The Mammaries of the Welfare State Read online

  His sensualism was legend, of course, but officially, in all his years, he hadn’t suffered any disciplinary action except for his frequent transfers—each to a post of substantial clout, patronage and personal gain, angled for with ferocious concentration and guile for months on end; from Deputy Director (Information and Public Relations), he’d moved to being Regional Joint Secretary (Home Affairs, Police Personnel); after four crucial years as Private Secretary to the Chief Minister (the eight-month-long wheedling for which had been so intense, so focused, as to be almost sexual), he’d arranged to become the Managing Director of the State Industrial Development Corporation; he’d spent two years as the Zonal Development Coordinator because he’d needed pretexts to officially wander up and down the West Coast states looking for nice tracts of land to invest in; when he’d learnt of these hectares south of Pirtana that were being developed as teak farms, he’d begun lobbying to become Settlement Commissioner but just then, the government—his government—had fallen.

  Totally befitting its waste and futility—Raghupati’d felt when he’d been Liaison Commissioner at the Centre—that the Welfare State, out of its contingency funds, had even forked out for the occasional prostitute that he’d slept with. They’d been organized by his Personal Assistant of those days, Satish Kalra, a Man Friday whose resourcefulness and amorality any Navi Chipra smuggler-builder would’ve been proud of. The expenditure on those encounters with the whores—a salesgirl from Mallika Arcade, a telephone operator from Aflatoon Bhavan, a part-time compounder from a private blood bank—had been passed off as having been incurred on liaison meetings with other state governments, on tea, Marie biscuits and so on.

  Fondling himself, Raghupati coldly recollected that the part-time compounder had hinted—simperingly, with just a veneer of obsequiousness—that she’d be ready to forgo the fees for her visits of an entire year in return for permanent employment in any lowly capacity, in any of the several reserved categories of jobs, in any of the million warrens of the government.

  ‘Don’t be idiotic, I can’t take a bribe from you.’ Outraged, yet close to laughter, and at the same time obscurely aroused by the notion that he’d periodically possessed, squeezed and nibbled a body which’d all the while hidden a mind so plebeian, socially so inferior that the ultimate that it could aspire to were the drying-up dugs of the Welfare State.

  She’d claimed that her name was Tina, and that she came from Mayong, in the North-East. She’d been short and cute, with wiry, shoulder-length, rather dirty hair. She’d always carried condoms in the zipped side pocket of her handbag, an indication of her preparedness that he’d liked. She’d looked sceptical about his outrage and had forthwith stopped scissoring his waist (his ‘solid waste’ is what DIPRAVED Kapila had always called it: ‘learn to manage your solid waste, I say’) with her shapely, hairy legs.

  ‘Look, as per BOOBZ, there’s a complete ban on all new recruitment, no matter which Department or Ministry, Centre or regional government.’ He’d then rocked her a couple of times with his hips, to distract her from her silly conversation and get her back to work.

  ‘No, not in all Departments—there isn’t any ban on the police, or in the emergency services, hospitals, firefighting.’

  The Welfare State hadn’t been paying her either for her views or for the mulish determination that’d changed her face, and he hadn’t cared for the ease with which she’d stopped calling him ‘Sir’ or ‘Saab’ in bed, so he’d rammed into her for another fifteen seconds, and then declared in farewell, ‘You know, our country’s not progressing because of people like you only.’

  The following week, she’d sent him the first of her two anonymous letters on the subject of employment in the government. She’d signed both Tina Munim, but since that hadn’t been her actual name, he’d considered the petitions to be simply two more in the endless list of unsigned letters received every week in numberless offices across the land.

  The language of the letter had been the usual gibberish and the matter naive suggestions on how best she herself could fill up any of the vacancies in various posts reserved for candidates from the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Depressed Castes, Backward Clans, Suppressed Groups, Repressed Classes and Other Underprivileged Phratries. She’d attached her c.v., a page of preposterous lies.

  He’d been stupefied. As always at such moments, blood had rushed not to his head, but to his crotch. The pages in his lap’d begun to dance in his twitching hands. Controlled by passions larger than himself, he’d unzipped his pants and tucked the sheets in between balls and tool. He’d come first over the c.v. During the second coming, God had hollered in his skull, ‘Yes! This, this is what you’ve longed to do for years on every memo, note, receipt, reminder, report, paper, statement, return, application, minute, annexure and file! Yes, blobs of spunk on dust and cockroach shit! On an obsequious, hand-written, illegible, incoherent submission of a debatable claim, supported by a sheet of lies about the claimant’s life! When someone grovels for your favour and you can jerk off on his entreaty—that is shakti! If there be Paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.’

  Kumari Lina Natesan and her complaint remained on Raghupati’s mind all day. ‘Her conduct is unbecoming of a civil servant,’ he grumbled to his PA Shobha. ‘Please connect me to the Regional Principal Secretary, Personnel—and give me the line before his PA gives him the line, okay?’

  Dr Harihara Kapila had recently taken over as the Regional Principal Secretary, Personnel. Raghupati had to endure his wit for the first five minutes before he could circuitously enquire what had become of his devious efforts to have Miss Natesan transferred, however temporarily, to Madna on plague duty. His question led only to a second explosion of KJs— ‘the conduct of a civil servant is unbecoming, I say, only when he can’t rise to the occasion!’—(a KJ was the Civil Service epithet for the Kapila Joke. Rebel wits had even mooted once, at one of the quieter meetings of the Civil Service Association, that the State should frame a KJEA, an Endurance Allowance payable to those lionhearts who worked with Kapila).

  On with the day. Raghupati summoned Moolar, one of his few Assistant Commissioners, to direct him to find out everything about mobile phones and to organize two for his official use. Moolar clacked his dentures in agreement and left. He was an efficient man.

  Raghupati had known him for seventeen years, from his tenure as District Development Officer in Tekdigaon, the waters of which region had been reputed to be so full of harmful minerals that no native inhabitant had retained his teeth beyond the age of thirty-five. He believed that he’d never forget the vision of his first mammoth crop-cutting- training meeting there, during which, after lunch, dozens and dozens, row after row, of patwaris, Circle Inspectors, Block Development Officers and tehsildars (including Moolar), almost as one, had removed their dentures and rinsed them in the glasses of water in front of them.

  ‘The mobile phone system hasn’t yet reached Madna, sir,’ Moolar reported half an hour later. His upper denture threatened to leap out and he paused to restrain it. ‘At present, mobile phones can be used only at the Centre and some of the regional capitals, sir.’

  Raghupati had always been alert to God’s communications with him. Of course, you fool, you’re being told to gift Baba Mastram not a phone, but a set of dentures. The present would also hopefully take care of the Baba’s halitosis, usually a lethal deterrent to any sustained intercourse with him. Raghupati hoped that Mastram’d be pleased.

  He was delighted. In return, on Thursday, just before he left for his second session with the dentist, he advised Raghupati that he could now go ahead with Chamundi.

  ‘This week, sir, is propitious for the transfer of your heat energy to anyone with whom your skin is in physical contact. If you don’t transfer, your surplus heat energy, finding no outlet, might attack your vitals.’

  During lunch-hour, in his puja room, naked and elated, with his tool rising like a beast from sleep, Raghupati simpered at Chamundi, grasped th
e nape of his neck and dragged his head down towards his crotch. The boy, quick like an eel, jerked his head away. Blood swamped Raghupati’s reason. He thwacked the boy’s nose with the back of his hand. He was both inflamed by the jolted expression on Chamundi’s face and moved by the blood that began to dribble out of his nostrils. A half-thought muddled him for a second—this was karma, whatever had this jewel of the sewers done to deserve this? An arousing pity made him fumble with the buttons of Chamundi’s half-pants, and then with the worn elastic of his peculiar, mustard-coloured wearunder. The boy remained will-less, spellbound like a prey before its predator while Raghupati sat down on the edge of the pedestal of an idol of Ganesh and tugged Chamundi to him by his penis. A shaved pubes the colour of toffee and a black, fat tool. He tweaked back its foreskin and didn’t notice the rich rings of crud beneath it before his tongue slithered out to tease the pink head.

  Aaaaaarrgghhhhhhh. The pong of Chamundi’s penis flung him back against Ganesh. Ggrrraaaaaaghhhhhhh. He wanted to vomit. His mouth, his nostrils, his tongue reeked of the accumulated smegma of weeks, months. He glanced up at the boy. Behind the blood on his face lurked a simper of nervous embarrassment. While getting up, almost mechanically, Raghupati picked up the brass incense stand and lashed out at Chamundi’s nose. The boy staggered back, stumbled, cracked his skull against the wall and slumped to the floor, where he remained in a heap, still. Blood started to trickle out from his curly hair. Raghupati lurched out of the puja room.

  In the bathroom, he gargled with Listerine for a minute or two. Bit by bit, as the smell of the mouthwash overpowered the stench of smegma and whatever-else-it’d-been, his rage shrivelled up and his sanity returned to him. While contemplating himself in the mirror, instinctively pulling in his tummy and puffing out his tits, he continued to mutter to himself, ‘Cleanliness before godliness . . . These leeches of the Welfare State . . . Discharge your dues to your creator . . .’ and other such disconnected phrases.

  Exhausted, with the tang of Listerine now burning his tongue, he shambled across to his bedside table for paan masala. Abruptly, he remembered a vignette from the days when he’d been Assistant Collector at Koltanga. His neighbour in the Civil Lines Colony had been a doctor whose name he for the moment couldn’t recall, a trainee at the local Primary Health Centre who had whiled many of their evenings away with tales of horror culled from his daily routine.

  ‘The sarpanch swaggered into the Health Centre this morning without his goons. I was surprised to see him alone. He had two subjects to discuss with me, he said. One concerned the conduct of his cousin, a frightful drunkard who, the evening before last, had implored his wife, an Anganwadi worker and the family’s single wage-earner, for some more cash for hooch and’d been refused; in a frenzy, he’d snatched up their two-year-old daughter and hurled her down on the ground. The child’s skull’d split open like a pomegranate. The sarpanch wanted me to say in my post-mortem report that she’d died of Japanese encephalitis. He’d already taken care of the witnesses. They wished to stay on in their village, he said.

  ‘ “I’m sure that you can work out the details,” he added graciously, “meanwhile, I’ve this other problem—” and he lifted up his kurta, tucked it under his chin, and hoisted up both his dhoti and his drawers to exhibit to me a penis the foreskin of which wouldn’t retract.

  ‘Raghupati Saab, the Welfare State must launch, on a war footing, the new IRHBTFP, Integrated Rural Hygiene Beneath the Foreskin Programme; as Assistant Collector, you must propose this revolutionary scheme to both the Departments of Health and of Rural Development. The logo for the project could be the rubber nipple of an infant’s feeding bottle and the slogan, Are YOU Sterilized Enough to Be Sucked? Do you suppose that our Muslim brethren would protest against the programme on the grounds that it’d rather shrewdly route huge funds towards non-Muslims alone?’ Dr Srinivas Chakki had then sighed. ‘Development is a tricky business.’

  Just then, the Mutesh cassette ran out. Raghupati welcomed the silence because it’d help him to think. He plodded back to the puja room. Chamundi hadn’t stirred. The blood beneath his forehead, though, had clotted. The offending penis, Raghupati noted, was now dried up, black and sad. Chamundi was innocent and sleek in coma, unless he was dead, in which case he was innocent, sleek and problematic. Should he feel his pulse, Raghupati asked himself, or his bum? All at once, his bedside phone buzzed, loud and harsh; it never failed to make him jump.

  He frowned, looking back through the doorway of the puja room at the phone. This was unbelievable. He’d instructed Murari and that lot a hundred times that he was never to be disturbed during his meditation. For them, never meant twice a week. The phone buzzed again. He strode across to it in a fury.

  ‘Sorry to bother, sir, but Honourable Collector of Madna on the line, most urgent, sir.’ Murari pushed the extension button down before Raghupati could start his abuse.

  ‘Hello . . . hahn . . . Mr Raghupati? . . . Good afternoon, sir, this is Agastya Sen, how are you? . . . I’m sorry that I haven’t yet been able to call on you, sir and I was wondering if I could later this afternoon . . . How kind of you, thank you . . . nothing that can’t wait—except that it’s driving me up the wall and preventing me from discharging my duties calmly and objectively . . . one can’t, you know, from near the ceiling . . . I gather that you also handle Divisional Accounts, sir . . . it’s a matter of the Travelling Advance that I took from my earlier office, of two thousand rupees for the train journey to Madna . . . the Accounts Officer here at the Collectorate tells me that I have to pay back to the government the bank interest that I might have earned on the Advance for the period that I didn’t use it to buy my train ticket with . . . Yes, sir, only you can waive it . . . waive sir, as in—or rather, not as in wand, sea and hair . . . would four-thirty be fine, sir? I have some kind of inspection at the Madna International Hotel at five . . . Thank you, sir . . . Good-bye.’

  The Magic of the

  Aflatoons

  The Madna International is a decent-enough hotel and the only fully air-conditioned one in town. Winter—when its air-conditioning is likelier to be functional because the Electricity Board traditionally restricts its nine-hour power cuts to peak summer—is usually a popular season of the year with visitors who have work in the satellite factories, quarries and paper mills that dot the district. Usually, but not this year—perhaps because of the plague. For whatever reason, Rajani Suroor and the players of Vyatha found rooms at the International quite easily, even at a concession. Its proprietor, Dinkar Sathe, has always been accommodating, almost philanthropic, with all representatives of the government. Suroor was practically one—an agent, certainly, even if not an official representative—for more than one reason. The amount of money that Vyatha procured from various branches of the government, for instance, to diffuse through its street theatre diverse statements of official policy, and the ease with which it milked the State were both impressive. So was the facility, the rapidity with which doors in high places opened for Suroor. Government, of course, Sathe understood to mean power; whether legitimate or illicit didn’t bother him. Its representatives therefore included any one who could wave the wand that—poof!—made obstacles disappear. Thus in his eyes, Sukumaran Govardhan, for example, the lord of the illegal traffic of the Madna jungles, could well be the Minister for Forests and Environment—though considerably more powerful.

  Because of his faith in the wand of power, its wielders, whether permanently in office or temporarily in jail, were for Dinkar Sathe akin to magicians. Illusionists, tricksters, larger-than-life distracters, the best of them were on the ball, knew exactly what was going on—who could be milked for how much and for what in return—and enacted their roles with more gusto and skill than Suroor’s roving players. Naturally, since they earned infinitely more for their pains.

  All would agree that Madna’s first magician is Bhanwar Virbhim, ex-Chief Minister of the region and soon-to-be Cabinet Minister at the Centre. Dinkar Sathe has known
him for about two decades, has observed him climb with mounting deference, has liberally contributed to both his personal and party coffers on more than one occasion and has received in return, over the years, diverse significant concessions and favours—the first bar licence in the town, the permission to add two floors to his hotel despite the existence of stringently prohibitive Municipal laws, a plot of land, at a throwaway price, that had originally been reserved for a children’s park, the suppressing of an unusually accurate and dreadfully embarrassing story in the local press about bonded labour on his teak farm, the protecting of his cartoonist brother from the fury of Virbhim’s son over a series of devastating lampoons, and so on. Even though Virbhim has performed for the past few years increasingly at the Centre, he and Sathe keep in touch, naturally, because Madna is the Minister’s patrimony.

  His only son too, Makhmal Bagai, is well known to Sathe and is a frequent visitor at the International. Neither father nor son has retained his original caste-revealing surname for the obvious reason that for the legerdemain of politics, one travels light. En route, they have picked up, like a thousand others before them, whichever names they’ve liked the sounds of. It is standard practice in the Welfare State. Indeed, its best example would be the nation’s extended first family, the Aflatoons.