The Mammaries of the Welfare State (22 page)

The flash of Agastya’s camera disturbed most of them. For a few seconds, it had been quite challenging. He hadn’t been able to decide whether to centre on the one-armed handshaker or the monkey.

‘Photography is strictly forbidden in all Welfare State premises, sir.’

‘Yes, not to worry.’ From his wallet, Agastya took out his temporary laminated photo pass of the Bhayankar Middle Income Group Swimming and Recreation Club and flashed it under the one-armed peon’s nose. ‘That’s all right. PM’s Secretariat. Administrative Reform Division.’ He clicked the monkey, the files, the grimy window, the scummy sink. ‘We’ve received more than one complaint about this monkey menace in these corridors. That they’re keeping the officers and staff away from work.’

‘They are divine, sir, hardly a pest,’ warmly protested the one-armed pisser. ‘Attendance is particularly thin today for a different reason. By the way, I am Dharam Chand, Personal peon at the Minister’s Residence and Joint Secretary of the Aflatoon Bhavan Class IV Employees’ Union. I have—’ he phallically raised the stump of his right arm—‘applied for exemption from plague duty. Meanwhile, three hundred and forty-four Under Secretaries of the Central Ministries, mainly of the Departments of Official Languages, Food and Rationing, Civil Defence, Physical Education, Prohibition and Excise, Town Planning, Vocational Training, Sales Tax, Dairy Development, Rural Broadcasting, State Lotteries, Water Resources, Land Records, Books and Publications, Employment Insurance, Ayurvedic Sciences and Malpractices and Village Industries have trooped off to the Supreme Court with a petition that: one, accuses the Welfare State of wilfully
playing with the lives of its public servants and two, suggests to it that if it still insists on playing God, it should draft to Madna, given the subject matter of the mission, only the officials of the Department of Public Health.’

‘Oh dear. Madna is from where he has come—’ Agastya jerked his head at Dr Alagh ‘—and specifically to meet two Under Secretaries. Have they been sent off there or have they marched off to the Supreme Court instead? Under Secretary for Demotic Drama Shri Dastidar and Under Secretary for Freedom Fighters (Pre-Independence) Dr Jain? Though the latter of course we wish to consult in his personal capacity as a homoeopath.’

Dharam Chand’s eyes became smaller and craftier. ‘Madna? And are you a bounty hunter? A grant stuck somewhere?’ He strutted across to the monkey on the window sill to deposit beside it a paper packet of yellowish, greasy sweets that he had pulled out of his kurta pocket. It was a daily routine for him, one of his ways of appeasing the gods for his thousand crimes.

Some of which he had, once upon a time, under the name of Karam Chand, committed in Madna, a place which, despite its insignificance and general ghastliness, is central to this story. Madna is representative of ten thousand other small towns and five hundred other districts in a land of a billion people. The events that occur and the characters who exist there could quite easily be located in any of the other dots on the landscape. Indeed, it would be more useful to say that many of the incidents—the outcry over the plague, the disappearance of Chamundi, the attack on Suroor, the ping-ponging of Agastya Sen—take place in Madna principally because they have Madna-like qualities.

Ditto for the characters. It is not therefore an extraordinary coincidence that three of them from Madna—the Honourable
Collector, the Honourable Civil Surgeon and Dharam Karam Chand—should be found at the same moment in the Gents’ Toilet of a government building fourteen hundred kilometres away in the country’s capital city. For at any given time (during office hours, it must be clarified), Aflatoon Bhavan is crawling with Madna types from all over the land. The building’s size, after all, must not be forgotten. Fourteen storeys, six wings, twelve hundred rooms for thirty-four departments of the government, nearly twenty kilometres of corridor—how could all that space not be temporarily occupied by at least a minuscule percentage of the billion hopefuls of the country?

Like Dharam Chand, for example, whose—it must be remembered—tortuous, eight-year-long journey from Madna to Aflatoon Bhavan had been instructive and illustrative enough to have become the plot of a quintet of street plays that Rajani Suroor had crafted for Vyatha.

Retribution atop a local train

awaited this marginally insane

ex-attendant of the School for the Blind,

Madna. Upper-class travel of a kind,

on the roof, ticketless, with friends, a breeze

of a journey on most days, relaxed, at ease
—

one always had to grip something stable,

of course, in case the slow train, unable

to keep steady, jerked over points, or lurched

around curves without warning. That day, perched

on the third bogie from the rear, waiting

for the train to start, Karam Chand, hating

the delay, had both his hands in the air,

running a filthy comb through his sparse hair.

A sudden twitch, like a start, beneath him,

just the engine’s spasm, but to the rim

of the roof slipped he and scrambling about

for a hold (pink comb still in hand, no doubt

because he wished to complete his toilet

before descending), went over. And yet

witnesses claim that it could have been more

hideous, for he did manage, before

the train began to glide forward, to roll

his torso off the track. Of course, the whole

thing took a second. His forearm remained.

River of blood. Squeals. Rags of shirt-sleeve, stained.

Rajani Suroor had found the biography of Dharam Chand intensely emblematic. They had met on another local train seven years later during one of Vyatha’s performances in a second-class compartment.

‘Here, let me treat you to samosas, bread pakoras, chutney and tea while in return you tell me the story of your life.’

Within those seven years, Dharam Chand had come to own a few hectares of sugarcane land somewhere in the north and two modest houses—one regularized, the other about to be—in one of the oldest slums—practically National Heritage quality—in the heart of Lutyens’s City.

He had also fallen into the habit of attending office in Aflatoon Bhavan just twice a week.

Why? Shri Dhrubo Jyoti Ghosh Dastidar, till recently one of his three bosses, had asked him.

Because I’ve lost my mind, he’d explained, and continually forget that I’ve a job in Aflatoon Bhavan. When Shri Dastidar had raised his eyebrows, he’d elaborated that he felt terribly depressed and guilty at having tricked, and been ungrateful to, the Welfare State.

Six years ago, the government’d decided to clean up the stretch of slum at Gadarpur that fronted the Airport Road because the Lieutenant Governor’d complained that it looked unspeakably ghastly when he drove past it with foreign
V∞IPs—Fidel Castro, Olaf Palme, people like that. However, the Urban Development Secretary had written back to the Secretary to the Lieutenant Governor that the government had no money for the project. No problem, asserted the Lieutenant Governor, clearly a statesman with zip and vigour. I shall ask my industrialist friends to chip in.

No problem, sir, declared they, and many thanks for the advertising opportunity. So the government had relocated Dharam Chand and a few thousand of his neighbours on fifteen-by-fifteen plots of marshy government land in the middle of nowhere twenty-five kilometres north of the city. Dharam Chand and Co were encouraged to move with soft—feather-touch, interest-free—loans of a few thousand rupees each. Which none of them has yet paid back, of course. For one, the period of repayment is thirty years. For another, they just stopped trudging to the bank with their instalments. Too much of a bother. Besides, no one’s pressing them very hard.

From the point of view of Dharam Chand, the dislocation had been brutal. The middle of nowhere was christened Senapati Aflatoon Nagar. It had no schools, no markets, post office, hospitals, doctors, bus services, parks, service roads, cinema halls, nothing. All of that bobbed up, certainly, practically overnight, cancerously, with the speed and quality of growth of the boom satellite town. At first, with the money that the government’d given him, on his fifteen-by-fifteen plot, he built only one room. With plywood and cloth, he partitioned it. He, his wife, his keep and his four daughters stayed in one half; he leased out the other. In a couple of years, with the rent, along with a House Building Advance and a Loan Against his Provident Fund from the Department, he built overhead a second room and a loo. Thus, in easy stages, the bare plots of Senapati Aflatoon Nagar became proper, Municipality-approved, two-and three-storey houses.
In a few years, therefore, when their ghetto-in-the-wilderness had become almost respectable, with the unassuming, settled air of a fifty-year-old slum, Dharam Chand and his neighbours sold their houses for several lakhs each and returned to invest in their old haunts in Lutyens’s City. Not exactly the same stretch alongside the Airport Road that they’d originally occupied, of course, because that was now the fourteen-storey Kamalavati Aflatoon Office-cum-Shopping Complex—but to all the pavements, parks, open spaces, road shoulders and disputed plots in the vicinity. Where the Municipal Corporation wouldn’t let them rest—and thrive—in peace. They were continually being menaced by demolition drives, bulldozers and the police. Their days were a blur of bribes, threats, stay orders from the courts, petitions, demonstrations and minor riots.

His attitude to the Welfare State was therefore schizophrenic. In the first place, he hated it for having dislocated him simply to make crores of rupees out of the sale of land that he’d come to believe was his own—his patrimony, as it were. After all, many of those dispossessed had been the original squatters beside the Airport Road a good thirty years ago, long before either the airport or the road. However, at the same time, he hated himself for feeling grateful to the Welfare State for the free plot, the soft loan, the chance to legitimize his existence, to become a property owner, the landlord of a two-storey structure. After he’d sold what he’d built, even though the money’d been welcome, and had helped him towards buying his hectares of surgarcane land and his modest slum tenements, he had still felt foolish and naked, empty-handed, as though he’d wronged both his family and his future. He’d then blamed the State, as a grieving child his parent, for having allowed him to sink again into the mire.

‘That’s truly sad,’ Dhrubo’d opined, ‘and touching, but how
is it linked to your showing up in office only on Tuesdays and Thursdays?’

‘Very well, sir. I’ll bring you fresh sugarcane juice from my fields.’

The offer of which’d placed Dhrubo amongst the chosen—the select few officers whom Dharam Chand thought worth his while to butter up—right alongside, for example, the newly-promoted Deputy Financial Advisor and Dhrubo’s part-time adversary, Mrs Minu Tutreja. She was attractive, venal and artistic, and therefore ideal for the Department of Heritage. She came from a small town not far from Dharam Chand’s fields of sugarcane,
-
a
fact that’d pleased, flattered and excited him no end and made her even more worthy of the gifts of the flasks of juice twice a week.

They were a familiar sight—Mrs Tutreja and Dharam Chand in the corridors of Aflatoon Bhavan. After her promotion, she’d been allotted Room 4609 in Wing N of the building. The car park for the Department of Heritage vehicles was outside Gate 13. Even after two months at the job, she had very little idea of how to get to her room from the gate and was terrified that she’d permanently lose her way in the maze of corridors and floors and languish for months—shrivelled, starving, unwashed, unheeded—in Atomic Energy, Jails and Urban Land Ceiling, Rural Development, Revenue and Forests, Public Relations and Protocol, Cooperation and Transport, Rehabilitation and Labour, Horticulture and Command Area Management, Dairy Development, Fisheries and Tourism, Law and Judiciary, or Industry and Company Affairs. She therefore had to be led—practically by the nose—to and from her room. In her first week after her promotion, while she’d been traipsing along in the corridor behind Dharam Chand en route to the loo, simpering back at everyone who’d beamed sycophantically at her, cutely crinkling up her nose at the better-looking males, revelling in her combination of official power and personal helplessness—sure enough, the lights had gone out. She’d
shrieked softly a couple of times, invoked a handful of gods and for support and succour till illumination returned, clutched on to the soft, lifeless stump of Dharam Chand’s right arm. Thereafter, all her guides had received instructions from her office staff to have on their persons official candles and matches or flashlights that worked. All phallic symbols, please note, Dhrubo had pointed out to Dharam Chand, including your right arm. Dharam Chand’s eyes had widened and shone with respect.

She was quite easy to work with. She brought to her job a welcome single-mindedness. In her twenty-three years of service, the one country in the world that she hadn’t yet visited officially was Mongolia. Thus, while governments toppled all around her, she got down to business.

‘How is our Heritage Exchange Programme with Mongolia? Dead or alive?’

‘It’s one of our very best. Madam.’

‘Good. Please put up a draft of a letter from me to our Ambassador in Ulan Bator . . . strengthen bilateral relations . . . mid-term review . . . Ministerial delegation . . . an exhibition of Buddhist relics . . .’

The third officer to whom Shri Dharam Chand had been assigned at that point in his career had been Shri Dastidar’s colleague and room-mate, Miss Lina Natesan Thomas. His official relations with her have been described in some detail in her memorandum on the general administrative difficulties faced by her in the functioning of the department.

I have in passing mentioned above the peon Shri Dharam Chand’s several crimes against me. To justify the use of the plural, I will engage the attention of your good self with just two more examples. On October 29 last, when I arrived in office at 8.59 a.m., I found, while settling down, an unmistakable teaspoonful of
semen next to the official water glass on the bottom left hand corner of my desk. I was surprised, to say the least. I shot off a memo to Shri Dastidar. Since he doesn’t get in before ten on most days, I had to wait for quite a while for his rejoinder. Meanwhile, Shri Dharam Chand banged open the door more than once to look in on me
—
in itself most unusual, since he generally doesn’t show up until an hour or so after his superiors. On each occasion, he smirked at the teaspoon, next at me and then slammed the door shut. Suspicious, to say the least.

In his memo, Shri Dastidar was most incisive:
Preserve it in an envelope for subsequent DNA analysis. We will catch the blackguard yet.

The off-white On Welfare State Service envelope still reposes beside my personal copy of the Civil Service Leave Encashment Rules, 1972 in the bottom-most drawer of my desk.

I am given to understand (from Shri Dastidar’s speculative memo on the subject, placed at Annexure R) that amongst the members of Shri Dharam Chand’s caste, to offer a teaspoonful of one’s semen to someone is to threaten him, to warn him to lay off, much as the symbolic presentation of a betel nut in certain other primitive Indian communities denotes that the recipients’ testicles are to be replaced. I should record here that I myself am a staunch Roman Catholic.

Whenever I visit the Ladies’ Toilet, namely about four times during office hours, I am unfailingly trailed by Shri Dharam Chand whistling and singing two Hindi film songs:
1) Ganga Tera Pani Amrit
and
2) Ram Teri Maili.
(I make so bold as to enquire at this stage whether the knowledge of our official language of your good self is good enough for you to understand the above two phrases. I take the liberty of translating them in any case. The first means,
Ganga, Your Water Is Ambrosial
and the second,
Ram, Yours Is Dirty.
)
Shri Dharam Chand sings rather well.

He, however, dresses inappropriately for office. Middle-aged men of the lower classes ought not to wear tight blue jeans to work, even occasionally. How is one to distinguish our college-educated, dope-smoking, English- speaking, unemployed idler from a representative of the submerged nine-tenths if both are going to wear jeans? Moreover, your good self is surely aware that all Class IV employees of the Welfare State
—
and they number over seven million
—
get a Uniform Allowance of Rs 44/- each per month and a separate Uniform Washing Allowance of Rs 27.50 per month. Where does all that money go? To buy jeans. Because in my two months here, I haven’t spotted even one peon, naik, dafadar, jamadar, orderly, sweeper, bearer, watchman, chowkidaar, mali or night watchman in uniform. They have all at one time or the other worn jeans.

Shri Dharam Chand’s argument against wearing his uniform is that it is made of khadi and that khadi is shabby, ethnic, indigenous and dull. Khadi makes its wearer feel crumpled, grey, poor, deprived, backward, depressed and dispossessed. The Welfare State’s policy to enforce khadi only on its Class IV employees clearly indicates its desire that they forever remain Class IV in spirit.

Rubbish, Shri Dharam Chand. Our politicians wear khadi. The Prime Minister wears it. The clip of his Cartier gold fountain pen looks splendid against it.

Ah, but that’s khadi from another planet. Whereas ours is Welfare State khadi. I know, Class IV types like me in the Khadi Board spin hundreds of thousands of metres every year
—
and then the Board sells all of it back to the State to be distributed to the likes of me, and we use most of it to shroud our corpses before burning. Khadi burns well. Sound Welfare State economics, khadi. Spend an enormous amount of time, money, infrastructure and manpower fundamentally to transfer funds from one Department to another and
incidentally, in passing, create a product that no one wants, but stuff that z-grade product down the throats of your Class IV employees and then pay them peanuts to swallow it.

Moreover, the Prime Minister, continued Shri Dharam Chand, wears starched white khadi. Our Washing Allowance doesn’t cover starch. Our Employees’ Union has sent at least twenty memorandums to the Welfare Secretary to initiate an Additional Uniform Starching Allowance but no one listens to anyone here.

It was pointed out to Shri Dharam Chand that Mahatma Gandhi wore khadi too.

Well, when I return from South Africa and England and after I’ve become famous and can roam around leaning on women for support, what I wear won’t matter, will it.

I gather that Shri Dharam Chand follows me to the toilet because he has been directed to do so. This is a secret administrative fallout of my representation at Annexure P, that is, he has to verify the general conduct of our Black Guard Commandoes and apparently protect me from them. While I am in the toilet, they chortle and guffaw outside and, from the shrieks that filter through to me, prod one another’s private parts with their AK-47s.

A dear friend of Shri Dharam Chand, a short young male with thick lips and curly hair, is a permanent inhabitant of the Ladies’ Toilet on the fourth floor, that is to say, I have seen him in there, three-to-four times a day, every day, for the last two months. He is always half-naked, in large white-leather boots with splashes of paint on them and mustard-coloured boxer- type underwear. Shri Dharam Chand for some reason calls them wearunders. I have asked him why his friend couldn’t dress and have been informed that the half- naked one is a painter. It is true that whenever I enter the toilet, he makes a pretence of washing a paintbrush
at the sink. The pretence is truly bizarre because there hasn’t been any water in that, toilet in the time that I have used it and on seventy-four occasions, no water taps and on twenty three occasions, no sink.

A glance at my representation at Annexure S will reveal my strong suspicion that Shri Dharam Chand and his young friend, in league with the Section Officer, Stores, have been merrily trafficking in taps, toilet sinks, flush tanks and other sanitation and plumbing articles. Their modus operandi is simple and effective. One accomplice is permanently installed inside the Ladies’ Toilet, busy all day long with hammer and wrench. The mastermind, using a foolproof pretext, pops in four times a day to check on progress. The stolen stuff goes out of the window and down the scaffolding that is permanently up in Aflatoon Bhavan because of its size and the lethargy and venality of the painters contracted by the Welfare State.