The Mammaries of the Welfare State Read online

  The Liaison Suite of course was the set of rooms on the second floor of the office building where the Commissioner threw his official parties when they, the rooms, were not occupied by some V∞IP from the regional government. Kalra had explained that during the Golden Age, the Liaison Suite had been built and christened by the-then Commissioner Bhupen Raghupati. A rare combination of vision and drive, he’d needed a place where he could fuck in peace the whores that were procured for him. Since he paid for them out of the office contingency fund, it was only fitting that the State pay for the place too.

  At these official dinners, alcohol greatly increased Agastya’s appreciation of Dr Bhatnagar’s qualities, prominent amongst which was his skill at name-and-designation-dropping.’It is with pride, sir,’ Agastya had declared after a few weeks under his tutelage, ‘that I wish to report that I’m learning to pick up your droppings.’ Thus, through the evening, whenever he felt Dr Bhatnagar’s pink eyes on him, he bent his head and stuck his bum out at the correct sycophantic angle and began to nod his agreement with whatever bilge Doctor Saab was trilling out at that moment.

  ‘Yes, it was Geneva—Captain Chandra was rather keen on the post, but you know, to be frank, he’s an ex-airlines pilot, so low IQ and all that, and to quote Ambassador Saleykhan—he has too much ego-sheego. In fact, Ambassador Saleykhan’d proposed my name—Ambassador Saleykhan—’ it was clear that Dr Bhatnagar liked to pronounce the word ‘ambassador’. He lolled it around on his tongue like a dildo and his mouth remained open in an O for a second after each emission—‘I speak of ’85, when I was learning the ropes in Geneva and Ambassador Saleykhan was being tipped for Brussels—for which I’d been sounded out, of course—it’s no secret that Ambassador Saleykhan was rather grateful that I’d refused—declined, I should say—my sabbatical, you know, at Harvard—so Ambassador Saleykhan and I’ve been together for donkey’s years—brothers-in-arms, partners-in-crime and what have you . . .’

  Usually, for close to a week after each official dinner, Dr Bhatnagar would withdraw into the Home Ministry to confer with Sherni Auntie, to analyse and dissect each move and utterance of the evening and thus to tot up his chances of a rosy future. Periodically, of course, in those days of retreat, he’d order Kamat the Residence peon to phone and harass the office.

  ‘Bakra Saab’s on his way over. An emergency, Kamat said. Must’ve run out of food.’ Gupt the Hindi stenographer thus interrupted Agastya’s and Kalra’s session before the telly. Gupt’s post was an Official Language Requirement. He doubled up as Kalra’s PA because he had absolutely no work. ‘Bakra Saab wants an in-house meeting immediately.’

  In-house meant Agastya, Footstench, Madam Tina, Kalra and a couple of others. A disgusted Kalra refused to go downstairs to receive Dr Bhatnagar—a policy requirement—and dispatched Gupt instead, certain that the sight of the PA’s PA beside the car door would infuriate the Doctor no end, but he was past caring.

  If there was a point to Dr Bhatnagar’s meetings, it was usually well-hidden. They tended to be long, incomprehensible, soporific pep talks centred around his cherished Management themes: the Modernization of Administration, the Techniques of Negotiation, the Human Factor: Means Or End? The Will to Change, Strategies for Objectives and the Bottom Line. Someone, usually Kalra, took notes at each of these sessions. They generally stopped all of a sudden, most often when Dr Bhatnagar began to feel hungry. Each of them ended in a flurry of telexes and faxes, aimed at whoever it was that week that Dr Bhatnagar wished to seduce by the power of his positive thinking.

  Just a handful of comatose subordinates around his battlefield of a desk, but one could actually nod off under his nose if one wished to, he being too senior to stoop to officially notice such insubordination. He didn’t much like any interruptions of his flow and all questions had to be reserved for the end. Not that his inferiors had worked out any tactics beforehand, but skill and experience alone had devolved upon Footstench the responsibility of encouraging Dr Bhatnagar to meander on for the duration of the session without disturbing the peace. At every third or fourth phrase therefore, Footstench’s goatee would bob up and down in agreement, or his black eyes would gleam in admiration, and even when, during the post-lunch sittings, they threatened to close and his rhythmic rumbles of approval began to sound like snores, he’d still continue to emit his steady murmurs of appreciation: ‘ . . . absolutely . . . we’ve to keep an ear out for their demandments . . . yes, to come to the nuts and bolts of your grassroots . . . get down, of course, on the brass staff . . .’

  The Wednesday of the near-debacle of the West Indies, Dr Bhatnagar surprised his in-house team with his black wig, his soft contact lenses and his new go-getting manner. ‘If four baskets of the very best mangoes have to be picked up from the West Coast and personally deposited in Hyderabad for a marriage positively by Sunday, what’s the best way to do it?’ The new Dr Bhatnagar had come straight to the point of the meeting, except that his in-house team took half an hour to realize it. Finally, Agastya suggested that they fly Sarwate the Dispatch Clerk out for the mission because in any case, he’d be disappearing a week later, on leave, to get married in Hyderabad itself. If they packed him off by plane—at the State’s cost—and a few days earlier, it’d be the ideal wedding present from the office. Everyone applauded the idea. Dr Bhatnagar actually said, ‘Bravo’ and shot off a fax to the Additional Secretary, External Affairs, repeated to about six other people: Apropos our emergency telecon this morning at my residence re Operation Hyderabad Mango, am completely in control and charge of the situation. Consider mission accomplished. Any other fruitful interface desirable, please convey the needful. Regards.

  The very next day, the new Dr Bhatnagar sent Footstench off on the first flight after the mangoes. Kalra later explained that the Doctor—that is to say, Sherni Auntie—had had an afterthought. Apparently, the Additional Secretary had been so pleased with Dr Bhatnagar’s promptness that, at the latter’s suggestion, he’d upped the baskets of mangoes to five, the fifth being a gift for the Doctor himself. However, on Wednesday afternoon, while reviewing his plan of action, Dr Bhatnagar had suddenly realized that the last basket would take a long time to reach its destination since Sarwate the Dispatch Clerk would be away for a month. In a panic, he’d phoned the Home Ministry on the hotline, the red phone on his desk that Kalra had been instructed to use only to contact Sherni Auntie.

  From the official dinner to the wig and contact lenses, Operation Hyderabad Mango, all in all, cost the Office of the Liaison Commissioner about eighty thousand rupees. Money well spent, since Dr Bhatnagar got his UN assignment shortly after. It made Agastya curious to see the UN, where the civil servants of the world congregated; the scope would be breathtaking.

  The costs of the wig and contact lenses were borne by the Welfare State under Medical Expenses. They should not, strictly speaking, be computed along with the expenditure on Operation Hyderabad Mango since they belong to a larger strategy. They were in fact the fallout of a policy decision of the Home Ministry, taken keeping in mind the highest level, namely, Prime Minister Bhuvan Aflatoon, at that point about twenty months old in office, and his coterie, youngish, full of ideas, forward-looking. Whatever would their expectations be from the few successful, go-getting, experienced, yet mentally alert members of the Steel Frame? No spectacles, certainly, just sleek reading glasses. A decent-looking pate. What else?

  No black Ambassador cars, because it’d been rumoured that during his autumn break on one of the Nicobar islands, Bhuvan Aflatoon had referred to his motorcade as a group of fat black dung beetles too stuffed with shit to more than crawl. There must’ve been some truth to the rumour because it will be recalled that not long after Dussehra, the motorcades of the V∞IPs of the Welfare State switched from black Ambassadors to steel-grey Contessas.

  What else was in? Signing files, looking at papers, like the PM only on Thursdays so that decisions could be announced on Fridays and effected—things could get cracking, in Dr Bhatnagar’s
words—on Mondays. On Thursday afternoon, therefore, Kalra on the intercom to Agastya:

  ‘Good afternoon, sir. About the resignation letter that you handed in, Bakra Saab wants to know whether you’re serious or whether you’re fed up.’

  ‘I’m fed up. It’s my mother who’s serious.’

  ‘Well, he’s finally decided not to do anything about it, except that he isn’t yet sure whether he should tell you. You see, he and Sherni Auntie have been advised not to rock the boat until the UN assignment comes through. Thus, in the past few days, on top of that enormous burden of the affairs of state that rests on his wide, steady shoulders, has come to perch—and rock—in his words, a new Beast of Anxiety. Am I rocking the boat when I send a fax to our High Commissioner in Australia congratulating her—inter-alia—on her fifty-fifth birthday? When I allow Sherni Auntie to have a second office car for the day since my revered mother-in-law is visiting? When I sign the letter forwarding, three weeks late, our Performance Budget, to the government? And when I decide to attend in person the General Body Meeting of the Gajapati Aflatoon Centenary Celebrations Committee—with Shri Agastya in tow, of course, in case I need someone to glare at when somebody more senior glares at me—which of my decisions can rock the boat? . . . To quote him again, in any decently-managed organization, one is paid, as the years pass, for the width and steadiness of one’s shoulders.’

  To resolve the uncertainty of his resignation, Kalra then advised Agastya to seek an appointment with the capital’s happening astrologer, Baba Mastram, though he also warned him that getting five minutes could well take six weeks. The Bhatnagars had tried for a month and had succeeded only when Doctor Saab had accepted Kalra’s suggestion that he himself speak to the Baba’s PA, because the latter had made it clear to Kalra each time that they had chatted, that he didn’t much care to speak to suppliants’ PAs. It was the Baba who’d advised the Bhatnagars in sonorous Sanskrit, in a three-minute session that had cost them a donation of twenty thousand rupees—not to rock the boat, to allow Luck, as it were, to clamber aboard.

  The office, to a man, prayed for Dr Bhatnagar’s departure. It had prayed the previous summer too, when the UN had let it down. ‘The rains won’t come,’ Footstench, a minor oracle in his own right, had proclaimed, ‘until he goes.’ Sure enough, last year’s monsoon had been catastrophic for the agriculture forecast.

  Agastya wondered whether, as a sort of surrogate offering to the gods, to egg them on, as it were, into egging on the UN, he should gift Baby Bhatnagar a couple of his sweaters. The original idea, of course, of presents to the Bhatnagar family on appropriate occasions had sprouted from the good Doctor himself. Its expression varied from the subtle—‘Agastya, don’t phone me tomorrow before nine forty-five. It’s my birthday, you see, and we’ve organized a rather long, early morning puja’—to the circuitously direct, as in Kalra to Agastya:

  ‘Good afternoon, sir. D’you remember the reddish-brown turtle-neck sweater that you wore to work on Monday? . . . Doctor Saab admires your taste in clothes and thinks that it would be a gracious gesture if you were to gift that sweater to Baby this week—dry-cleaned, of course. It’s a good week for Baby to receive, so the stars foretell Sherni Auntie. If you do, he might even consider forwarding your letter of resignation with his recommendation . . . no, just trying his luck, I think, seeing what he can grab before he departs. In return for the sweater, he also offers his counsel: “Don’t quit, don’t be silly. You haven’t married yet, your worth on the market’ll vanish without a trace, like hot samosas and chutney on a cold, rainy day. With your useless English Literature-civil service background, you’re unemployable. Out there in the jungle, your upbringing itself will be an insurmountable Efficiency Bar.” ’

  Dr Kapila finished his lunch quite early and while patiently watching Agastya gorge his, chatted of BOOBZ, how essential it was in theory and how impossible in practice. After they had ordered dessert, easily and smoothly, like a knife cutting through crap, he introduced the subject of his daughter. At one moment, they had been debating gulab jamuns versus mango ice cream and when Agastya focused next, the moot point had become an attractive, single, young woman with a mind of her own.

  ‘I want her to marry—whoever she wants, but marry. Then she’ll stabilize. After which, she can do whatever she wishes—her abandoned Ph.D on the influx into the Punjab of labour from Bihar, her Bharatnatyam—at which she showed promise—even her silly TV job, whatever. She isn’t stupid, you know. She’s tall, beautiful and intelligent, even if it’s her father speaking. She was shortlisted for the Rhodes scholarship in her final year in college. At the last interview, at the Golf Club, I’d sat outside in the lobby and prayed that she wouldn’t make it, because it would have upset all my plans for her. Do you think I’m old-fashioned? . . . But she’s precious, and there’s a time for everything in life, a time for fun and a time for responsibilities. I asked her whether she’d like to sit the Civil Services exam; instead, she joined some incredible fly-by-night television production company called TV Tomorrow. It pays her per month more than what I earn per year after twenty-six distinguished years in the civil service. I must say that there are times when I don’t understand the economics of the modern age. Nor its outlook . . . We—my wife and I—have built a rather nice house for ourselves in Gulmohar Vihar—do you know it? It’s a bit far from the centre of town—fortunately, I say—fresh air and all that, breathing space—but my daughter simply refuses to stay with us for more than the occasional weekend. It’s embarrassing in company, she contends, to reveal that one stays in the suburbs and with one’s parents. To quote her, a total loss, yaar. She’s rented a place the size of a paperback novel just off Cathedral Road. I suspect that her rent is paid by her Gujarati venture capitalist friend. Sunita’s conduct has made her mother more religious than ever. She’s changed her name too—Sunita, I mean—to Kamya Malhotra, after a character in some modern epic or myth, I forget which.’

  ‘Would you still consider me eligible, sir, if I were to quit the government and join a small ad agency as its Senior Vice-President, Public Affairs?’

  ‘You’d be less attractive, but not entirely worthless . . . which organization were you thinking of?’

  ‘Softsell.’

  ‘But the DGP’s office reported that after your transfer to the capital, your ardour for that lady had considerably diminished.’

  ‘On the contrary, sir, to cite St Augustine, absence makes the fart go Honda. We’re still thick as thieves, a chain gang, Hell’s Angels, absolutely.’

  As usual, Agastya exaggerated without meaning to. To be sure, whenever he and Daya met, Casper still flew with the old vigour and froth, but because several hundred kilometres now separated them, they simply met less often. They wrote occasionally and frequently wished they hadn’t. They were both by nature composed, self-centred and unhappy. They thought of each other only in fits and starts, often guiltily, puzzled at the fickleness of their desire. They would have both liked to return to the old life—the romance by night, the yoghurt with honey at three in the morning, the happy film music through the open French windows—but they—Agastya in particular—were too dazed by the minutiae of their daily lives to act, to move towards recapturing their past. Their letters to each other reflected their sadness and confusion only indirectly, that is to say, they never straightforwardly described their feelings. Daya for example never wrote: ‘Look, cut the crap, let’s be together because then we both feel very nice, and despite—or perhaps because of—the differences in age, temperament and upbringing, we should give a future together a chance. Therefore, please ask the Welfare State for a transfer back to where you belong.’ Her letters instead were altogether of a different style.

  August,

  That last visit of yours wasn’t such a grand success, was it? . . . you’ve definitely become thinner, weaker and more depressed (oh-oh, she means Thursday night, when she could come just once because I asphyxiated and had a heart attack with my nose in her pussy. H
ow selfish of the darling, how come she hasn’t blown me even once, and we haven’t fucked—in the sense of in-out, in-out, the earth moves, in-out—even once in all these nights that we’ve spent together. We’ve never even met by day. I’m not even sure that she and I can be called an affair. Which modern oracle can I ask?) . . . Please give me a week’s notice of your next trip and I’ll set up an appointment with my doctor, a homoeopath with an absolutely luminous intelligence. Yours is a condition that can be corrected. I’ve read up a bit on your problems and am convinced that Dr Thadani is the person for you. I don’t know if you’ve ever consulted any specialist, but even if you have, please meet this luminary. I’ll accompany you and if you like, wait outside while you chat with him. Please, August, you owe yourself a chance. Shape up! Why do you allow the inertness of your official life to seep into the personal?

  What else is new? Quite accidentally, I reread Wuthering Heights last week and was very impressed by Emily Bronte’s sexual energy, by its (obvious) transformation into a creative energy and by its transference onto the elements, the very landscape, of the book. Heathcliff is nature’s power wonderfully anthropomorphized, of course . . .

  Agastya shuddered at the prospect of their next assignation.

  Moreover, she was right; his last visit hadn’t been such a grand success. Of the three days that he’d been there, she’d had a female friend—a large, Caucasian Anand Margi whom Daya had addressed as Lazy Susie—staying over two nights and sharing her bed, hai Ram, so what was one to infer? Lazy Susie and Agastya hadn’t hit it off. She’d found August, his nickname, rather droll and him in general ill-informed when he, to make polite conversation, had asked her whether she, as an Anand Margi, liked dancing with the skulls of wolves. Later, Daya had told him that Lazy Susie had disclosed to her that the vibrations that she, Lazy Susie, had received from Agastya had been ‘cold, sneering and anti-life’.