The Mammaries of the Welfare State Read online

  In the twenty-one months that the TFIN Complex took to recover from the father of all fires and the firefighting measures of the Public Works Department, the happenings of the Welfare State occurred elsewhere, in the sports stadiums, auditoriums and multi-media centres of the city, but not with the old zip and vigour. In that time, Bhuvan Aflatoon successfully fought off a threat to his Prime Ministership from an obscure ghost of the extended family, a virtually-illegitimate pretender of a third cousin who headed a splinter in the party, was a thorn in its flesh (and a bloody prick to boot) and whom Bhuvan Bhai packed off to the North-East Council as its Executive Governor. He wasn’t as pleased, however, with the astonishing failure of his think tank, in that year and three-quarters, to come up with a suitable, melodious, pronounceable, Sanskrit name for TFIN Complex. He had received suggestions, certainly—Srishti, SamvadBhavan, Varta, Sanchar—but they’d all sounded unreal and alien, partly because he could barely understand Hindi, leave alone Sanskrit—though doubtless he could hardly have his ignorance of both the official language and its mother bruited about. Till the time that one of the light bulbs clicked on an acceptable name, proposed Rajani Suroor to Bhuvan Bhai, would the PM like to refer to TFIN Complex as P-C-Om? Privately, of course.

  In those twenty-one months, one Aflatoon Centenary, a quiet affair in memory of Trimurti, blended into another, altogether more glorious and politically more explosive, that of Gajapati, statesman extraordinaire (to quote the blurb, crafted by him and attributed to his amanuensis, on each of the back covers of his six-volume memoirs), thinker, writer, sage, savant, philanthrope, cricket enthusiast and founding father of the Welfare State—and unfortunately for Bhuvan Aflatoon, only a distant grand-uncle of his. Try as he might, because of a handful of Aflatoons in between, Bhuvan Bhai couldn’t quite get the effulgence that the centenary celebrations reflected off the immense bald dome of Gajapati to shine on him. Jayati of course hadn’t been born an Aflatoon but she’d become one when she’d married Gajapati’s younger grandson, one of the continent’s great jerks, a polo player and a lover of horses with the mind of a thoroughbred, haughty, pure and simple. But she herself was Raw Sex Incarnate and Bhuvan felt warm and laughed a lot whenever he was with her. When she’d suggested, smiling into his eyes, that she slip into the saddle at the Centenary, he’d welcomed her with open arms, silently pointing out to himself that he’d credited her with more intelligence. As a strategy for an entry into politics, Culture sucked, and while sucking, emitted wrong signals, because only the closet bisexuals dipped into Culture, didn’t they, because Home Affairs was far too sweaty and macho, and all the rest of the junk—Rural Development, Energy, Planning, Industry, Water Resources—simply too dry and unsexy. Well, Jayati’d fit in because the inner circle’d whispered a couple of times that she, to use the phrase that they used to giggle over in school, swung both ways and that moreover, her appetite was that of a corrupt civil servant of the Welfare State, quite bottomless. But man, what a bottom.

  To inaugurate the renovated TFIN Complex, a befitting event, it was felt, would be the first full-blown meeting of the Gajapati Aflatoon Centenary Celebrations Committee. To fix a date, the Secretariat of the Committee put up a file through the proper channels—to the HUBRIS Minister, Bhanwar Virbhim, who consulted his astrologer. The eighteenth of November, decreed Baba Mastram. May kindly see and approve, pleaded the Minister in a note to Madam Jayati, who did but added, May we discuss the agenda? I wanted to do something special for poor Rajani Suroor.

  With reason. Much had happened to him—apart from the slide into coma—in the months between the two centenaries. He’d grown in official size, as had his orbit of influence, in keeping, as it were, with the comparative stature of the two Aflatoons in question. He’d also moved laterally from Bhuvan’s court to Jayati’s, displeasing Bhuvan not just a bit. Old bedfellows and dormitory-mates that they were, he of course didn’t stop frequenting the PM’s office; he simply began showing up just as often at the headquarters of the Gajapati Aflatoon Centenary Committee, exploiting to the hilt his official post of Advisor there. A busy man, using, with the industriousness of a bee, his clout to push his own theatre group into every nook, and cranny of government. His street plays were thus used by Welfare to propagate its new Integrated Female Child Nourishment Project, by Public Health for its Early Plague Detection Strategy, and by Rural Development for its revolutionary Revised Bank Soft Loan Programme. Vyatha, needless to say, performed for a pittance—and rather well. In return for board, lodging, transport and a handful of rupees, its enthusiastic amateur actors successfully concentrated their energies on spreading the messages of the Welfare State. Everyone was surprisingly happy with the arrangement—the Ministries because Vyatha, when compared to radio and TV, to which it was an inconspicuous adjunct, was a damn sight cheaper and far more effective, Suroor because his group gained some terrific goodwill and publicity, and the actors because they travelled to, and performed in, outlandish places.

  Like Madna, for example. Being quite a performer himself, Suroor journeyed with Vyatha as often as he could. Street plays helped him to unwind and rejuvenate himself. Of course, after he was knocked about on the head by Makhmal Bagai’s hoodlums some eleven months ago, the pace of his life had really slowed down—in fact, virtually stopped. Only his heartbeat and a couple of electronic graphs on spasmodically-functional video screens kept him away from absolute zero. For the entire period, he’d been comatose in Madna and not because of the town. His body had been politicized, for Bhanwar Virbhim, on Baba Mastram and Bhupen Raghupati’s counsel, refused to have him shifted out. It was Madna that’d crushed the skull of the esteemed Advisor, declaimed Bhanwar Saab at public forums and whined he before Jayati and the PM, and it should be Madna where he—the esteemed but comatose one—must recover (or rot). For political and personal reasons, Bhuvan Aflatoon agreed to let the brightest of his light bulbs rest in peace in that town. Serve the quisling right, thought he in his black moments, but whenever his heart melted and he missed his groovy, long-haired dorm-mate, he’d helicopter the best specialists out to the middle of nowhere to check on the goodly frame of Rajani Suroor.

  After each visit, the specialists submitted to the PM’s office an impressive series of documents, reports, assessments, charts, prescriptions and diagnoses and to their own-organizations their more modest hotel bills of the Madna International. He’s steadily improving, sir, they concluded, jargon edited to suit addressee, the bumps on his head’ve healed completely, the spinal column now looks terrific, the collar bone, ribs and shoulder are almost as good as new, the last cat scan and cerebral angiography show nothing abnormal, his hypostatic pneumonia’s responded very well to our antibiotics and is now a thing of the past, he has the heart and blood pressure—if you permit—of a healthy, happy fifteen-year-old dreaming of a good game of football. All he now needs to do is to wake up. A mystery of science, really, why he doesn’t.

  ‘Perhaps he’s fed up,’ mused Bhuvan Aflatoon, ‘and needs the rest.’

  Along with Rajani Suroor, the portion of the Madna Civil Hospital that he inhabited, and certain parts of the town, improved too—marginally, fitfully, it is true, but improved, nevertheless. A special cubicle, for one thing, was erected for him in the corner of General Ward Two that stood furthest from the loo. Off-white distemper on its walls, disinfectant, white tiles, new wiring, tubelights that worked, scrubbed floors that’d changed colour like the sun breaking through, electricity available almost—certainly, officially—round the clock, not that he was ever dragged out of his coma by a fan that stopped whirring. Someone declogged the drains, the rat population diminished, the stink lessened. The monstrous garbage dump at the hospital gates was shifted to the lane behind the municipal school, thus, within a week, since old habits die hard, creating two dumps in place of one. Naturally, because of the number of V∞IPs who streamed in and out of Madna to look in on Rajani, the two routes from the helipad and the railway station to his bed were mapped out and cleane
d up, up to a point. The bedpans were removed from the corridor, but the authorities could do nothing permanent about the paan-spittle stains on the walls or the hawkers and the cattle in the lanes. Life must go on, they would have argued, no matter who slips into coma.

  He was sorely missed, initially. With time, however, because he neither died nor awoke, he became just a bit boring, a fixture of the town, like the new, unfinished boundary wall of the Collectorate. At the same time, the months in a sense augmented his stature—mainly, no doubt, because of the number of his visitors, V∞IP pilgrims at a shrine, and made him, by a mythopoeic process, almost a figure in some hoary tale, dormant till the magic moment broke, perhaps with a kiss or—mindful of the sexual traditions of the country—even a touch, the spell that bound him.

  No one, it should be clarified, kissed any part of his body even once in those eleven months. For one, he looked too grey. Besides, he had all those tubes, wires, pipes and bottles attached to him. Jayati and Daya might have, had they visited him inconspicuously, without a cortege. Jayati missed him even professionally. He’d been full of ideas. He’d known the system, where the money was, how to steal—clearly a personality who was going places even after he’d arrived.

  ‘Tell me, Jayati—’ to him, she was Madam only in public—‘Gajapati Aflatoon officially was a great lover of Hindi, wasn’t he? A motive force behind the Our-Own- Official-Language Policy, etc? It’s a facet of the Great Man that the Centenary Committee could underline, highlight, whatever, because you could then lay your hands on some of the budget of the Official Language Caucus. Even five per cent would fetch you some crores . . . yes, thanks, it is quite a brainwave, isn’t it? . . . we wouldn’t have to do very much, I imagine, just copy what each Department does for Hindi every year. Organize a Hindi Week, in fact . . . usually in winter, out in the sun, with a public address system, really quite festive, with vendors of oranges, peanuts and aphrodisiacs mingling with the Section Officers and Senior Assistants . . . all non-Hindi-walas in the central Ministries are invited-coerced to participate in a Hindi essay competition and the winner reads out his entry before his colleagues. Terrific entertainment . . . Under Secretaries rolling in the aisles, clutching their stomachs . . .

  The germ of the idea of exploiting the funds of the Official Languages Wing of the parent Department of the Committee for other, officially-acceptable purposes had infiltrated Suroor rather early in his tenure as Advisor to the Committee. In his third week in his office, he’d been trying to figure out anew the monstrous organizational chart under the glass top of his desk and’d stopped once again at the smiling face of the Director (Official Languages), a pleasant, slippery man who, Suroor knew, reported to him but whose precise day-to-day tasks and responsibilities remained enveloped in a cloud of unknowing. The chart stated that the Director was being paid to implement in the Committee the official language policy of the Welfare State.

  ‘Yes, but what does that mean, exactly?’ asked Suroor of his favourite Under Secretary, Shri Dhrubo Jyoti Ghosh Dastidar, who had nothing to do with the subject. ‘This Director guy gets up in the morning, drinks two cups of tea, reads the newspapers, maybe uses the office car to slip off to the local temple to pray for his daughter’s success in her school exams, returns for breakfast, gobbles up his alu parathas, mango pickle and dahi, and with a mind as clean and quiet as a blackboard on the first morning of the new school term, turns up at nine forty-five at Aflatoon Bhavan to start his day—and then what? He sits at his desk, puts his lunch box on the side shelf, summons his PA to prioritize his personal work—and then? What does he do?’

  Sure, he’d asked him directly too. The Director (Official Languages) had been quite taken aback.

  ‘Prepare for our Hindi Week, sir,’ he’d elaborated after a minute’s thought.

  ‘The essay, the elocution and recitation competitions, a play, film and non-film songs, and a dozen speeches for the Minister, the Chairman, the members, me and you. But the other fifty-one weeks of the year? What goes on in your room?’

  ‘Well, sir, in the time left over from preparing for the future, and analysing the previous, Hindi Weeks, we translate into Hindi the Parliament Questions, correspondence, orders, circulars, resolutions, notes, memorandums and Unofficial References of the Committee.’

  They’d been conversing, of course, in Hindi. The Director thought it proper to speak nothing else in office In a sense, he was being paid, he reasoned with himself, to set an example, to hear himself enunciating in the official tongue. His newly-arrived temporary boss, though a bit theatrical, was perfectly fluent too—with a deep, resonant voice, moreover. They should get together in the after-hours for a poetry reading—rum, cashew nuts, kebabs, deathless Urdu couplets, that sort of thing.

  ‘But you yourself, personally, don’t do any translating,’ Suroor’d countered, a bit startled by the Director’s laziness. Dammit, the bugger doesn’t even have the energy to invent a set of tasks for himself. ‘I see from this chart here that you have with you two Deputy Directors, four Assistant Directors and six Senior Translators. What do they do? Put up for your approval their translations of memorandums?’

  ‘Yes, sir. And their ideas for Hindi Week.’

  ‘Well, I’ve some too.’ Vyatha thus slipped into the programme that year and considerably improved it. Demure, disciplined, it was ready to shoulder all the low-profile, rural, small-town stuff. It was quite welcome, given Rajani Suroor’s clout. Equally naturally, once he fell into his long doze, the standing of his troupe plummeted correspondingly, particularly since it’d been at one of its performances that, to use a phrase popular with the coterie, a joker of a happening had snicked Suroor’s balls—and cracked his skull.

  Headless Vyatha remained, flapping its limbs about in the corridors of Aflatoon Bhavan, wandering around in the dark, stumbling into cupboards and monkeys, looking for direction, succour, inspiration and funds. By the time that the money started flowing again—in a sad trickle, a cruel parody of the munificence of the golden age, barely enough for Raichur’s phone bill and petrol costs—a few more months had passed and the drifting about in Aflatoon Bhavan had become habit. Thus, when the Ministry began to warm up for the grand meeting of the Gajapati Centenary at TFIN Complex, and the panic started to set in, and hundreds of hands—and more important, feet—seemed to be needed every hour, to dash off to the printer’s, zip down to Jayati Aflatoon’s office, run around in circles in the city hand- delivering invitations, careen around in intersecting circles hand-delivering corrigendums, and scurry up to the Zonal Municipal Office for permissions to put banners up across some streets, the headless staff of Vyatha came in handy. They were quite happy to be peons for the Welfare State. They were after all paid for their labours and their routine was unpredictable and undeniably dramatic—hardly routine, in fact.

  Thus when Agastya Sen looked in on Shri Dhrubo Jyoti Ghosh Dastidar on official work, the Under Secretary’s chamber was crowded with the amateurs of Vyatha waiting to be packed off on errands. They stood and sat about in different parts of the room with professional listlessness, like actors out of work, who’d given up waiting for their cues. Raichur sat opposite Dhrubo, breathing heavily, diffusing garlic into the air. Dhrubo himself was on the phone, strongly advising his auditor against seeing some striptease show.

  They were always very glad to see each other. ‘I’ve come with a complaint from Dr Bhatnagar. The agenda that you’ve sent him for your jamboree-meeting has a pale green cover. He’s discovered that you’ve another agenda—or rather, the same agenda with a yellowish, glittering cover, which is meant for Additional Secretaries and above. He wants that one in exchange. He’s very offended.’

  ‘The yellowish cover was supposed to be golden. It was my symbolic protest against the Centenary. All that glitters is not gold, you follow? I told the printer a hundred times, golden, golden, golden—but I hadn’t reckoned with his symbolic protest. He apparently spends only his spare time at his printing press. His real vocation
, profession, hobby and passion is trading in gold, the prices of which’ve fallen like a diver off a ten-metre board. We are pissed off with his cavalier treatment of us. I’ve put up a stinker of a note proposing that we blacklist the printer from all future dealings. Yellow, yellow, dirty fellow, begins my note. So how’ve you been? . . . Have you met Raichur-ji? The heart, soul and—I might add—breath of Vyatha . . .’

  ‘Yes, of course . . . How d’you do? . . . your room’s a bit too crowded now for your tai-chi gyrations, isn’t it? What d’you do nowadays for peace of mind?’

  ‘There’ll always be room for tai-chi . . . Tell me, what should we serve at our Centenary meeting? The last circular from the Finance Controller specifies two Britannia Marie biscuits and tea per head if the meeting is chaired by a Joint Secretary or above. Cashew nuts, potato chips and colas are allowed only if the diplomatic missions are invited. We haven’t decided yet between Bangladesh and Finland.’

  ‘Cashew nuts are good. Everyone’ll turn up if you mention them in your letter of invitation. Dr Bhatnagar, for example, won’t have breakfast that morning. An economy measure.’

  ‘Everyone’d better turn up. The invitation in fact is in the form of a veiled threat, phrased in masterly prose, if I may say so myself. You see, the meeting is a grand event for a variety of reasons. One: the re-inauguration of TFIN Complex. Two: the first reunion of the committee under Jayati Aflatoon, her coming-out occasion, as it were. Three: she’s planned, with an astrologer’s approval, a huge cultural rite, like a religious mega-happening, for Raichur’s ex-boss. Therefore, the meeting just has to be held in Hall One, which seats two thousand. It goes without saying that the auditorium has to be packed choc-a-bloc with bureaucrats taking notes, carrying files, ferrying memos; otherwise it’ll be a terrible insult and Bhanwar Virbhim, flattened by Jayati’s vengeance, will find himself back in Madna, perhaps alongside Rajani Suroor. Whom haven’t we sent invitations and agendas to, that’s the question. Everyone’s on the hit list—Energy, Rural Development, Civil Supplies, Defence Production, Parliamentary Affairs, Food Processing, Labour . . . Our own Department’s unofficially shut on the eighteenth of November because everyone, absolutely everyone, has to attend the meeting. Even I’ve had to change the timing of my second tai-chi session to accommodate the centenary. Would you like to be there?’