what’s going on in the Welfare State? The news item in your hand is from the December 4 edition of The State Express.’

  And Now Murine Typhus

  Dr Sitaram Dhanuka, a killi University academic who had predicted the outbreak of plague in a research paper published last January, now questions his own forecast. In a letter to this newspaper, he writes:

  I note with serious concern the reports published in several newspapers that the hospitals and clinics of Madna and its environs, because of lack of trained medical staff and facilities and because of overcrowding, have released and continue to release into open society all those patients who test negative for the plague. I am amazed that the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (from which august political institution I resigned in protest in 1979) and hospitals all over the country need to be reminded of the existence of murine typhus, a flea-borne disease akin to the plague, with much the same symptoms and transmission route. It could even be argued—though I’m not for the moment doing so—that what Madna is battling at the moment is not the plague, but murine typhus.

  The following symptoms are common to both diseases—high body temperature (102 to 105 degrees F), severe headache, a chill, body pain, a rash. I suspect that those patients at Madna who exhibited the above symptoms but still tested negative for the plague might well be afflicted with murine typhus, which is an airborne, rickettsial disease spread through the fleas of rats, dogs and cats. Its mortality rate is five per cent. I would strongly recommend to the hospitals of Madna that all suspected plague patients be tested for murine typhus as well. Otherwise, I fear that what we might have on our hands is not one epidemic, but two.

  Or even three. I read with bitter amusement on November 11 the news item on Housing Problem of your paper that the National Institute of Communicable Diseases still refuses to recognize the existence in this country of a comparatively new, drug-resistant, potentially fatal strain of malaria, the perils of which I had spelt out in my pape
r on the subject as far back as 1978. Twelve cases and two deaths have been reported in the last three months from Sripura, Shagaland and Rassam. How many deaths will jolt the Welfare State out of its slumber? Yours, etc.’

  The bald policeman had expressionlessly handed the clipping back to Dr Chakki and then with a wriggle of his eyebrows and a motion of his head indicated that he should retreat down the corridor from which he had slithered out.

  ‘Of course,’ conceded Dr Chakki graciously, ‘but shouldn’t you instead be more worried about the real threats?’ and he pointed with his chin to the squad of Madna youth at the gates of the hospital. It had been a neck-and-neck decision, what to distract the guardians with—the gang at the entrance or any one of the other clusters in the compound, one munching peanuts and playing cards, a second enclosing a hoarse-voiced seller of aphrodisiacs, a third bickering with a different set of policemen.

  Sedately, they’d strolled across to the gates. The youngsters, more well-meaning than wise, formed one of the many bands that scoured the choked drains and mountainous garbage dumps of their town for rats, which they trapped, stunned, performed—being a devout people—a little puja around, anointed with kerosene and ghee, set fire to and watched burn. In fact, one teenager—long-haired, large-eyed—did hold by the tail—at arm’s length, it is true, and quakingly—a monstrous rat, grey-brown, furry, fat, about whose snout he clumsily waved a lit incense stick. A comrade waited beside him, bottle of kerosene in hand. Beneath the hubbub of the street could be heard from the group the hum of some religious chant.

  ‘Heroic,’ observed Dr Chakki, ‘but one must add that while burning a knocked-out rat might possibly be a karmic experience, the zeal, the war fever of these juveniles might actually be helping the plague—or the murine typhus, as the case may be—to spread since the vector fleas are far more likely to flee from the corpse of a burning rat than the snug fur of a living one.’