The Mammaries of the Welfare State Read online

  One of the many things that he’d liked about Daya was that she came from another planet; there existed nothing to connect her with the world of the Pay Commission, the Steel Frame, Interim Relief, Off-White Paper and the Efficiency Bar. With her, therefore, he’d felt less tired, less futile. On his last visit, however, he learnt that he should have known better; the Welfare State was truly everywhere and even those who sneered at its clumsiness condescended to suck at its dugs.

  Over mugs of hand-churned buttermilk and tiny Chinese bowls of raisins and blanched almonds, they had been chatting in their usual manner of this and that; Daya had been asking him whether he’d finally succeeded in slipping either a request for a transfer or a letter of resignation past his extraordinary boss and Agastya had been describing how her health food tended to fill him up like a balloon with gas and how therefore it was the one element of his old life that he didn’t miss, when she had sighed, tied up her hair at the nape in a bun and muttered:

  ‘As Senior Vice-President, Public Affairs, you’d be the talk of the town.’

  ‘Yes, but what if I quit my job and join you and then you die?’

  ‘Well, I’ll try to take you with me, if you like. I mean, really. And don’t eat so much if flatulence is a problem.’

  In a bit of a huff, she had swished off to the kitchen with the mugs and unfinished bowls. She’d returned, calmer and more determined, to suggest that if he gave her a copy of the letter in which he was going to ask for a transfer, she’d probably be able to swing it through Jayati Aflatoon.

  ‘Oh, I say.’

  Apparently, they had been dear dear friends ever since boarding school. Agastya must have looked disoriented because Daya had continued, ‘In the few minutes per day that you must take off from gazing at your navel and feeling sorry for it, have you never wondered what takes me to the capital twice a month? Apart from love of you, of course. Those hotel bills and plane tickets—it isn’t the hand of God, you know, that pays for them.’ But pretty close. Daya had turned out to be the Principal Media Advisor to the Executive Group of the Gajapati Aflatoon Centenary Celebrations Committee. The Executive Group was nominally headed by the Prime Minister but the buzz confirmed that it was his power-hungry, culture-loving wife-of-cousin who actually called the shots.

  She had got her friends and lovers into the group—Rani Chandra, Rajani Suroor, people she could work with. Culture was fun—tribal operas, carnivals of ethnic wear—one dressed to kill all the time for elaborate dos—not dreary and dusty like Land Reforms or the Agriculture Census. Her friends of course worked gratis, for the honour (the equity, in Daya’s words) and the fun of peeking at the behemoth from up close—and for the pickings that were to be had. Daya for example had an eye on the general elections (God willing) eighteen months away and the ruling party’s advertising and publicity plans for it. Jayati would get her cut, naturally, were Softsell to succeed in seducing the party of the Aflatoons into letting the agency manage its fabulous publicity budget. In its high places, the Welfare State could be quite exciting.

  And munificent. To celebrate the centenary of the birth of Gajapati Aflatoon, statesman extraordinaire, founding father and Guide of the Nation, the Committee had over a hundred and fifty crores to spend. In Parliament, members of the Opposition, feigning outrage, had yelled and bayed for over four hours (at the rate of fifty thousand rupees per second) on the subject of the gross extravagance of the Centenary Committee. Had the government again lost its mind? Would the Prime Minister care to explain why he had sanctioned ten crore rupees to combat the plague scare in Madna and fifteen times that amount to celebrate the birthday of his grand-uncle? Had he any plans for the wedding anniversary of his parents which was just round the corner? Why did the Centenary Committee have an incredible one hundred and fifty members? One fiddler for each crore—was that the idea? If so, why had the government discriminated against the backward castes? Didn’t they too enjoy the right to nibble? Why had the recommendations of the Kansal Commission not been implemented in the Centenary Committee? Did the government believe that matters of culture and heritage were above the grasp of the depressed castes? If the Committee truly comprised, to quote the Government Resolution that had announced it, the ‘best and brightest of our cultural firmament’, then how on earth could one explain the presence in it of Bhanwar Virbhim? And Madam Jayati Aflatoon and her friends? Whatever were they doing there?

  The Opposition had indeed enjoyed itself hugely. When Jayati Aflatoon’s name had cropped up, Member of Parliament Bhootnath Gaitonde had suddenly jumped up from his bench and baying for attention, stridden down to the Well of the House, waving a document that he’d hollered was the New Charter of Sycophancy of the ruling party. Nobody had allowed him to speak but that had never posed a problem in the House. Shrieking over the tumult, shrugging off the hands that reached out to physically shush him, overriding the commands from all quarters of the hall ordering him to keep quiet and cock up, clambering over the benches, dancing and dodging in the aisles like a football maestro his colleagues and adversaries who rushed up to show him his place, Bhootnath Gaitonde informed the Chamber of the People of the grand plans that the riffraff of the ruling party, led by the redoubtable Nominated Member of the Regional Assembly from Madna, Shri Makhmal Bagai, had chalked out to celebrate in a befitting manner the fiftieth birthday of the Prime Minister’s cousin-by-marriage, Madam Jayati Aflatoon.

  ‘Honourable Mr Speaker, sir, with your permission . . . this truly is a season for celebration. Centenaries, anniversaries, birthdays—may I remind the chair at this juncture that mine falls on January 14? Not that far away, particularly when compared to my centenary . . . this document in my hand is an advance copy of a pamphlet that is to be circulated for publication in the major regional newspapers and journals in my dear constituency of Madna. It purports to be the Official Programme of Action for the Fourth of November, the Official Birthday—like many of us in this House, she too has two, one official and another, usually preceding the official by a few years, actual, birthday—of the Mother Goddess of the Future. I skip over the other hysterical appellations bestowed on Madam Aflatoon—particularly since my colleagues in the Treasury benches would’ve coined some of them and do certainly use all of them in their daily morning prayers—and come to what precisely is going to happen on that glorious day.

  ‘One: The Regional Forest and Transport Minister has announced that the Forest Department will dig fifty J-shaped tanks in various forest lands for wild animals to quench their thirst at. If the tanks by any chance prove to be death traps for some of the larger animals—elephants, for example, his Department, the Minister elaborated, will request the Department of Environment to arrange for fifty mobile veterinary units to visit the tank sites every day.

  ‘Two: The Minister for Urban Transport has proclaimed that fifty women—presumably J-shaped—will be licensed to operate motorcycles as taxis in the regional capital. Men can ride pillion, he stated, on payment of a fixed fare. Any eveteasing will be most severely frowned upon . . . Three: The high-yielding tamarind trees that the Sapling Research Institute has developed and that produce over two thousand kilogrammes of tamarind per acre, the Agriculture Minister declared, will be rechristened Jayatirind and planted in fifty acres of land in different districts in the region.

  ‘Honourable Mr Speaker, sir, Four: Each of seven unnamed Ministers has promised to publicly eat fifty clay pots filled with mud. One of them, incidentally—the Ministers, that is—has been found to be HIV positive. It is not yet known whether their act of penance on a day of universal festivity will please Madam Aflatoon—or indeed whether it is a true expression of contrition and not simply an irresistible addiction to mud. The official version states that they are sorry—and want to show it—for having earlier celebrated the actual birthday of the Protective Angel by rolling down all the six kilometres of Cathedral Road, right up to the Gokul Nath Temple, where they’d had their ears pierced and had prayed for the speedy entry into acti
ve politics of the Birthday Girl.

  ‘Five: Ms Kathipalari, a chairperson of a Regional State Corporation, has promised that she will lead a—and I quote—“bevy of naked virgins decently covered with neem leaves”—to the Har Har Mahadeo Temple at the crack of dawn of the fourth of November to invoke the heavens into—and I quote again—”making Madam the permanent Prime Minister of the Welfare State” . . . May we take the last to mean that the palace intrigue amongst the Aflatoons is at last official? . . . Six:—aaaargh!’ He had stopped then, using as a pretext the second paperweight that’d struck his shoulder. Clutching it, groaning softly, he had collapsed onto a bench, happy with his performance, quite certain that it would have equally pleased the lobbyists behind it.

  Agastya of course wanted coffee and Dr Kapila nothing; while they waited for it, he asked Agastya whether he and Sunita had met recently. Just checking out the police report.

  ‘No, I don’t travel that often. Besides, the Gujarati venture capitalist and all that. I’m of course flattered that Sunita remembers me and has told you that she wouldn’t mind meeting me again, but I wouldn’t raise my hopes, sir, if I were you. She probably means that it’d be nice to chat over a drink.’

  ‘You drink far too much, if I may say so.’

  ‘Yes, sir. D’you think that it—the booze, I mean—reflects the quality of my life, its quiet desperation, so to speak?’

  He hadn’t ever regularly drunk in office hours before. He had picked up the habit from Kalra and Footstench who boozed in their office rooms because otherwise dealing with Dr Bhatnagar would have cracked them up. Agastya discovered that they were right; when drunk or stoned, looking and listening to Doctor Saab and his family actually became quite fun. When sober, however, he’d feel depressed at the thought that Dr Bhatnagar, simply by being who he was, qua Dr Bhatnagar, had ruined and continued to ruin the health of all his office staff. Agastya had even wanted at times to write anonymously to the National Human Rights Commission.

  Kalra kept the best booze behind his chair, locked in the official Godrej steel almirah along with the fancy photocopier paper, the extra packets of felt pens, tiny emergency polythene bags of breath-freshening cardamoms and cloves, and spare copies of Dr Bhatnagar’s electronically-typed curriculum vitae. Agastya had christened the Godrej almirah the office Efficiency Bar. He had also helped Dr Bhatnagar’s cv reach its present form.

  ‘Agastya, in the past few months, you’ve begun to know me as a man of many interests, not the typical stuffy bureaucrat at all. Tell me, for my bio, under Hobbies/Recreation/Interests, how would you do justice to my—I’ll be frank—myriad-faceted mind? . . . no, no, not immediately . . . here, take a copy of the bio away, reflect on it at home and give me a feedback by Thursday afternoon. Can’t be rushed, you know.’

  Agastya’d finally come up with: Reading, Writing, Golf, Walking, intelligent, stimulating Conversation, followed by long periods of reflective Silence. After Reading, Writing, he’d had an urge to add Arithmetic, but had sternly controlled himself. Impressed but reluctant to show it, Sherni Auntie had okayed it the same evening.

  In the career of the mandarin of the Welfare State, the Efficiency Bar bobbed up at some stage or the other. It had to be negotiated if he wanted an increment in his salary, a promotion—to get on, in short, To decide the matter, Administration usually checked, among other things, his annual confidential reports of the last five years. If the verdict’d been Good or above in all five, the mandarin’d cross the bar.

  So far so good, except that in the language of confidential reports, Good meant Ordinary/Average/No Great Shakes/Nothing to Write Home About/Hardly Efficient/Barely Passable. There were usually five categories in which bureaucrats could place their subordinates, namely, in ascending order: Bad, Average, Good, Very Good and Outstanding. After fifteen years of written debate and counter-comment, Personnel, wishing to be positive, had changed Bad to Poor and Very Good to Excellent. Only the brave and demoniacally industrious civil servant, the sort who waded through files even on Sunday afternoons and didn’t notice that his children snapped at him—only he ever used the categories Poor and Average to rate a subordinate, because when he did, Personnel freaked out and, having at last some work in hand, increased fourfold the sod’s paperwork. It deluged him with demi-official letters and printed annexures labelled Secret. Had he intended his grading to be retributive or corrective? Did he have any objection to the assessee being informed of his superior’s estimate of him? Could it be presumed that for the assessee to be rated so, there must have been, in the course of the year, many occasions when he must have failed to deliver? On those occasions, had the demoniacally industrious superior officially informed his subordinate of his disappointment with him? Had the superior kept an official record, minutes of some kind, of all these occasions? If not, had he, the superior, any document or written proof of the year that his assessment was neither caprice nor malice? Personnel had to keep the welfare of its assessed personnel in mind, hadn’t it?

  To avoid being trapped into an eternal correspondence with Personnel, most civil servants therefore used the standard, unwritten, euphemistic code in writing the confidential reports of their subordinates, by which the slippery performer was judged to be Good and the disastrous Average. Everybody who spoke the language knew the code, of course, so that when names were being circulated for certain posts, one could insist on—if one wanted to, that is to say, depending on whom one wanted to pick—candidates with five Outstandings or above in the last five years. The grade above Outstanding did exist to fit into the language of the code those who were, simply, outstanding but who obviously couldn’t be described so because—it may be recalled—in the language of the code, Outstanding simply meant Good. How best to describe the truly outstanding civil servant was left to the creative abilities of the Reporting Officer who, to make matters clear, usually began with: The assessee is more than outstanding, and then let himself soar, She is as stainless as steel . . . a veritable lion of the jungle . . . Yours Truly found her more utterly reliable than the Undersigned . . .

  The code also operated to sniff out the odours of corruption. In the confidential report, one couldn’t of course record: The assessee-bugger’s been raking it in for years, so what’s new? because then Personnel would make one regret it—at least till one’s first crippling heart attack; instead, for the madly venal, like Chanakya Lala for example, those whose improbity had achieved the status of myth, so that one could construct proverbs and maxims around them—in the reports of civil servants like those, in the column marked Integrity (Use a Separate Sheet if Necessary), one was advised to write: Nothing Adverse on Record, which, for those who knew the language, meant, Boy-o-Boy! For all those bureaucrats about whose honesty one just wasn’t sure, one wrote: Above Reproach as per all reports. Tradition hadn’t bothered to dream up phrases for any other category.

  Since the code was unwritten, it could at a pinch be ignored as though it didn’t exist, which it didn’t, officially speaking, being unwritten. Thus in the ease of Dr Bhatnagar, for example, his lobby would interpret his five Goods in a row to mean, clearly, that here was a candidate who was rock steady, persevering, not flashy, salt of the earth, absolutely. When valued along with his sound grasp of management techniques and his multidimensional range of Hobbies/ Recreation/Interests, his lavish dinners and his generosity with his office organization, staff and services with anyone who mattered—when thus viewed as part of a larger arsehole, his confidential reports made Dr Bhatnagar a sure winner, a pole vaulter above any efficiency bar.

  Like other characters of his type, he pounced like a gecko on a moth on any office case that Madam Tina had successfully brought to a close and that was therefore ripe and ready to redound to his credit. She reported directly to him four to five times a week, alone, behind closed doors, in sessions of half an hour each. Agastya didn’t think that he pawed her. Kalra confirmed his opinion. ‘Too scared, with Sherni just a hotline call away. Can’t get it up but
he leaks into his pants when he sees Tina and that’s enough excitement for the day.’

  Dr Bhatnagar liked to listen to good news from Madam Tina, the success stories that could be transformed into a set of coruscating faxes. He left the crap and the bad news for Agastya, naturally, he himself being so senior and all that. Thus, to him she would report, for example, that the Regional Industries Secretary’s Laminated Security Pass for All Central Ministries had been signed just that afternoon and had been collected by her within minutes of its being issued, and that the Foreign Exchange Clearance for the Regional Tourism Minister’s trip to the Reunion Islands had been sent by the Ministry of Finance to External Affairs that very morning and that yes, she had procured a photocopy of that confidential letter. For Dr Bhatnagar’s office, the most valuable news, naturally, concerned not the doings of the regional government in general but the personal fortunes of its more important individuals.

  From the very first day, the office had made it clear to Agastya that Madam Tina was a whore. ‘You should be informed, sir,’ Kalra had firmly announced the moment the door had shut behind her, ‘that she’s a P-R-O.’

  ‘Ah, I see, like our colleague with the foot stench, the same Department—though his toejam, I imagine, couldn’t be doing very much for our image.’

  ‘No sir, he’s our PRO, our Public Relations Officer, but Madam Tina is our prostitute. We have only one. It’s a small office.’

  ‘What’s her payscale?’

  ‘That of a Senior Office Superintendent. She’s received two out-of-turn promotions in the last three years. The rest of the office hates her. You’ll receive many phone calls for her at your number. As Deputy, you should put a stop to it. A question of the dignity of office.’

  Sure enough, that first afternoon, Agastya had received a phone call for Tina, except that the caller had called her Mona. A harsh and very horny male voice, as though he had his erect cock in his other hand.