The Mammaries of the Welfare State Read online

  They weren’t of much help, though, in the jungle of Aflatoon Bhavan. A cop stopped him and Agastya at the doors and asked them in Haryanvi-Punjabi, in a lazy, friendly way, ‘And you, Hero Masters, where d’you think you’re off to?’

  Alagh Saab (as he liked to be called) began to stutter in Hindi, ‘We wanted to—Culture . . . a report . . . Under Secretary . . . appointment . . .’ He glanced at Agastya for guidance but the latter didn’t much wish to converse with a cop. Besides, he—Agastya—was comfortable only in Bengali, Hindi and English. Haryanvi frightened, and Punjabi appalled, him. He was also depressed at being one of the only pair to be stopped in the leisurely after-lunch influx into the building.

  The cop wriggled his eyebrows at them. ‘What’s in that bag? A bomb? An AK-47?’ He commandingly stretched his hand out for the briefcase. Mesmerised both by the power of the law and the Haryanviness of the policeman’s personality, Dr Alagh numbly handed it over. A Surd breezed by with a cheerful invitation for the cop, ‘Coming up to the Coffee House? For something piping hot before we fuck your mother?’ A large group of folk singers that had just been cleared by Reception guffawed.

  The cop’s paw emerged from the briefcase with T.S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture and the Nivea cream. ‘What’s this for?’ he demanded, pushing the Nivea under Dr Alagh’s nose, but he didn’t really want an answer. He was about to rummage deeper when he—‘Aha!’—caught sight of the leather strap of a simple automatic camera around Agastya’s neck. He looked sternly from one to the other. ‘Spies, perhaps! Photography is strictly banned in Aflatoon Bhavan—you’ll of course tell me that you didn’t know that.’

  ‘It isn’t a bomb, for Heaven’s sake. It’s silly to ban photography in the office when you have at least five hundred photocopying machines in each Department.’

  ‘Deposit this camera at Reception and get a pass from them for whoever you want to meet.’

  ‘Look—we have been to Reception! We have an appointment at 2.30 with the Under Secretary for Demotic and Indigenous Drama. We tried his intercom from Reception but there wasn’t any reply because he never answers his internal phones. There’s nobody in Aflatoon Bhavan, he’s often declared, whom he’d care to receive a call from. The man at Reception understood but couldn’t issue us a pass because as per rule, he has to first confirm the appointment on the intercom with the officer to be visited. He suggested that we should explain the background to you and that you’d be sure to follow and let us through . . . are you wondering whether the Under Secretary for Demotic Drama answers his external phone? He doesn’t, but mercifully his PA does—that’s how—’

  ‘HUBRIS DESCENDING!’ All of a sudden, from the speaker above the cop’s head, a deafening, panicky whisper, as though from an archangel under stress. ‘Attention, Main Gate, Reception and Parking . . . HUBRIS descending . . . Attention . . .’ The electrified cop straightened his beret, pulled his stomach in and roaring his intimidation at the throng around him, began to march towards the elevators twenty paces away, vigorously shoving to left and right all the potential assassins who awaited the Minister’s descent. Agastya and Dr Alagh, who happened to be on the right, with one shove were propelled considerably closer to the stairs. Returning the camera to its case, Agastya watched for a couple of seconds the faces of the others gaping at the elevator while they waited for it to open to debouch Bhanwar Virbhim and his cortege; then he and Dr Alagh began to mount.

  To restore his nerves, he needed to piss, smoke and drink some tea. In the corridor on the fourth floor, to locate the loo, he followed the overpowering stink of urine. En route, he was distracted by a sign that read in both Hindi and English, Toilets This Way, but which pointed the way he’d come. In two minds, he about-turned and hesitantly retraced his steps till the stairs, where he stopped. The pong of urine to him now was as confusing as the Toilets signs because every now and then, in his bewildered passage down the corridor, it had mingled with the smell of hot, thick, sweet, milky tea.

  The corridors of Aflatoon Bhavan had once been a handsome five metres in width, but over the years, the cupboards, desks, chairs, electric fans, coolers, shelves, sofas, stools, teapoys, clocks, folders and files had edged out of the twelve-hundred-plus rooms and sidled along down the passages in search of lebensraum. Virtually every inch of common zone in the building—foyer, corridor, lobby—was now piled high with junk; only those spaces declared by the Black Guard commandoes to be sensitive from a security angle—that is to say, those areas that would catch the Minister’s eye in his shuttling from motorcade to elevator to office, escaped the rubbish, the lumber. That still left quite a few kilometres of corridor. The fire-escapes, storerooms, garages and the dead-ends of passages all resembled the aftermath of an earthquake, a riot or a bombing—discarded, broken furniture and mountains of files, documents, booklets, official publications, piled all anyhow, one atop another, restrained from blocking off the heavens only by the ceiling. At regular intervals in the corridors, painted signs on the walls exhorted denizens and visitors, in two languages, to Keep Quiet, Refrain From Spitting and Smoking and to Maintain—separately—Peace and Communal Harmony, Cleanliness, Dignity of Office and Due Decorum. Paan stains, that covered the discarded furniture and files like enormous drops of red rain, had on occasion soared up to splotch some of the signs.

  ‘Where’d you think the toilet can be, Sen saab?’

  ‘Westward ho. Can’t you smell it?’

  Shrill giggle. ‘Yes and no. At times, it smells like tea.’

  Same thing, though, pondered Agastya the thinker. On each floor, the Gents was two doors away from a Department Canteen. The two stinks were in one sense Welfare measures, generated so that even the blind could find their way to both refresh and relieve themselves. The not-so-blind too, perhaps, because those Toilets This Way signs had been quite misleading, hadn’t they? They’d’ve staggered on and on down these corridors in the wrong direction till their bladders would’ve burst. Of course, they could always have squirmed into any of those crevices between desk and almirah. One could think of them as resthouses for travellers on the Road of Life. The Toilets signs therefore were reminders of All That Misguide. They were also subtle and potent advertisements of the Department of Education—seventh-to-eleventh floor—for its Literacy Commission. The workers who actually measured, hammered and put these signs up—how many of them, d’you think, asked Agastya of himself, could read them?

  Uh . . ., he replied.

  Exactly. They—and their brothers—also erect our road signs. That is why, if you want to go, for example, from Aflatoon Bhavan to, say, the Pashupati Aflatoon Public Gardens—to restrict the example to the family, as it were—and you scrupulously follow the signs that you can decipher from your driving seat, it should take you about a year, plus-minus two months. We won’t make it, you know, as a nation until—to take only one instance—the people who put up our road signs and the people who need to use them, to decipher them from their cars, are the same.

  How interesting . . . why doesn’t someone get rid of all this junk? One could sell it for lakhs of rupees to the kabadiwala. Surely the Welfare State would welcome the revenue.

  No, too dangerous. Too many decisions. Which kabadiwala was one going to call? The man on the bicycle ringing his bell beneath one’s bathroom window while one shaves in the morning—‘Hello, come over to my office tomorrow morning at eleven with all your friends and buy off me three hundred truckloads of junk’? How would one prove to Audit that he didn’t bribe one for being so kind? Even a one-per cent cut on the sale of all the clutter of Aflatoon Bhavan would be more than a salary for the whole year. No. One would follow procedure. There exist rules even for the proper disposal of office junk. One calls for a minimum of three quotations from interested parties. If the value of the rubbish is estimated to be above a certain amount, one advertises in the newspapers. Which newspapers? All the major newspapers of all the SAARC countries? Perhaps, since the kabadiwala is quite a SAARC inst
itution. Then, mindful of the Official Language Policy, one routes the Junk Disposal File through the Director, Official Languages. The quotations then are examined and processed at the appropriate level.

  Further, what is junk? Speaking of levels, which one would best define it? There, on Agastya’s left, those lemon- green booklets dispersed all over those desks and sprouting out of that cupboard—three thousand of them were published some four years ago. Two thousand seven hundred remain. They are the Minister’s Welcome Address on the Occasion of the Inauguration of the Plenary Session of the Trimurti Aflatoon Birth Centenary Celebrations Committee. What was one to think—were those booklets junk?

  Under Secretary (Ways and Means and Administrative Reform) had certainly thought so and—to use officialese—Initiated A File on the subject. Permission is sought to call for quotations from interested dealers in scrap. Oh dear—one would’ve imagined that the nation’d gone to war. But Ways and Means had fought back like a hero—Kit Carson, absolutely.

  The proposal is not meant in any way to insult the august office of the Minister. It is only intended to allow Aflatoon Bhavan to breathe a bit. Improvement of the Work Environment. It is alternatively submitted that the booklets be circulated amongst our Higher Secondary Central Schools as proposed models of English prose for those students of Standard Eleven who offer English as their Optional Third Language. Of course, if approved, more copies would have to be printed. The views of Director, Official Languages may kindly be solicited in this regard. However, it should be pointed out here that copies of the official Hindi translation of the Welcome Address, regrettably, are not immediately traceable in Aflatoon Bhavan. If required, a second official Hindi translation may be commissioned after a decision has been taken at the Highest Level. Naturally, a parallel enquiry would have to be initiated into the absence or disappearance of the Hindi texts.

  Not surprisingly, the file was still drifting about in one of the abysses of Education—after all, what was four years in the life of a Welfare State file? Not even a heartbeat. Meanwhile, there mouldered those masterpieces of oratory. Passersby had often been offered copies. Of course, before one actually disposed off all those booklets and files, one’d have to consider the invaluable insulation that they provided to the entire building in winter. An indisputable fact, when one recalled how many clerks had snugly slept for months ensconced among them.

  The Gents’ Toilet was large, greyish, brightly-lit, wet and crowded. Dr Alagh stepped up, gritted his teeth, fumbled with his fly, managed to undo its buttons in time and as he let go, sighed with relief and shut his eyes. A couple of seconds later—in midstream, as it were—he squeaked in disgust as he felt something warm and—well, urine-like—spray his left foot. He opened his eyes. In a nanosecond, he yelped in horror as he realized that the piss wasn’t his. He jerked his leg away, glared at the profile of the pisser on his left and hoped that the dirty look would suffice because he didn’t quite know what to say. What could he say? Mind your spray? Look before you spatter? Yet, equally clearly, his glare had no effect because his neighbour—small, moustached, with a lined, desiccated face—was pissing with his eyes closed, leaning against the marble partition that separated him from Dr Alagh. Who hurriedly stepped down to avoid being further irrigated.

  But who continued, however, while rebuttoning himself and rolling up till the knee his left trouser leg, to glower at the bum and back of the off-target pisser. Which is when he noticed that the pisser’s right arm tailed off at the elbow. He held the edge of his kurta in his mouth and the strings of both his pyjamas and his undies in his left hand, thus leaving himself no means by which he could catch his penis to guide its stream. Dr Alagh stopped glowering.

  Revolted, confused, abashed and curious, he watched the pisser skilfully knot up with one hand and amble off towards the sinks. Where he stopped to shake hands with a friend. Who had to let go of his crutch to extend his hand. They chatted. At that moment, the cleaner who was swabbing the floor neared them and—in warning, perhaps—clicked his tongue a couple of times. The pisser leaned sideways, shook hands with the cleaner and said something. The cleaner responded in sign language. One of the doors of the WCs creaked open and out stepped a man in sun glasses, with a walking stick. He tapped his way towards the door. Two places away from Dr Alagh’s at the urinal, a short, podgy man with the lost, open face of a victim of Down’s Syndrome, half-turned to holler a greeting at the blind man, who responded cheerfully. Near the window, a teenager with a left leg badly deformed by polio, was feeding what looked like chapatis to a large monkey that squatted on the sill on what appeared to be a bundle of files.

  The flash of Agastya’s camera disturbed most of them. For a few seconds, it had been quite challenging. He hadn’t been able to decide whether to centre on the one-armed handshaker or the monkey.

  ‘Photography is strictly forbidden in all Welfare State premises, sir.’

  ‘Yes, not to worry.’ From his wallet, Agastya took out his temporary laminated photo pass of the Bhayankar Middle Income Group Swimming and Recreation Club and flashed it under the one-armed peon’s nose. ‘That’s all right. PM’s Secretariat. Administrative Reform Division.’ He clicked the monkey, the files, the grimy window, the scummy sink. ‘We’ve received more than one complaint about this monkey menace in these corridors. That they’re keeping the officers and staff away from work.’

  ‘They are divine, sir, hardly a pest,’ warmly protested the one-armed pisser. ‘Attendance is particularly thin today for a different reason. By the way, I am Dharam Chand, Personal peon at the Minister’s Residence and Joint Secretary of the Aflatoon Bhavan Class IV Employees’ Union. I have—’ he phallically raised the stump of his right arm—‘applied for exemption from plague duty. Meanwhile, three hundred and forty-four Under Secretaries of the Central Ministries, mainly of the Departments of Official Languages, Food and Rationing, Civil Defence, Physical Education, Prohibition and Excise, Town Planning, Vocational Training, Sales Tax, Dairy Development, Rural Broadcasting, State Lotteries, Water Resources, Land Records, Books and Publications, Employment Insurance, Ayurvedic Sciences and Malpractices and Village Industries have trooped off to the Supreme Court with a petition that: one, accuses the Welfare State of wilfully playing with the lives of its public servants and two, suggests to it that if it still insists on playing God, it should draft to Madna, given the subject matter of the mission, only the officials of the Department of Public Health.’

  ‘Oh dear. Madna is from where he has come—’ Agastya jerked his head at Dr Alagh ‘—and specifically to meet two Under Secretaries. Have they been sent off there or have they marched off to the Supreme Court instead? Under Secretary for Demotic Drama Shri Dastidar and Under Secretary for Freedom Fighters (Pre-Independence) Dr Jain? Though the latter of course we wish to consult in his personal capacity as a homoeopath.’

  Dharam Chand’s eyes became smaller and craftier. ‘Madna? And are you a bounty hunter? A grant stuck somewhere?’ He strutted across to the monkey on the window sill to deposit beside it a paper packet of yellowish, greasy sweets that he had pulled out of his kurta pocket. It was a daily routine for him, one of his ways of appeasing the gods for his thousand crimes.

  Some of which he had, once upon a time, under the name of Karam Chand, committed in Madna, a place which, despite its insignificance and general ghastliness, is central to this story. Madna is representative of ten thousand other small towns and five hundred other districts in a land of a billion people. The events that occur and the characters who exist there could quite easily be located in any of the other dots on the landscape. Indeed, it would be more useful to say that many of the incidents—the outcry over the plague, the disappearance of Chamundi, the attack on Suroor, the ping-ponging of Agastya Sen—take place in Madna principally because they have Madna-like qualities.

  Ditto for the characters. It is not therefore an extraordinary coincidence that three of them from Madna—the Honourable Collector, the Honourable Civil Surgeon
and Dharam Karam Chand—should be found at the same moment in the Gents’ Toilet of a government building fourteen hundred kilometres away in the country’s capital city. For at any given time (during office hours, it must be clarified), Aflatoon Bhavan is crawling with Madna types from all over the land. The building’s size, after all, must not be forgotten. Fourteen storeys, six wings, twelve hundred rooms for thirty-four departments of the government, nearly twenty kilometres of corridor—how could all that space not be temporarily occupied by at least a minuscule percentage of the billion hopefuls of the country?

  Like Dharam Chand, for example, whose—it must be remembered—tortuous, eight-year-long journey from Madna to Aflatoon Bhavan had been instructive and illustrative enough to have become the plot of a quintet of street plays that Rajani Suroor had crafted for Vyatha.

  Retribution atop a local train

  awaited this marginally insane

  ex-attendant of the School for the Blind,

  Madna. Upper-class travel of a kind,

  on the roof, ticketless, with friends, a breeze

  of a journey on most days, relaxed, at ease—

  one always had to grip something stable,

  of course, in case the slow train, unable

  to keep steady, jerked over points, or lurched

  around curves without warning. That day, perched

  on the third bogie from the rear, waiting

  for the train to start, Karam Chand, hating

  the delay, had both his hands in the air,

  running a filthy comb through his sparse hair.

  A sudden twitch, like a start, beneath him,