The Mammaries of the Welfare State Read online

  ‘I’m deeply sorry to have to tell you,’ Agastya, welcoming a familiar feeling, had intoned, ‘that Madam Mona left us this morning . . . no no, for her heavenly abode . . . a sudden heart attack in the room of a Member of the Regional Assembly. She’d gone there for some urgent dictation . . . I’m her ex-boss speaking. We’ve just returned from the cremation . . . the office is closed for the rest of the day as a mark of respect . . . yes, so sorry . . . as a keepsake, would you like a speck or two of her ashes? . . .’

  Innocent that he was, he’d never actually met a prostitute in flesh and blood before. Of course, he wasn’t quite sure about Madam Tina, and the two or three times that they met per week, he certainly didn’t expect her to show him some cleavage or let her hair down with a sigh or rub her bum against him or something; in fact, he didn’t much mind when she cancelled their meetings because of ‘urgent work that she had to chase up’. For one, the files that she brought to discuss with him concerned the headaches stuck in Defence or Industries or the Cabinet Secretariat, certainly not the problems towards solving which he could contribute anything significant. For another, she was cute, well-mannered—she never failed to call him ‘sir’ with every sentence—she smiled easily, making one want to say stupid things all the time just to see her teeth, she was anything but dumb—in fact, twelve times more efficient than everybody else in the office barring Kalra, and one afternoon, daydreaming behind his desk, Agastya had suddenly realized, while imagining Madam Tina in the nude, astride him, smiling above her shaved pussy and her small brown breasts and still calling him ‘sir’, that he was getting older and lonelier by the minute, and that maybe he should follow his father’s advice and marry before it was too late, because now he knew what too late could mean—a pass at a possible prostitute, for example, made in the heat of the moment and the privacy of his room, would make things too late, wouldn’t it, because slipping was so easy and welcoming, and once one had slid, it was too late to retrieve one’s place—not because one couldn’t but more because one simply wouldn’t want to.

  ‘Of course, one should marry in time, sir, there’s a time for marriage, and a time for orgies,’ thus Agastya to Dr Kapila, to distract him from the intense scrutiny to which he was subjecting their lunch bill, ‘to quote Ecclesiastes.’

  ‘This is most embarrassing. Our lunch has turned out to be more expensive than I’d expected—about a thousand rupees more, in fact. It’s all that whisky that you drank, I’m afraid. I’ll have to borrow some money off you—that is, if you carry that kind of cash around. This is terrible.’

  ‘Yes, it is. It comes of hanging round, sir, all the time in high places. One loses touch with the grassroots. In your case, I’d imagine that the problem’s compounded by the fact that you don’t drink and that you’re a vegetarian. Which is ironic, sir—come to think of it—that you continue to be a vegetarian even after you’ve lost touch with the grassroots.’

  ‘From your gibberish, I conclude that either you don’t have the money or don’t want to lend it to me. Well, say it straight out, man! I’ve handled crises before! What about ideas? D’you have any of those?’

  ‘Well, I’ve my credit card.’

  Dr Kapila transferred some of his intense scrutiny to Agastya, who continued, ‘Well, I mean, sir, don’t you? I have one in lieu of a bank balance, if you know what I mean. We’ve rented out part of our ground floor, you know, to the Regional Cooperative Bank—that scam dates from the era of the second Liaison Commissioner. The presence of the bank immediately makes Dr Bhatnagar a landlord and V∞IP in the eyes of its General Manager, who’s a twenty-first-century cow-belt Brahmin—download, CD Rom, online and all that—and me a deputy landlord. How much Dr Bhatnagar harassed the GM, poor man, when he first called on Doctor Saab to offer him his credit card gratis—without the annual service charge, we being landlords and V∞IPs, you see. I haven’t used mine yet because they always swish off with it somewhere, don’t they? That makes me insecure because the waiter leaves me with no receipt to prove that he’s taken it. What if he returns, denies that he has it and presents me with the bill again? In our system of things in the Welfare State, one produces receipts and records for everything—to prove when your domestic cooking gas cylinder was last delivered at your doorstep and whom you telephoned on such-and-such date. To mistrust is much safer, more realistic and professional. It doesn’t get you very far but all the paper that it generates makes you feel better, illusorily protected from the outrages of Fortune. Even when the records are faked and the receipts counterfeit, one still has a basis for writing letters and rushing off to court, for creating more documents and dusty off-white files.’

  Outside the restaurant, while they waited for the chauffeur and car to discover them, Dr Kapila said, ‘It’s ridiculous that I invite you out to lunch and you pay. I’ll write you out a cheque as soon as we return to the office. Or if you prefer, I can add the amount to your dowry. That’s why I kept the bill. You have thought of a dowry?’

  ‘Not the nitty-gritty, sir, not yet. But if you’ve decided to bequeath us your house, I’d be inclined to say no, thank you, sir. I’m not much of a suburbs person either. One always feels a long way from home.’

  ‘I should find out whether there are other contenders in the field for your fair hand. Mrs Bhatnagar reported to my wife quite emphatically that nobody so far’s made any alarming moves. Just some postcards in your dak, I gather.’

  ‘Would you like to set up an Efficiency Bar for your prospective sons-in-law? Whoever drinks the largest number of glasses of fruit juice wins. Dals and vegetarian soups will be allowed but soft drink cocktails frowned upon. Look, can you swing for me a transfer back to where the action is? It’ll be so much easier then to wean Sunita away from the bosom of the Gujarati venture capitalist.’

  ‘What’ll happen then to the BOOBZ programme here? Well, tit for tat, let me see . . . but you haven’t answered my question about my competition.’

  ‘It can’t be compared, sir, rest assured, to the annual Public Service Commission exam to enrol wise men in the Steel Frame. In fact, there’s only one old friend of my father, from his college days in Calcutta, who’s been trying for the last several years for either one of his two grand-daughters.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘As a first step, my father, the grand-daughters and I are waiting for him to die.’

  ‘Here it is. Thanks for the lunch. Can I drop you somewhere?’

  ‘Yes sir. Aflatoon Bhavan, if possible.’

  Where the Under Secretary for Demotic Drama has finished his tai-chi exercises and is sitting in the visitor’s chair before the desk, calm of mind, gazing at nothing. To his left and slightly behind him stands a suppliant, head bowed like those of the statuettes of the Magi in a creche. He is a Madna type whose face Agastya recognizes but whose name for the moment he can’t recall.

  Agastya to Dhrubo: ‘Why aren’t you sitting behind your desk?’

  ‘For a variety of reasons . . . One: it gives me perspective. Two: from here—or elsewhere in the room—on the occasions when I do answer the phone, I can with perfect truth inform the enquirer that there isn’t any response from the incumbent’s seat. Truth, you know, cannot be achieved by the weak. Three: I’m not sure whether my seat isn’t a piles-giver.’

  Dhrubo then turned to the suppliant and asked pleasantly, ‘Is there anything that you wanted to ask me?’

  ‘Yes . . . I wanted to know why the funds that your Department used to give my organization, Vyatha, have suddenly dried up.’

  ‘Gand Mein! Vyatha, I see! . . . What are you there?’

  ‘I’ve become the Number Two in the organization. You must’ve received from me at least one letter a fortnight over the last two months. My name is A.C. Raichur.’

  ‘In the euphemisms of one’s nonage, Number One was pee-pee and Number Two potty.’

  ‘We’re still headed by Rajani Suroor.’

  ‘Rajani Suroor . . . He often used to grouse that everybody else in
his organization had the capacity of a lazy cretin, that the only thing that all of you were any good at was cooking the books. I suppose I mustn’t speak ill of the comatose. Frankly, I don’t think Vyatha’ll get any more money from us until Suroor wakes up. There’s nobody left here, you see, to push and chase your file. I could, I suppose, but I simply don’t have the time.’

  ‘But how’ll I survive?’

  ‘Would you like some more tea? If you order it in your room, it’s more expensive and the service slower, but the tea’s better.’

  Dhrubo pressed a buzzer on his table. Save for a rack that held six rubber stamps, the table was scrupulously bare. A comradely silence, while he and Agastya gazed benignly at Raichur.

  Dhrubo to Agastya, while continuing to look at Raichur, ‘So how are things with you, friend?’

  ‘I am being plagued by my neighbour in the Transit Hostel, a Srinivas Chakki, to join him to foment a revolution.’

  ‘Ah yes. The plague. He once used to share this room with us.’

  Suddenly the door crashed open, as though it’d been kicked, and a large, bilious-looking monkey squatted in the doorway, right arm extended to prop the door open, munching peanuts with the other.

  ‘Hahn, Boss, three teas please, mine without milk and sugar.’ The monkey departed without a word.

  ‘Acute staff shortage, I see, Dhrubo.’

  ‘Yes. A combination of BOOBZ and the Minister’s office, which has been gobbling up staff like the giant in Jack and the Bean Stalk.’

  ‘When I was last here, I couldn’t help being struck by the large number of one-limbed, blind and deaf and dumb Class IV staff.’

  ‘Or is it only the lumpen, the Depressed Castes and the backward classes that lose their limbs and their faculties in accidents or at birth? How many one-armed, one-legged, Brahmin senior civil servants do you know? And are they any good? Do they—can they—deliver the goods? Does it matter if they can’t? Because isn’t it enough that the goal—of having a one-armed senior civil servant—has been achieved? Please don’t ask me these questions. Reserve them for the Under Secretary of the Kansal Commission—a Brahmin incidentally, four-limbed but with thick bifocal spectacles, though they haven’t yet decided whether they should reserve any Welfare State posts for the myopic. They could, you know, logically. The more sat upon you are socially, the more likely you are to suffer from other disabilities—of education, health, poverty—and surely the State should try to help you to the extent that you are disadvantaged. But if you ask me, we should first pump in all we’ve got into creating aware minds in healthy bodies, and then give everybody a level playing field.’

  Giving up, Raichur meanwhile had dropped into a vacant seat and sighed explosively. His breath carried to Dhrubo, whose nose twitched. A faint grimace distorted his fine features. ‘Garlic for breakfast and lunch, I see—and smell. Dragon-like, your breath, absolutely. Probably excellent for your blood pressure and your bowel movement, garlic, but it won’t help either you to widen your circle of friends or Vyatha to prise some funds out of us. I should’ve told the monkey—had I known earlier, had you exhaled those noxious fumes at me in good time—to crush a dozen cardamoms into your tea. He’s resourceful and quite helpful when in the mood. He was bequeathed to me by my ex-peon, Shri Dharam Chand, who was a tremendous asset, madly corrupt and madly competent—and had sedition brewing in his head all the time.

  ‘For instance, in one of the General Staff Meetings last year, Dharam Chand startled everyone by wanting to know why Aflatoon Bhavan had separate loos for Women officers and Women Staff, and Men Officers and Men Staff, and why the Welfare State should officially discriminate amongst its citizens in the matter of their bodily functions. I, as Official Spokesman of the Officers’ Cadre, had pointed out that from the stink in the entire building, one couldn’t really tell the difference between a conference hall and a canteen, leave alone an officers’ loo and a lumpen loo—and that the stink was part of the Official Strategy for Equality. Anyone who’s visited our men’s toilet on this floor would’ve seen that the number of the Physically Challenged amongst its users is rather high. That is Dharam Chand’s doing. Either we have Equality or we have Reservation. So he successfully led a campaign to reserve one lumpen loo only for the PCs. God knows where the non-PC lumpen staff goes for its ablutions—perhaps into the almirahs that line our corridors.’ Then, to an agitated Raichur, ‘Was there anything else?’

  ‘Sir, I—my family and I—have become beneficiaries—creations of the Welfare State. We—Vyatha—signed an agreement with you to receive a certain sum of money every month. We submit every quarter to you a report of our activities and our accounts. Even though we’ve been headless for a while, we continue to flap our limbs about on schedule. We’ve planned our activities for the next six months and sent you a copy for your final approval. We invite the Department—the concerned Under Secretary and above—to all our functions, theatre events, street happenings, protest shows and drama festivals. We also keep you informed of our weekly meetings. So I don’t understand why the udder’s dried up. Do you disapprove of the programme? We can do a street play around the opinions of Mr Dharam Chand, if you wish. We’re already working on one on the life and times of Rajani Suroor—it’ll be ready by the time he either wakes up or passes over. We’ve left the ending open.’

  ‘Who’s your Chartered Accountant? I can’t quite make out from the signatures in the accounts. Is it your mother or your wife?

  ‘My mother. I’ve time and again implored her to use her maiden name but she’s both—if you’ll pardon me—stupid and obstinate.’

  Dhrubo relented only when Raichur began to weep, finally proving himself to be one of the world’s losers. ‘Stop crying and snivelling, don’t be silly . . .’ Dhrubo opened a drawer and handed Raichur from it a sheet or two of off- white paper. ‘Here, blow your nose, wipe your tears. I’ll see what I can do. Deputy Financial Advisor Mrs Tutreja’s off to Ulan Bator early next month to coordinate an exhibition on Gotama and the Non-Violent Tradition. That’s when we’ll slip the file through. As a last resort, I’m afraid that I might’ve to request you to arrange a fire in one of the rooms.’

  Patiently, Agastya waited for Raichur to stop blubbering in simulated gratitude over Dhrubo’s hands (that he didn’t release for close to a minute for fear that he wouldn’t appear thankful enough). It never ceased to astonish Agastya that there was nothing in government that could not wait, nothing. Whenever somebody pressed for urgency, his hackles rose. Because then there was even more reason to wait. For the urgency was always to warp the rules to do somebody else a favour in return for a consideration or another favour. Be honest, Raichur, change the rules and the game, and redefine discretion to include dishonesty. Our consciences will then rest, our hearts won’t go thump-thump each time we note the possibilities of the fast buck in each file, so fewer cardiac arrests, substantial economies in medical reimbursement. Oh how often had he wanted to quit! Except that every time that he’d drafted a letter of resignation, a Pay Commission had been set up to hike his salary up by a millionth of a fraction. A raise, as Jesus said, is a raise. One can’t, you know, leave one’s mother’s lap. The outside world is much less funny and far more wicked. Out there, all of them would trip head over heels over the lowest efficiency bar.

  Firefighting on a War Footing

  To lessen the awesome amount of paperwork in the Welfare State, as a last resort, one government servant does sometimes request another to arrange a fire in one of the rooms of an office (not in his own, naturally, for that would be conduct unbecoming of him). A great many files are disposed of in this way. Numerous instances of this style of decision-making spring to mind—the Aflatoon Tower blaze of 1973, the Non-Aligned National Centre conflagration of 1977, the Senapati Place catastrophe of the same year, the Millennium Plaza disaster of 1983 and, of course, the Vesuvian eruption at the TFIN Complex that the Welfare State took twenty-one months to recover from.

  The burning down of the la
st was special mainly in the magnitude of the calamity. For the rest, like its predecessors, it provided, while it lasted, terrific entertainment to hundreds of spectators and after it had charred itself out, goaded the government to review for the tenth time the existent firefighting measures in its buildings.

  In the corridors of Aflatoon Bhavan, it will not be easily forgotten that to house some of their countrymen who had swarmed into the capital for the event, the organizers of the OYE OYE Happening had finally set up Camp One in the car park of TFIN Complex. Public Works had objected vehemently and recorded in a series of rapidfire confidential exchanges with the Department of Culture and Heritage that the entire happening was a grave security risk to the building.

  There were thus some four hundred ringside witnesses to the conflagration. The chosen visitors who’d never seen a washing machine before hadn’t ever seen such fireworks either. They gawked, wide-eyed with wonder and joy, their fireside entertainment abandoned, as the vast electric circuitry of the building gushed, at one corner, a shower of red, blue and green sparks that lasted half a minute, hissed menacingly as the fire careened down its wires and explosively spat out fifty metres away a large gob, a burning ball, that shot up some feet into the evening sky before descending in slow motion to smoulder and trigger off other pyrotechnics. Quite a few of the spectators believed initially that the fireworks were part of the official programme, were more awed by their grandeur than by the sightseeing of the day, were impressed by the thoughtfulness of the organizers and mentally noted that while they were there, they should explore the possibilities of other junkets. A loud collective gasp was heard right across Camp One as, all of a sudden, the windows of the east wing of the ninth floor belched out, alarmingly like a dragon, a huge tongue-like banner of fire. One of the representatives of the district of Madna, none other than A.C. Raichur, who by one of the campfires had been providing a Vyatha play with the background noises of a typically crowded lane of a red-light area the morning after, and who’d been distracted from the production of the sounds of women screeching at their kids by thoughts of Vyatha and how it could be milked—A.C. Raichur was distracted from his reveries by a deafening explosion from somewhere high up in the building that really sounded like one storey collapsing on to another, and that was accompanied by enormous, dense, noxious, infernally hot clouds of smoke and burning debris that whooshed out of the windows like the fallout of a revolution in hell. It impressed him so much that it was only on the day after that the idea popped into his head to include in his repertoire of simulated noises the impressive sounds of the father of all fires eating up a state-of-the-art building.