The Mammaries of the Welfare State Read online

  Suppliant (briefcase in hand): I beg to remind you, sir, that I offer you the same quantity and quality at fifty crores—virtually half the price, esteemed sir.

  Private Secretary (into the phone): Minister would be rather taken aback at anything less than two point five per cent.

  Peon (without stopping either his assault on used envelopes or his pocketing of cash): The same crappy paper at the top end of the ladder too—so why bother to climb?

  Suppliant (to Private Secretary): Our percentages too, sir, are more attractive. As an added incentive, there’s a percentage of the percentage exclusively for you. Consider it akin to a festival bonus.

  Private Secretary (chuckling suavely into the phone): Come come—in dollars US of course. Minister has always been very pro the open society and human rights. He would feel like a traitor with any other currency.

  Peon (musingly): Honourable Minister’s cut alone could buy us several billion envelopes—but of a quality far superior to our needs. Who’d use a sack of silk to throw his garbage out in?

  Dr Chakki was distracted from the play at that point by the sudden appearance at Durga’s elbow (at one of his eight, more accurately speaking) of a long-haired, bespectacled, groovy-looking man. ‘What an interesting idea,’ murmured Rajani Suroor half to himself, as he examined Dambha’s getup with intense curiosity, ‘Look, Mother Durga, dear,’ he cooed as, gripping the young man’s shoulder, he began gently to propel him towards the actors, ‘Why don’t you join the queue that wants to meet the Minister?’

  Dambha smiled beneath his mask. ‘Yes, why not? I could ask him to save my sister’s face.’

  Durga in single file triggered off more than one appreciative laugh amongst the audience. The sentinel peon added his share by demanding from the goddess a considerably larger entry fee. ‘You’ve so many more hands, revered Mother, with which to give.’

  ‘Or take.’ Dambha swayed and writhed so that the fingers of one of his padded arms could graze and try to fish for the money in the peon’s shirt pocket.

  Rajani Suroor was in near-ecstasy. ‘I’ve picked a natural.’ Almost all the spectators were in agreement with him. A handful who weren’t had just arrived in a white Ambassador. They carried bicycle chains, bamboo lathis and hockey sticks. Beginning with the fringe of the crowd, they started, with a shove and a curse here, a lunge and a threatening gesture there, to encourage the audience to disperse. After they had thus cleaved a passage through to the performance, they attacked the players with their weapons.

  Exclaiming incredulously, Rajani Suroor had moved forward towards the hoodlums. Two of them pitched into him. The thwack of a hockey stick on his skull was sharp like a rifle shot. A second blow as he toppled altogether stilled him.

  Dr Chakki watched them scramble into the car and it squeal away. Its number plate read: Something Something JB 007.

  The Prime Minister

  Visits

  The December of the plague scare, continued. Agastya Sen believed that one of the many important duties of the Collector of Madna was to swamp his subordinates with paper. Typical of his correspondence with his staff would be his demi-official letter of December 12 asking the tehsildars and Sub-Divisional Officers of the district to pay more attention to his demi-official letters. They didn’t.

  So in his memo of December 17, he beseeched them to ensure only one thing when they submitted any information to him, that it should not absurdly contradict the information that they’d given him on the same subject the week before. To his mind, his request was simple and reasonable. He failed to understand, therefore, why they all found it so difficult to comply with.

  Of course, there had been times when he hadn’t had to refer to the previous week’s report to feel totally foxed. One could take as an instance the last statement of the Resident Tehsildar:

  There are no cases pending for regularization under Section 31AA of the BP of FC on H Act, 1947. Hence the information called for by the Department for the quarter ending June 30 may be treated as Nil.

  He had sent the file back with a question for the tehsildar. What does the BP of FC, etc., stand for? As he had suspected, the tehsildar did not know. The Collector had suggested to him that it might well be the Beastly Practice of Effing Criminals on Housetops Act, 1947, and that the tehsildar could consider writing thus to the Department. He did.

  More to the point was the last report of the Leave Reserve Deputy Collector on the position of borewells in the district on July 31:

  Total Number of Borewells in the District as on June 30 : 854

  Number of Borewells Constructed in July : 8

  Total Number of Borewells in the District as on July 31 : 858

  Total Number of Functioning Borewells in the District as on July 31 : 72

  Number of Functioning Borewells Constructed in July : 6

  Total Number of Borewells repaired in the District in July : 84

  Total Number of Borewells Yet to be Repaired : Figures not available

  The statement went every month to the Commissioner, the Departments of Rural Development, Water Supply, Agriculture, Planning, Revenue, Relief and Rehabilitation, and to the Geological Survey. At least they had stopped sending—or rather, it’d be more correct to say that Agastya had stopped signing—totally illegible copies of such statements. Some of his subordinates would recall that that—the incredible nonchalance with which illegible junk was being put up for his signature—had been the subject of his circular of December 15. Very early in his tenure, he had sent dozens of files back with the following note, in place of his signature, on each one of the letters or statements placed for issue in them: I will not sign something that I cannot read. None of those files had ever returned to him. When he had enquired, he’d learnt that—why, those letters and statements have been dispatched, sir.

  How, he’d asked.

  You’d signed them all.

  I wrote a little note of protest, you fool, I signed nothing. Can’t you read?

  Many Departments have replied, sir.

  On that occasion, the Class III Employees’ Union and the Dainik raised a big fuss against the Collector’s having used unparliamentary language against a clerk. To make amends, he had agreed thenceforth to call the concerned clerk a spade.

  The stenographers and typists of the Collectorate excused their idleness and lack of typing skills by squarely blaming the poor quality of carbon paper that was supplied to them by the Commissioner of Printing. It was a poor pretext and did not hold water with Agastya. For, he felt, even the most vocal of its detractors would not deny that the Office of the Commissioner of Printing and Paper was—and had always been—consistent. Its carbon paper was much like its other paper—grey and smudged, the tint of the sky at twilight over a soot-belching power station.

  Bhootnath Gaitonde was imposing in a Mujibur Rehman kind of way. He strode into the office with a handful of his vaguos. Public life had made him taller and fairer since his days in Bhayankar, had deepened his voice and added resonance to his chuckle. As per Department of Personnel and General Administration Office Memorandum No. 25/19/ 64—Ests (A), dated 8.10.1974, on the subject of Proper Procedure to Be Observed in Official Dealings With MPs/MLAs, Agastya rose from his chair to receive the Member of Parliament. The circular specifically mentions that ‘an officer should rise in his seat to receive the member’, which to Agastya had always sounded a bit pornographic. He loved it, this whole thing.

  The Madna seat had fallen vacant when Bhanwar Virbhim, with an eye on that wider canvas, had decided to become a Member of Parliament. Naturally, the Legislative Assembly seat was his patrimony for his son, to be nurtured by the family well into the next millennium. Bhootnath Gaitonde, then a potential rival, had been simply bought off and encouraged instead to try for Parliament from neighbouring Jompanna South.

  Pleasantries for a few minutes, before the sparring; tea, coffee or cola? . . . Shri Sen politely pointed out to one vaguo that for the hoi polloi, chewing paan was not allowed o
n office premises, so would he go out pretty far away please . . . Eventually, Bhootnath Gaitonde got down to taking guard . . . there are so many issues that we need to clarify, Collector Saab . . . how do we begin? . . .

  Item Number One was the hunger strike of A.C. Raichur, except that it had now transformed itself into a threat of self-immolation. ‘Ah!’ beamed Shri Sen, happiest when refusing with reason on his side, ‘that’s out of our hands. We’ve forwarded his representation to Home Affairs, copy to the Kansal Commission. Our people have met him to try and dissuade him—the press has been totally irresponsible. He isn’t really an emergency, not like Rajani Suroor. Raichur isn’t going to cop it for a few months yet—in fact, I’m told that he’s put on weight because of the amounts that he eats at night . . . what exactly are you after in his case? . . . ahhh, human interest! . . . why don’t you raise the subject in Parliament? . . .’

  A.C. Raichur had been forced to heighten the level of his protest because of the utterly unexpected way in which, during the past week, Rajani Suroor had hogged all the spotlight. Not merely the local press, but the national dailies too—and radio and TV as well. Why, even the devious means by which Makhmal Bagai had managed to get bail had gone almost unnoticed in the papers. Raichur had been enviously impressed by the importance of being a friend of the PM.

  In a specially constructed, air-conditioned cabin in the Madna Civil Hospital, the friend lay in coma and was thus several laps ahead of Raichur in the race for immortality, an aspect of his hunger strike that had irked the latter not a little. It seemed to him that Rajani Suroor had received—and continued to receive—far too much attention. He’d even been on the front page of The State of the Times for the first couple of days. With him had been catapulted into the spotlight the unlikeliest and least deserving of this unfair world—slugs like Alagh the Civil Surgeon, for example, wrenched out of pre-retirement torpor by the pin-prick questioning of hard-boiled, big-city, English-speaking journalists.

  ‘In reply to an earlier question, Dr Alagh, you’d stated that Suroor’s condition was “mysterious, not serious.” We’d be glad if you could elaborate.’

  ‘Between you and me, that comment was off the record, you know, made just within these four walls and for their ears only.’

  ‘Well, for the ears only of this press conference, Dr Alagh, did you mean that Suroor’s unconscious state has confounded some of the finest medical minds of the country—mainly because they can’t explain it away? That all we need to do is to call in some even finer?’

  ‘Yes, contusion worse confounded, so to speak—off the record, of course.’ Not many chuckled, most being unsure whether Dr Alagh had been inopportunely witty or was just plain nervous. Alagh himself would have been at a loss to understand his own remarks, so unsettled had he felt ever since the Thursday of the attack on Suroor. Not an hour’s respite had he enjoyed since that afternoon—first the flustered junior doctor on duty to him at home, and after that youngster, at the hospital, the deluge: the Police Superintendent, the Commissioner, the Collector baying on the phone from Rameri, the Surgeon-General from Navi Chipra, the Deputy Secretary (Health), the Joint Secretary (Home Affairs), the Resident Under Secretary to the Chief Secretary, and the morning after, three experts in person from the capital, tense, taciturn and balding, a team organized and packed off to Madna at the behest of the Prime Minister, and instructed by him personally and simply to save Suroor.

  Which had been achieved, felt the experts dissatisfiedly, by the local Civil Surgeon himself. He seemed all right—a bit lazy, but fortunately no fool. His report of Thursday afternoon clearly showed that he had taken the crucial first few steps in the right direction, thank Heavens.

  . . . Patient’s pupils, pulse, blood pressure, reflexes and breathing checked and found to be normal. No signs of vomiting. External wounds on scalp, not skull. Bruises on body but no broken bones. All indications of severe concussion but no deep internal haemorrhage. Cerebral angiography was called for and done. Confirmed the absence of internal bleeding. Patient definitely unconscious and definitely alive. By this time, anxious enquiries from very senior district officials made clear the V∞IP status of Patient, so Undersigned telephoned the Surgeon-General before he could phone him. Thereafter, through the night, Undersigned was more on the telephone than with Patient. He, Undersigned, was instructed to await the team of experts rushing down from the capital and till then to do the essentials and not anything silly. Accordingly, he readied the operation theatre and ordered his staff to check Patient’s pulse and blood pressure every fifteen minutes. To prevent bedsores, Patient was to be shifted about every six hours. Needless to add, Patient’s head has been shaved and his superficial wounds treated. A catheter has been inserted for his urine. He has been changed into regulation hospital clothes, that is, our standard off-white pyjama and top.

  Over Friday and Saturday, the experts suggested the expected: that two tubes be pushed down through Suroor’s nose, one to his stomach for food, the other to his lungs for extra oxygen (an oxygen cylinder on a trolley took up a fair amount of room beside the bed); that he should be immediately attached to a cardioscope and a drip, and that the nearest water bed ought to be procured at the earliest. Naturally, enemas would have to be administered as and when required. If his condition continued to be stable, shifting Suroor by helicopter to a—well, better-equipped—hospital or medical centre could be considered after three or four days. Meanwhile, it was the wish of the Highest Level that the patient be provided with an air-conditioned cabin. Since they didn’t exist in the Madna Civil Hospital, perhaps the simplest would be to construct one around Suroor. On a war footing, please.

  It was obvious to Agastya that Bhootnath Gaitonde hoped to use the crisis of A.C. Raichur to embarrass Bhanwar Virbhim but, unfortunately for him—Gaitonde—the crisis, by Welfare State standards, just wasn’t critical enough. When faced with a crisis, what all civil servants longed for was a bigger crisis. In the bureaucratic mind, the tensions of a demonstration, for example, were easily resolved by an outbreak of the plague, which in turn could be totally wiped out by the worst calamity of all, the visit of a Prime Minister. It was a bit like the ancient law of Matsyanyaya, of the Big Fish gobbling up the Little Fish, and of being gobbled up in turn by even Bigger Fish. What with the assault on Rajani Suroor and the subsequent decision of the PM to drop in to see his friend at the Madna Civil Hospital, poor Raichur had lost the race within metres from the start.

  Exasperatingly small crises like Raichur, or the persistent telephone calls of the District Minister for a favour disguised as an order, Shri Sen defused by simply going away on a tour. The district of Madna covered 17,000 square kilometres and one could always find a hundred reasons—cases, inspections, enquiries—for driving out into it. Out there in the landscape, time moved like a bullock-cart. It didn’t matter that the telephone didn’t work and everyone seemed to wait in the shade all day only for the sun to set. Routinely, he returned to headquarters calmed, refreshed to the point of being zonked, because he’d forgotten the crisis that had sent him away, so had the office. Or it—the office—had been overwhelmed by a graver emergency and had therefore abandoned the preceding crisis, that is to say, considered it resolved.

  And Commissioner Raghupati, too sated by cynicism to be upset at the legitimate absence of a key official from the scene of a flap of the magnitude of the Suroor incident, yet perennially alert to the possibilities of exploiting any turn of events to unexpected advantage, found time, even in that first confusing week after the attack, to direct a series of letters both to the central and regional governments on the subject of impressing upon National Telecom the urgent need of arranging for the mobile phone network to fan out across the length and breadth of the country, and of providing official portable sets to key district officials for better governance in general and more effective disaster management in particular.

  Agastya had a longish note on Matsyanyaya in the February section of his black diary, except th
at he called it Nutsyanyaya. He could find an example of lunacy wherever he looked in the Welfare State, but no one else seemed to bother, most found it funny or pleasantly incomprehensible. He was compelled to believe that everyone recognized the madness but accepted it as law—Item Number Two on the agenda of Bhootnath Gaitonde, for instance, the visit of the Prime Minister to Madna a week later, would certainly qualify as an example of Nutsyanyaya. Why was he coming? Did he know that his forty-five-minute-long visit would cost the government over six crores of rupees? Of course, he couldn’t very well declare to the world that he was flying down fourteen hundred kilometres from the capital at state expense only to look in on a friend, so his party and the regional government, to justify his appearance, had organized a public meeting for him in Aflatoon Maidan and, to quote from the official Top Secret Circular, ‘a personal inspection of the supposedly-plague-stricken areas’. When he zipped to the capital’s airport from wherever he was to board his plane, eight other steel-grey, bullet-proof, opaque-glassed, souped-up Hindustan Contessa cars, wailing and squealing, would zip with him. Someone was paying for all that zipping about. All along the route that the Prime Minister would take to the airport, and all along a decoy route that he wouldn’t take, constables would be posted fifty metres apart for two hours before the zipping and for half-an-hour after. That was seven hundred man-hours of the police force. Along those two routes, traffic would be stopped by stressed-out policemen for seventy-five minutes before and fifteen minutes after the Contessas. One could thus add to the costs of the Prime Ministerial visit the value, of one hour in each of the lives of at least five thousand people. Agastya firmly believed that a survey ought to be undertaken of the opinions of those citizens fretting away in one of the traffic jams created by the Prime Minister. He’d quite willingly have passed the questionnaires around himself. He could in fact see himself in the role—miraculously a boy again, in white shorts, red tee-shirt and red-n-white baseball cap, teeth gleaming white against a skin blackened by the sun, thrusting sheaves through open car windows, madly happy at being on the move with a purpose and at being paid for it, enjoying the sweating, unhappy enervated faces within and outside the cars, flinging into the confusion these questions that had so much topspin in them.