The Mammaries of the Welfare State Read online

  Quite often, the government posted a jerk as Liaison Commissioner. After all, it had to post its jerks somewhere. They loved it, the perks, the absence of stress, the hundreds of kilometres between them and their boss. Dr Bhatnagar had three phones on his desk that never rang. They occasionally buzzed, Kalra asking him whether he wished to speak to whoever was on the line. Dr Bhatnagar never did, because the people that he would’ve loved to speak to—the Secretary-General of the United Nations, for example, or the President of the World Bank—never called, and their organizations never even acknowledged his letters. Kalra routinely transferred all of Dr Bhatnagar’s calls to Agastya.

  Accepting them was pretty unpleasant. They were almost always from Headquarters, i.e., the Secretariat hundreds of kilometres away, and almost always accusatory, sarcastic, recriminatory. The entire office had been tutored to say that Dr Bhatnagar was away at a meeting in the Ministry and when pressed, to add, the Home Ministry. Presumably, Agastya had concluded, since it was the vastest, the size of a bloody city, and also because it was sort of true, wasn’t it, since the bugger was always at home, scheming with, and being pushed around by, his wife, a pale, fat, unpleasant woman with fish-eyes and shoulder-length hair. Agastya was quite nonplussed to discover that Dr Bhatnagar too, and quite seriously, meant home whenever he said Home Ministry. ‘I’ll be tied up all morning in the Home Ministry.’ From him, such a statement could not be a witticism, and certainly to a subordinate twenty years his junior, unthinkable—unless it was a literal truth. Perhaps, long long ago, it had been a joke between husband and master, so rare that it had been cherished, and therefore oft repeated, and thus had become so familiar that to the ears of the bureaucrat, it’d begun to sound just right, not a witty euphemism, but the thing itself.

  ‘I run my office from the Home Ministry.’ Dr Bhatnagar’s boast simply meant a costlier telephone bill for the office. Every one hour, both Kalra and Agastya were to telephone him at home to report the significant events since the last call. On the fourth day after he’d joined, Kalra advised Agastya to concoct a bit, since the statement that ‘Nothing’s happening, sir,’ particularly when sleepily delivered, would exasperate Dr Bhatnagar no end. Fabrication came quite easily to Agastya, but the passing years had also taught him the virtues of moderation. Buddha-like, he chose the Middle Way. Doctor Saab was never to be told either that 1) anybody more senior than him had phoned him, or that 2) somebody from an Economic ministry had called the office. Such cooked-up reports would fluster him and Sherni Auntie (Tigress Auntie, Kalra and Co’s affectionate name for Mrs Bhatnagar) beyond measure. They’d go into a huddle from which they’d emerge after half an hour with the decision that Dr Bhatnagar should hare off to work to harass everyone there till well past closing time with nervous, mindless crap of a quality of which only he was capable. ‘Kalra, take a fax to the Commerce Secretary . . . Agastya, speak to the Additional Private Secretary to the Industries Secretary and ask him whether he wants me to phone his chief now or later . . . Tell the PRO to deliver personally this evening a bouquet of fifty yellow roses to Mrs Khullar, you know, the Chairman of the Public Service Commission . . . he should first take the flowers home and have Mrs Bhatnagar okay them . . . Kalra, take a fax to the Finance Secretary . . .’

  Thus Agastya, following the Middle Way, every hour, to Dr Bhatnagar’s house, in Hindi:

  ‘May I speak to the Liaison Commissioner, please?’

  Kamat, the Residence peon—he and the Bhatnagars have been made for each other, a match in Heaven—in Hinglish: ‘Who shall I say is calling?’

  Agastya, in Hindi: ‘It’s me, you undie, U Thant.’

  Ages later, Kamat: ‘The Liaison Commissioner wishes to know what the subject of your call is.’

  ‘If he doesn’t want to get up, tell him not to bother. We merely received a telephone call from—’ Agastya routinely disconnected at that point and immediately left his room in search of Madam Tina, marvelling at how much they relied on the inefficiency of their telephones to help them in their work. He was safe now from Bakra Uncle (Uncle Goat) for at least one hour, which was when he’d repeat the same farce. For Dr Bhatnagar to phone him back was not an easy task. He couldn’t of course, because of his seniority, simply pick up the receiver and dial Agastya’s number. He had to order Kamat to phone the office exchange and ask the operator to tell Agastya to phone Dr Bhatnagar. Fortunately for Agastya, all the telephone operators at the office hated Kamat only fractionally less than they hated Dr Bhatnagar; none of them was likely to interrupt his card game to deliver any of Kamat’s messages.

  When they next spoke, Agastya would not refer to his last interrupted phone conversation with Kamat until Dr Bhatnagar broached the subject, and then he’d state, airily, ‘Oh, that! Yes sir, Deputy Secretary, Pensions and Administrative Reforms phoned . . . I think he knows you and wants you to put in a word for him for some post that he’s angling for . . . yes sir, terrible, these fellows, sir, no shame . . .’

  The first new marriage proposal was a postcard from Dadar, Bombay, from one Vishnu Bhatt, Professor Emeritus of Numerology, typewritten, stark in his Office Post File, all stamped and recorded in the Inward Register of the Dispatch Section.

  ‘Dear Doctor Agastya Sen,

  I learn that you are still available. I have for you a very interesting combination in my second daughter, Kumari Lavanya, an accomplished sitar player and a Bachelor of Dental Surgery from Baroda . . . If you show interest, I will dispatch you post-haste her photograph and her bio-data. I saw your date of birth in the Union Civil List, calculated from it and concluded that Lavanya and you are superbly matched. Never in my thirty-four years of numerology have I come across such a perfect pair of numbers . . .’

  Agastya wrote on the postcard, ‘I’d prefer a perfect pair of knockers. Dictation please, Steno,’ and flung it in the Out tray. If his stenographer ever turned up with it, he’d reply politely recommending somebody else, Dhrubo perhaps, or the steno.

  The second marriage proposal was from Kalra on the intercom. ‘Good morning, sir. Doctor Saab wants to know why you haven’t married yet.’

  Doctor Saab himself had two almost-nubile children, Bitiya and Baby. Baby was a twenty-year-old bespectacled male, a washed-out student of Physics somewhere. Bitiya the daughter, also bespectacled, was older by a year or two, chubby, wan, smug, plague-like by reason of her parentage. Agastya had met them because the entire office spent most of its day ferrying the office cars to different parts of the city to drop and pick them up. For which it, the office, couldn’t of course touch Doctor Saab’s office car, an off-white Ambassador with black windows that squatted like a toad at the office entrance, blocking the way, ready to scud off at a moment’s notice to answer the Call, from the Cabinet Secretariat or the Department of Economic Affairs or, what was most likely, the Home Ministry. Thus in the course of the day, Bitiya and Baby popped into office quite often, between extra Physics tuitions and clumsy tennis at the Gymkhana Club, to fax and phone friends and relatives in Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Bombay.

  ‘Kalra, does Bakra Uncle want me to interface with Bitiya?’ ‘Interface’ was one of Dr Bhatnagar’s favourite words. Agastya had explained to Kalra that it was Management language for sixty-nine. Kalra had been rather grateful for the idea. It had thenceforth enlivened a little his gruelling dictation sessions.

  ‘No sir, may your tongue be cut off,’ said Kalra in Punjabi, ‘for even imagining an event so gross. Sherni Auntie is on the lookout for a kayastha from the cow-belt for Bitiya, definitely from one of the two top civil services, preferably from the diplomatic service. She ordered Doctor Saab to ask me to find out from you whether you’d like her to find you a match. Which is to say that she’s already begun hunting.’

  ‘How much does she make out of each successful transaction? I just want to know for my General Knowledge. To remain young, one must learn something new every day.’

  ‘Yes sir. Lots, I’d imagine. A significant percentage of the dowry finally decided
on. She’d certainly make about ten times the amount that Doctor Saab picks up from his faked Medical Claims and Travelling Allowance bills. Small minds win small sums. Slow and steady always finishes the race, but comes in second last.’

  ‘Thank you for your observations, Kalra. Your wisdom encourages me to seek your counsel. In my youth, I would have fobbed Sherni Auntie off by admitting that I was already married to a Norwegian Muslim who was at present dying of breast cancer in England. Doctor Saab, though, might use that as a pretext to wangle an official trip to Europe. What do you think?’

  At which wangling Dr Bhatnagar is simply wonderful. His expertise forms one of the objectives of growing up within the Civil Service. When one joins it at about the tender age of twenty-two, one is packed off to one of the dots in the vastness of the land to learn about and function in the wiles of district administration. One usually grows up rapidly in those two years, sporadically dreaming of a post in Paradise, namely, the regional capital—to which, eventually, over the years, one makes one’s way. Once in the regional capital, one sets one’s sights on the Centre, where all the action is, where the foreign trips are. When one arrives at the Centre, one proceeds to scheme for a slot in an international agency—FAO, UNICEF, ILO, UNDP, WB, UNO, IMF, UNHCR—by Jove, the wide world at one’s feet, and in one’s pocket!—and a salary in dollars US to be spent in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Geneva, New York and Paris.

  Agastya’s explanation for the civil servant’s lust to travel abroad at official expense is the by-his-standards-princely daily allowance that he is paid for his trip. That allowance, depending upon one’s seniority, varies from dollars US seventy-five to one hundred. Abroad, wherever he goes, the civil servant, thanks to the great Indian diaspora, always finds an accommodating countryman to shack up with—and a McDonald’s to eat hamburgers in. He thus manages to save, in a trip of one week, out of his daily allowance, the equivalent of two months of his pay (from which saving, before returning to his native shores, at the last truly international airport, he buys girlie magazines like crazy). Everything, reasons Agastya, is economics—that is, when it isn’t politics. His first official trip abroad is to the civil servant what the Fall was to Adam; nothing is ever quite the same again. Someone like him from the Embassy to ease him through the cold discomfort of Immigration and Customs, those spacious, silent cars, everyone in what to him look like snazzy suits, those women in skirts, the endless clack-clack of their heels on clean pavements, that frenzied wining and dining, the whirl of one official meeting after another, all handshakes and smiles, in which nothing is ever decisively discussed, the insane sightseeing, the frenzied, high-risk whoring in Djakarta, Bangkok, Amsterdam—having experienced all that and having gained two months’ pay in the process, the civil servant returns home to find his job rather shabby and dull, without any fizz. He begins to dream of more foreign jaunts, to befriend Joint Secretaries in Commerce and Personnel, to speak the lingo of External Affairs, to invite the chaps from Banking and Finance over for slap-up dinners, to snoop around for the off chance in Agriculture and Fisheries; Dr Bhatnagar had even started to correspond regularly with an incredible number of Ambassadors and High Commissioners. For him, any occasion could trigger off a fax.

  ‘Kalra, take a fax to our Ambassador in Mauritius . . . My dear Katju comma Yesterday was Gudi Padwa here—Gudi Padwa in italics, Kalra—comma a holiday comma you know comma the New Year in many parts of the country and I thought of you . . . you will recall that last year comma on exactly this day comma you and I met in transit at Frankfurt airport . . . you were dashing off to your new assignment in Port Louis whereas I was whizzing off to Honolulu to interface with our chaps there about a few Personnel Administration tricks that I’d picked up at Manila . . . when do we see you next? . . . I could always pop down to Port Louis were it not for this enormous comma absolutely wretched pressure of work over here . . . it’s sad comma but true comma that in our system comma those who work comma get more work and those who shirk comma get the promotions exclamation mark . . . My dear wife sends her warmest regards to Lekha and you dash perhaps warmest—warmest in quotation marks, Kalra—is the most appropriate adjective for this unusually stifling March-April this year exclamation mark . . .’

  Every morning, with a snowballing sense of O-brave-new-world-that-has-such-people-in’t, Agastya would read the office copies of the faxes, telexes and letters that Dr Bhatnagar had dispatched, over the past few months, to the four corners of the world. ‘Kalra, why don’t I send copies of these faxes and telexes to Headquarters as part of my BOOBZ study? This is what we do, have a look and swoon.’

  Kalra was surprised. ‘But we do send them copies of each and every one of our communications.’

  BOOBZ could equally aptly have been called SFS—like an obscene hiss from a lout on the road at something passing that had caught his fancy—sfs, that is to say, Start From Scratch. Like many other Management ideas, BOOBZ was simply plain common sense whisked up with jargon. Underneath that froth, it merely suggested to an organization to plan its budget with no presumptions, to examine each of its activities anew for its utility, to start from scratch every time. Is your organization fulfilling the functions that it was created for? Is the salary of this particular employee justified? What has been your growth in the previous year?—twenty pages of questions completely irrelevant to the functioning of government. BOOBZ in the Welfare State, though the brainchild of an earlier Regional Finance Secretary, was given extra impetus by the present incumbent, Dr Harihara Kapila, who was to Dr Bhatnagar what a five-hundred-rupee note is to the currency of Monopoly. He was a genuine Economics whizkid and he truly wanted, with all the naivete and zeal of the whizkid, to run the nation like a private sector corporation, to see the Ministerial Cabinet function like a boardroom. Fortunately for him, the new Chief Minister had given him a free hand because they both belonged to the same sub-caste.

  Caste is truly everywhere, even in space: so Dr Kapila rationalized subsequently. It isn’t a coincidence, for example, that our first—and only—astronaut was a Brahmin . . . other things being equal, send a Brahmin into the heavens. He’ll be more appropriate for the gods. Caste is a much more reliable factor than merit, you know . . . because merit? Every Tom, Dick and Harry has merit, but how many have the right temperament, the right ethos, genes, lineage, morality, attitude, biases, hangups—in short, the right caste—for a job? By allowing me to do what I want with BOOBZ—which is a much easier, more memorable term, by the way, than the original, rather vacuous ZBB—all that is what the Chief Minister is saying. I’ve got to where I am because of my—and his—caste. We should be proud of his vision.

  Under BOOBZ, Dr Kapila froze all recruitment to the government. ‘Our offices are all overstaffed,’ said he. He’s crazy, said everyone else.

  ‘If you don’t give me men,’ thundered the Director-General of Police, ‘I will not line two alternative routes for kilometres on end with constables fifty metres apart from the airport to Raj Bhavan for two hours before he lands each time the Prime Minister comes visiting!’

  However was one to reason with the top brass of the Police State?

  In that infernally crowded city, they didn’t have an alternative route from anywhere to anywhere else. Dr Kapila suggested that the DGP deploy his constables from elsewhere in the police force. After all, over fifteen thousand of his men guarded the V∞IPs who stayed in the Central Municipal Area of about forty square kilometres, that is, fifteen thousand of his Special Task Force, not counting his staff in the various police stations, anti-crime bureaus, on traffic duty and all that. The State spent over three hundred crores every year on V∞IP security alone. The DGP knew better than anybody else what frenzied lobbying went on amongst their men of state to get on the Intelligence Bureau Endangered List. One had truly arrived when one was declared a Z-category security risk. One was officially allotted five bullet-proof Ambassador cars with souped-up Isuzu engines, a posse of Black Guard commandoes and a colonial bungalow in th
e Sanitized Central Municipal Area. The Security budget paid for the doing-up of those cars: velvet seats, synthetic-tiger-skin dashboards, a bottle of scent beneath the rear-view mirror, a stereo—security requirements, of course. The Security budget also provided for raised boundary walls topped by barbed wire for all those colonial bungalows—and fifteen thousand men of the Special Task Force watered those vast lawns and hung about at the gates to keep the rest of the gawking nation out. All those men doubled up, didn’t they, as gardeners, cooks, nannies and housekeepers. They rushed off to the store when Madam ran short of curry masala or spring onions. Dr Kapila suggested that the DGP pluck them out of V∞IP security duty and use them to line his streets for the Prime Minister.

  Outraged, the DGP dictated a stinker of a note to the Home Secretary, warning the nation, inter alia, of an apocalypse were recruitment to be stopped to the police forces. Following the usual route—Director-General to Home Secretary to Chief Secretary to Minister of State for Home Affairs to Home Minister to Secretary to the Chief Minister to Chief Minister—the note flitted about in the Secretariat for three days. The Chief Minister had no time for the apocalypse, so his Secretary wrote on the note: Seen by CM. The views of Finance may be solicited. Off shot the note again on its, billiard-ball route.

  Dr Kapila loved this sort of thing the most—the impressive advocacy to a superior, through the use of cold, clear reasoning, of doctrinaire ways and means of effecting logical economies in the Welfare State. On notes such as the one from the Director-General of Police, he could dictate for months without pause.