The Mammaries of the Welfare State (14 page)

Tetracycline is difficult to come by in Madna as well. Overnight, its dealers and retailers have made it as rare a commodity as statesmanship and probity in public life. To distract himself from it, the Collector of Madna, Shri Agastya Sen, usually flits to any one of his several other insurmountable problems. They come in all sizes. Wishing to write a letter to his friend, Daya, in Navi Chipra, for instance, he asks Chidambaram, his Reader, ‘Can I get some decent writing paper? Something I wouldn’t be ashamed of?’

A late morning in winter beyond the enormous vaulted rooms of the office. From the stone corridor outside, from amongst the pigeons and the water coolers, drift in the rustle and shuffle, the occasional cough, of a hundred petitioners waiting to gnaw the Collector’s ears with their diverse tales of tortuous, enervating injustice at the hands of a dozen different departments. The man-size windows are open and welcome in a variety of smells and the warm soporific air. They haven’t had any electricity since the morning. Through the window on his right, Shri Sen can see, a hundred metres away, the compound wall of the Collectorate coming up. The premises had never had one and thus, every day for over a century, had welcomed, kept open house for, the cattle of the district. Generations of cows, bulls, calves, oxen and goats had come to love the grass and the off-white paper, the serenity and openness of the Collectorate compound. Pushing
for the wall had been one of his predecessor’s first acts on taking over the post some thirteen months ago. The wall was now two feet high, not likely to rise any further in that financial year and effective against everything but the urchins and the goats. The puzzled, disoriented cattle now wandered up and down Junction Road and into Aflatoon Maidan, holding up traffic and disturbing courting couples. The view from the window was silent and sunny, in spirit like a graveyard in an Ingmar Bergman film.

Shri Sen leans forward to note the comparison somewhere on his enormous desk for use in his letter to Daya. Meanwhile, a child, with his half-pants down to his knees, crosses his field of vision, hopping from spot to spot to look for paper to wipe his arse with. Madna faces an acute and chronic water shortage. The subject has been noted in Shri Sen’s
To Do
list in his very first week in office.

The Collectorship of Madna is the seventh post that he has held in eight years. He is quite philosophic about the law that governs the transfer of civil servants; he sees it as a sort of corollary to the law of karma, namely, that the whole of life passes through innumerable and fundamentally mystifying changes, and these changes are sought to be determined by our conduct, our deeds (otherwise, we would quite simply lose our marbles); only thus can we even pretend to satisfactorily explain the mystery of suffering, which is a subject that has troubled thoughtful souls all over the world since time immemorial. It is also a hypothesis that justifies the manifest social inequalities of the Hindu community.

His
To Do
list is actually an enormous black diary full of cross-references and coded marginal scribbles. The cattle, for example, haven’t been struck off yet; they’ve instead been relocated from April (that deals with problems pending within the Collectorate) to the September-to-December section (that is reserved for the police). The black diary is not the official diary of the Welfare State for that year. It was one of several
gifted to Shri Sen in an eventful first week by various local businessmen, builders and industrialists. He chose it chiefly for its generosity of size and layout.

In the
official
diary of that year, he intends to maintain his dhobi account at home, which clothes sent, how many lost, how many torn, burnt, how much due, how much to deduct. The official diary was meant to have white pages and a chocolate-ish cover, but it looks more or less uniformly grey. It is carried about by the losers. Three million-plus copies are brought out every year by the Commissioner of Printing, Paper and Stationery for the Welfare State at a printing cost of a hundred rupees per copy. He employs three hundred thousand people and amongst other activities, supplies all the Departments of the State with, amongst other things, files, file covers, file boards, file boxes, notepads, envelopes and paper of dizzying sizes, sealing wax, pins, clips, tags, blotting paper and bottles of red, blue, green, black and blue-black ink. However, he cannot produce paper white and thick enough for Shri Sen when the latter wants to write to someone outside the Welfare State.

A pause in the day, in the never ending lurch from telephone call to unwelcome visitor to personal work to meeting to review to site inspection to social function to public puja to official inauguration to ghastly crisis to office files to telephone call. Just then, a goat looks in enquiringly at the window. It is a frequent visitor; it pops in sometimes to chew up some paper and crap between the almirahs. ‘Fuck off, you,’ orders the Collector. It does. This is power.

Every now and then in his career, once a week on the average, Shri Sen regrets his decision to join the topmost Civil Service of the country. On the other days, when he reflects, life outside the government appears tense-making, obsequious and fake. In contrast, within the Welfare State, he feels that he has at last begun to trip without acid—with his feet six inches above the ground, yet with an ear to it,
walking tall, on a permanent high. There have been moments in the last eight years when he’s caught himself thinking that he could quite easily have worked in the Welfare State for free. Of course, given his salary, he is doing almost just that.

Chidambaram sidles in at that point. Generally speaking, the more he sidles, the less welcome the news. ‘Sir, milk- white paper not readily available in Stock, sir. I have sent the boy to Gaindamull’s Stationery Mart on Junction Road, sir, to purchase . . . and there was a telephone call from the Circuit House, sir. Shri Bhootnath Gaitonde has left and is on his way here to meet you.’

All of a sudden, Shri Sen feels an urge to smoke a cigarette. He hasn’t smoked even one in four years, but the desire still assails him every now and then. He manfully resists, remembering that he has the Welfare State to thank for helping him to kick the habit. For smoking and spitting paan all over the place have been banned by law in all the offices of the government. It is a regulation that Shri Sen has enforced with considerable enthusiasm and vigour, commanding the police to arrest and harass, in their own inimitable way, all offenders. The Welfare State has certainly helped the fascist in him to bloom.

As for dope, though governance couldn’t wean him off it, it did manage to influence his mode of its intake. A Collector couldn’t very well be seen rolling and puffing away at a joint, so he began to brew cannabis in his morning pot of tea and stuff pellets of hashish into his post-lunch paans. Paans were eminently Establishment—why, the Chief Revenue Divisional Commissioner had more than ten a day. He had a plastic wastebasket beneath his desk into which he periodically spat paan gob and residual cud (this disgusting habit was not an offence; if you kept your red paan spittle to yourself and your wastebasket, you were law-abiding).

Those in the know will corroborate that dope that enters one’s bloodstream through one’s stomach hits later, hits
harder and stays longer than that through the lungs. Thus, in the course of his day, when Shri Sen wasn’t on a permanent high, it could be presumed that he’d wandered further up—as it were, onto Cloud Nine. Moreover, during the past eight years, he’d discovered that cannabis and hashish, steadily imbibed, helped marvellously to lessen the pain and discomfort of his senselessly strenuous swimming and jogging sessions. Dope, he was convinced, was the antidote to much of the suffering of the civil servant. Thus, in his black diary, in the February section that was devoted to
Possible Ideas for Essays and Articles on the Welfare State,
he’d noted:

Cannabis and Piles: Didn’t de Quincey and Sherlock Holmes have haemorrhoids? Please find out. Also, it is extraordinary how many civil servants have piles. In my eight years, I myself’ve met Kulmohan Singh, Killer Venkita, Shengupto, Singhvi and Tutreja. The Fellowship of the Rose. Surely sitting around on files can’t be the cause. But how fascinating if there’s a link.

One of the challenges of his job that he’d particularly liked was acquiring dope simply and inconspicuously. The best dope in town was of course with the police, kilos and kilos of it seized in routine raids and swoops. The Superintendent of Police of Madna, Shri Pannalal Makkad, wise and wicked, had already sent the Collector a consignment of the best.

Though Shri Makkad, socially and culturally, came from a different planet, Agastyaji the Collector Saab got on well with him and considered him a friend. They had socialized twice in the first ten days—booze, reminiscences and a terribly late dinner. Shri Makkad’s recollections of thirty-five years spent in the service of the Police State were what enthralled Agastya. For, as he joked all the time to whoever was listening, for the life of him, in his eight years of service, he hadn’t been able to distinguish between the Police State
and the Welfare State. There
wasn’t
any difference between the two, was there?

The Welfare State, for example, was totally committed to Protecting The Planet, but who actually profited the most out of illegal tree felling and the criminal timber trade? The police, of course. The Welfare State had outlawed beggary, but just before the visit of Gorbachev or Nelson Mandela, when it actually wanted to keep the beggars out of sight, who did it turn to to round them up, stuff them into trucks and ferry them a hundred kilometres out of the city? The police, of course. ‘We can never Eradicate Poverty,’ Shri Makkad used to intone over his fourth whisky, ‘but we can eradicate the poor. All we need is intelligent legislation.’ When the intelligent legislation of the Welfare State backfired horribly, as when, on the basis of the recommendations of the Kansal Commission, it ratified the reservation of an awesome seventy- three per cent of all its jobs for different categories of Backward, Depressed, Repressed and Suppressed Classes and Castes, and thus triggered off nationwide riots that left officially eighty-four dead and unofficially 342, whom did it, the Welfare State, blubberingly beseech to stop the carnage? Its police force, of course, which later, frenziedly searching for a scapegoat, it blamed for provoking the riots in the first place. Agastya respected the police because it was everywhere and always there to create the shit, wallow in it, to take it. When his monthly Small Savings target, for instance, fell short by a few lakhs, he wouldn’t bother to summon his slothful Assistant Directors of Small Savings to exhort them all afternoon to move their butts. No. Instead, he’d phone Makkad and ask him to send around his most persuasive Station House Officer to the more prominent traders and businessmen of Madna with an earnest appeal to participate in the State’s laudable schemes. Again, when he wanted a train ticket in a couple of hours, or when he found that the garbage dump at the junction of the main road and his lane
had mounted high enough for Moses, he’d turn—not to the Railways or the Municipality—but to the constables who hung around the gates of his house.

Madna is probably Makkad’s last appointment before he retires. He’d been posted as Police Superintendent in that district once before. He is a widower. Rumour has it that he burnt his wife some twenty years ago in a fit of rage because she used to criticize his drinking. All of Madna can attest to his ill-temper.

During his first stint as Police Superintendent, at the Hemvati Aflatoon Welfare State Home for the Visually Disadvantaged, an infuriated attendant, with a hot ladle, had gouged out the right eye of a blind girl, just because at breakfast she had asked for a second helping of gruel. The incident, naturally, had stunned Madna and the entire region. Questions had been vociferously asked in the Legislative Assembly. The tabloids of the town, led by the yellowest of the lot, the
Dainik,
had plastered the face of the victim on their front pages and run interviews with the unrepentant attendant for days on end. Several protest marches and processions had been organized and the redoubtable Shri Bhootnath Gaitonde himself, on the morning of the District Planning and Development Council meeting, had led seventy blind students of the Home and about a hundred of their supporters in a dramatic silent march to the Council Hall. The—men of vision, shall we say? including Shri Gaitonde—had all worn dark glasses to—presumably—symbolically and visually underscore their support of the purpose of the march. The men of vision had thought the dark glasses a brilliant idea, but the Superintendent of Police hadn’t. Makkad had been so incensed by what he considered tasteless and gimmicky exhibitionism that he’d verbally commanded the constables on duty at the Council Hall to swagger out and
cosh the non-blind protesters about a bit. Unfortunately, the police coshed more than a bit and did not discriminate amongst the dark glasses.

Sixteen grievously injured and seventy-one with bumps on the head. Shri Gaitonde was rendered speechless with ecstasy at this heaven-sent opportunity to plague the Welfare State. And plague it he did, with elan and gusto, exploiting the mishap at every turn till the next elections, when he formed the New Vision Party and won the Madna seat of the Legislative Assembly. Of course, a high-level enquiry was ordered into the incident and the State appointed the then Managing Director of the State Industrial Development Corporation, Bhupen Raghupati, to conduct it. The Superintendent of Police, deposing before the Enquiry Officer, was aghast at the insinuation of the Inspector on duty at the Council Hall that he, the Superintendent, had ordered the lathi charge against the procession. When he learnt of the Superintendent’s stupefaction, the Inspector, who knew what was what, in turn retracted his statement, instead owned up himself to having ordered the assault and on the advice of his well-wishers, pleaded temporary insanity on the morning of the march because of sunstroke and exhaustion. The Civil Surgeon of Madna, a pleasant sluggard called Alagh, certified that during the enquiry proceedings itself, the Inspector had suffered a relapse of the same whatever-it-had-been-that’d driven-him-round-the-bend and needed to be hospitalized immediately. After fifteen months of cogitation, the Enquiry Officer concluded that since the Inspector had acted when not in complete control of himself, he needed first to be issued a stern warning against such lapses of reason in the future and second, to be posted to a less strenuous job where he could be observed for a few months. Only thereafter could the extent of his guilt be accurately ascertained. In his recommendations, the Enquiry Officer himself suggested a transfer to either the Police Wives’ Welfare Board or The
Police Sports Stadiums Authority.