The Mammaries of the Welfare State Read online

  ‘Rajani Suroor.’

  ‘How do you do.’

  The telecast was a recording of the inauguration of the Festival of Russia. Gymnastics, the human pyramid business. The camera closed in on one of the saps in the bottom row. It shouldn’t have, the bugger was dying, but in the cause of better relations between the two countries.

  ‘So you’re a dope-smoking civil servant. Do you bring to your work a new perspective?’ Groovy Suroor apparently knew a lot about the government. From his kurta pocket, he pulled out a metal cigarette case and a silvery Yin-Yang box and while rolling a joint, dropped names in a well-bred way. Agastya decided to ‘sir’ him while sharing the smoke, to try and discompose him. The camera had abandoned the Russians and zeroed in on the V∞IPs in the front rows, beanbags all in starched, billowy white, a white Gandhi topi atop each like a blob of icing crowning a cake, snugly shapeless in white armchairs and sofas. ‘Ah, our dear, dear Minister-to-be, the Jewel of the Deccan Mafia,’ murmured Groovy as the TV showed bald, bespectacled, obese Member of Parliament Bhanwar Virbhim of the heavy-lidded eyes licking the toenails of Jayati Aflatoon, the wife of a cousin of the Prime Minister.

  ‘That isn’t fair, Rajani,’ objected Daya, handing Agastya a glass of watermelon juice. ‘If you can’t stand even the possibility of his appointment, you should stop sucking up to authority. My favourite commandment from the Reader’s Digest goes: If you don’t like what you do for a living, quit. If you can’t quit, shut up.’

  Then folk dancing, by what Agastya presumed were Taras Bulba and Co. Just watching them tired one out, their never-ending extreme form of the Canadian 5BX, and grinning all the while too, or were those rictuses of agony? Next, Groovy Suroor, after a long drag on the joint: ‘For you, Daya, everything’s always been either black or white. In my world, the pros outweigh the cons, but that doesn’t mean that the cons don’t exist.’ He beamed avuncularly at Agastya. ‘Does this not-so-young man have any opinions on the service of the Welfare State?’

  ‘Yes. I feel weird. I ask myself all the time: How do you survive on your ridiculous salary? And why do you survive on your ridiculous salary? At the same time, I feel grossly overpaid for the work that I do. Not the quantity, which on certain days can be alarming, but the quality. In my eight years of service, I haven’t come across a single case in which everybody concerned didn’t try to milk dry the boobs of the Welfare State.’ The dope was first-rate. ‘But I suppose that’s what the boobs are there for.

  ‘In my earlier office, on the ground floor of the Commissionerate, alongside the stairs, stood a kiosk that we’d leased out about a decade ago, for a rupee a month, to a privileged underprivileged. He was Backward Caste, Depressed Class, Physically Handicapped—his right leg petered out at the knee—Mentally Zonked—his file had a photocopy of an illegible four-line note from some Assistant to the Head of the Department of Psychiatry of the Trimurti Aflatoon Welfare State Hospital—and Utterly Black and Angry. The clerk who used to deal with Handicap’s file would say that the Hospital note merely certified that he, Handicap, periodically needed to have his head examined.

  ‘The kiosk wasn’t that small—about eight-by-eight—and he’d set up a photocopying machine in it. A sound business prospect because the Commissionerate shares its compound with the Sessions Court, the Registrar of Births and Deaths and the Deputy Tribal Commissioner. Handicap’s photocopying machine, of course, had been funded by three separate Welfare brainwaves: i) The Rural Poor Self-Employment Generation Scheme, ii) The Physically Handicapped Economic Self-Sufficiency Project, and iii) The Depressed Classes Financial Independence Plan. The three loans had to be repaid over twenty years—it came to a little over four hundred rupees a month.

  ‘A lot, isn’t it? Handicap certainly thought so—particularly after he stopped feeling grateful. To get hold of the loans in the first place, he’d forked out nearly five thousand rupees in bribes—under The Welfare State Public Servant Economic Regeneration Grant, or so he called it. Four years ago, when a new government took over, Handicap petitioned anew the Rehabilitation Minister. Under the Minister’s Discretionary Write-Off Quota for Semi-rural Economic Incentives Programme, Honourable exempted Handicap from the loans— after accepting a contribution of five thousand rupees, of course, to his wife’s Non-Governmental Organization for the Creation of Viable Employment Alternatives for Backward Caste Semi-rural Women.

  ‘Within days of my joining the office, Handicap applied anew for permission to instal in the kiosk a public phone with both National and International Dialling Facilities. He’d been beseeching us for a couple of years and we’d ping-ponged his request about—call for the comments of Telecom, the No Objection of the Municipal Corporation, ascertain the views of the Parent Department, that sort of thing. I don’t think that any of the clerks was specifically angling for a bribe; it was just that nobody knew how to deal with his application because it had no precedent.

  ‘I did a terrible thing. I decided the case. In his favour, but that was secondary. You must know how weird, how spooky it feels to actually—to use officialese—take a decision in any government matter. Boy. You see, I’d begun swimming by then at the Municipal pool and that very morning, I distinctly remember, I’d finally figured out the leg movement of the breast stroke. Oh what a feeling. Life therefore was a long song—a bit like Julie Andrews screaming and haring around amongst green hills in The Sound of Music—by the time I showed up at my desk. I took decisions in several files that day. It was horrible.

  ‘Handicap sub-let the kiosk for two thousand rupees a month to a guy with no legs. Legless wangled the phone through some Scheme or the other. Sometime in the middle of last month, Handicap slipped in a proposal for starting up a Cooperative Society For The Physically Handicapped beneath the stairs; the kiosk will certainly have to be enlarged.’

  ‘May I ask what percentage of our civil service is corrupt? I mean, I know that my ex-husband was—is. But whether every public official is dishonest?’ Daya spoke loudly from the kitchen. ‘Or am I being too naïve?’

  Swan Lake on the telly. The ballet frock, decided Agastya, was the kinkiest, the horniest dress that he’d ever seen. Swan Lake would have been even better had the chicks not worn any panties—they could’ve had their frilly frocks start at the nipples and extend fanlike till the navel; from the navel till the knees could’ve stretched a fecund expanse of pussy, fat, lush, many-coloured. However on earth could Tchaikovsky and Bhanwar Virbhim connect? Fecund pussy was much more Bhanwar’s scene, and yet there he was, furrowed head propped up on forearm, an attentive and discerning member of audience. Unless he too was seeing pussy instead of pantie. ‘I’m dishonest, but not corrupt. I use my office phone to make personal calls—that’s, strictly speaking, being dishonest, but I haven’t yet had my palm greased. I have received a box of mithai at Diwali and a bottle of Scotch at Christmas, though.

  ‘I did try once to milk a lakh or two of rupees out of the Welfare State:—’ Agastya here turned to an intelligently-smiling Suroor—‘it was out of that dairy farm, the Department of Culture and Heritage. It had two mindblowing Twelfth Plan Schemes of doling out lakhs of rupees to any bearded pseud documentary film-maker to shoot Our Endangered Tribal Heritage and The Jewels of the North-East. A friend of mine and I’d mapped everything out—we’d lug a Handycam down to the dhabas by the river, behind the Tibetan Monastery on Mall Road in the University area, and film ourselves smoking dope with the pushers there. But at the last minute, our middle-class pusillanimity and squeamishness spiked our plans.

  ‘Many moons ago, when I was a babe in these woods, I’d imagined that People Like Us—i.e., those who’ve grown up on Richmal Crompton and the Rolling Stones, and who speak English more often than any other Indian language— we just aren’t corrupt, we can’t be, constitutionally. Fortunately, these silly notions evaporated pretty quickly in these woods—as soon as one grew up, really. How worthless one’s upbringing’s been when it’s come to facing one’s own country! Ah well.
’

  Daya’d joined them by then; she looked a little alarmed at these confessions but clearly felt that they could still serve as a topic for drawing-room conversation. ‘Why then did you become a civil servant in the first place?’

  ‘Because within the civil service, one is likelier to know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows a cop. Or so I believed eight years ago. Now that I’m wiser, I know that the government can fuck you up bad even if you’re part of it—unless you suck, suck, suck. The civil servant can fellate with the best of them. I say, sir, can we roll another joint?’

  ‘But why don’t you quit, then?’ Daya was correctly puzzled.

  ‘But I like it here! And quit and go where? The more years one spends in the civil service, the more competent one becomes to remain in it.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’m sure you could find a job more to your taste. Cynicism is a waste of a life. Why, I could give you a job if you wanted.’

  He glanced at her. She laughed and answered, ‘Because I like you, Peter Pan.’

  Just at that moment, however, on the TV screen a close-up of Suroor himself, looking deadly in a silk kurta, head intelligently bent to peep at the boobs of a gorgeously-painted middle-aged woman who was seemingly tonguing his ear. ‘Ooooh . . . who’s that?’ trilled Daya in theatrical envy.

  ‘Why, that’s me . . . oh, the woman . . . don’t you recognize her? . . . Rani Chandra, the capital’s new Culture Czarina . . . they change every three months . . . she too shed her caste-revealing surname somewhere on the way up the ladder . . . but she’ll learn, sooner or later, that the single factor that works in every corner of this country is caste . . . a Brahmin vibes best with a Brahmin, a Thakur lends a hand most often to a Thakur . . . her surname must’ve been Saxena or Katoch— something simply not arty enough . . . at that point, she was breathing into my ear that coitus these days is totally out of fashion because nobody has the time . . . at best a couple of minutes off for a quick grope and feel . . . the only way in which she unwinds is in her Toyota Lexus, listening on her Walkman to a tape of a male voice thinking aloud about what he longs to do to her body . . . very hot stuff, no holds barred . . . the tapes are a by-product of her husband’s electronics mega-company . . . she gifts the tapes to her closest friends . . . they’re rather well-composed, actually . . . very little music . . . there are four sets of tapes . . . Man-to-Man, Woman-to-Woman, Man-to-Woman, Woman-to-Man . . . her brainchild, apparently . . . I gather that she presented a box set of CDs to Kinshuk Aflatoon at Diwali and that he and Jayati listen to nothing else . . . in the capital, amongst the Gur Baoli Farmhouse jetsetting crowd, Rani Chandra Cassette parties are nowadays all the rage . . . RCC get-togethers, they’re called . . . she plans to diversify soon into a separate range for paedophiles . . . the sky’s the limit for those blessed with enterprise . . .’ Now that he’d seen himself, he rose and switched off the TV just when, after surveying the audience, its camera returned to Swan Lake.

  He stretched, yawned and smiled at Agastya. ‘Why aren’t you venal? How do you survive on your ridiculous salary without being dishonest? . . . Some six months ago, they’d been planning a Roving Festival Of Tribal Arts for South-East Asia. A Cultural Delegation from Japan, Malaysia and Singapore’d visited us and I’d escorted them when they’d called on the Heritage Secretary, Harihara Kapila—he’s just returned here, hasn’t he, to Regional Personnel? The delegation was headed by a TV mogul from Singapore. We’d sent them off to Jalba, Agrampada and Sindhyachal and they’d predictably returned with heatstrokes and the shits.

  ‘However, they still had questions to ask—about the Heritage budget and the Archaeological Survey and transport bottlenecks and Buddhist monuments and overseas funding and local initiative and the Preservation Trust. Then, after a lull and out of the blue, “Mr Secretary, may I enquire of you a personal question?”

  ‘Kapila, whose wit’s given the world some of the deadliest headaches that it’s ever known, beamed and quipped, something like, “Oh, fire away,” said he as he snapped away his cigarette and faced the firing squad, inscrutable to the last.

  ‘ “What, Mr Secretary, is your basic pay?”

  ‘ “I cannot invoke the Official Disgraceful Secrets Act against our honoured guests . . . Eight thousand.”

  ‘ “Dollars US?”

  ‘Kapila chortled, not the sweetest of sounds. “No . . . rupees, my dear sir.”

  ‘A gasp from a lady member of the delegation; then, after a pause, “How is that possible, Mr Secretary? After over thirty distinguished years spent in the top ranks of the civil service of the world’s largest Welfare State, how can it be that you earn merely about sixty dollars US per week? Sir, please do not misunderstand our questions. We’re neither civil servants nor diplomats and yours is a bewildering country in more ways than one. One cannot argue that you are a poor nation because from this magazine—“ the TV mogul drew out from his camera bag a fat, slick The State Today—“I learn two facts germane to this issue, i) that in the last five years, an enterprising stockbroker of Navi Chipra has filched from the system more than three thousand crore rupees, which is almost one billion dollars US, and in those five years, the system didn’t wince even once, and ii) that within the last two years alone, eleven billion dollars have been laundered away from here to the US alone, and the system hasn’t hobbled even a step—how can the country therefore be poor? You also enjoy one of the severest tax structures in the world, so one cannot plead that you are a rich country with a poor government.”

  ‘ “Oh no, I’d instead assert that we’re a rich country, a rich government and a poor civil service . . . We’ve now touched upon a subject as old as Plato, namely, How can you entice the best brains of a country to take on the onerous task of administering that country disinterestedly and well? Answer: By getting them, the administrators, to tell themselves and one another, all the time, that they are the best brains, the cat’s whiskers, the absolute cream of the scum mainly because they perform their onerous task so disinterestedly and well. And who gets them to swallow their own gobbledygook? God, without a doubt. God is a first-rate bureaucrat, one of the best. In all matters, He sees the truth, but is yet to take a decision. We have high regard for Him. In almost all the homes of civil servants, you’ll find a puja room devoted exclusively to Him . . . Doesn’t it amaze you to learn that over three hundred thousand hopefuls sit for the Public Service Examination every year, of which just about a hundred are selected for the top slots? Ergo, there must be something in it! Job satisfaction is my salary! We get by on plain living and low thinking.”

  ‘Kapila stopped without warning, as was his wont, but continued to beam at them. The delegation clearly would have preferred him to go on discoursing instead. His beam was winning when the TV mogul tried for the last time, “A rich country, a rich government, at least one fabulously rich Navi Chipra stockbroker, and a poor civil service: who then, Mr Secretary, manages all that money?”

  “Some of it goes down the drain, of course—we being a Welfare State. Some of it goes—with the blessings of the Almighty—to a good many bank accounts located in several tax havens. The balance we leave to the guidance of God.”

  ‘The delegation’s Escort Officer from External Affairs was a bespectacled blob of oil, a disciplined envoy-in-the-making. I could read on his face an increasing concern for the sanity of the Heritage Secretary—to whom nothing happened, of course, for shooting his mouth off, or for losing his marbles, in front of a foreign delegation. Some sub-caste network shielded him, I gathered.

  ‘What do you think, my dear Agastya, of the hordes of bureaucrats who go off their rocker in the course, and because, of their official duties, and who consequently indulge in diverse kinds of conduct unbecoming of a civil servant? Is nobody, as you mandarins say, seized of the problem? The system—the work they do, doubtless—is to blame; the strain, the tensions, together with the futility, the absence of direction, the triplespeak, the bottomless greed of our middle
classes, certainly produce a lethal blend—but my point is, it is the civil servant’s preposterous salary that is at the heart of it! My God—if you’re honest, on your savings you can’t take your family of four out to dinner more than once a decade and you can’t fly them, say, Navi Chipra—the capital—Navi Chipra, on a holiday more than once in your lifetime, and you definitely can’t do both, if you’re honest.’

  Agastya wished to contribute his views. ‘I too have examples of plain living and low thinking. The plain liver is my Assistant Director friend who turned vegetarian because he couldn’t afford meat. The low thinker is my cop acquaintance, a Station House Officer who was dementedly corrupt because he contended that he had four daughters to marry off with dowries of over five lakhs each. Speaking of which, why doesn’t the Welfare State legalize dowries for the civil servants of its Steel Frame? It could then stop paying them salaries altogether.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Why not? You aren’t that young. Are you gay?’

  ‘No, not yet. But tomorrow is another day.’

  ‘You should marry early. As one grows older, one becomes increasingly reluctant to share one’s toilet with someone else. What’s kept you from marrying so far? Haven’t you yet found the dowry of your dreams?’

  ‘That’s it, exactly. My expectations’re always being thrown haywire by inflation and the new economic policy. Eight years ago, I’d more or less settled on marrying a Kelvinator fridge, a Videocon colour TV with remote and a Maruti 800 Deluxe car, red, with a.c. and stereo. How naïve I was! A noble savage, a rough diamond. Now, of course—I’m happy to say—that sort of simple-mindedness is a thing of the past. But today’s decisions suffuse me instead with a modern disquiet. A Peugeot diesel 309 or a Mitsubishi Lancer? The Samsung TV or the Whirlpool Washing Machine? The BPL, three-door fridge? A mobile phone? These tides that’ve to be taken at the flood—they’re upon me, I feel it in my bones. I’ll certainly invite you to the wedding.’