The Mammaries of the Welfare State (25 page)

‘A legend, you say?’

‘A lion of the civil services, a model for all seasons.’

F
or his first meeting with the Liaison Commissioner, Agastya Sen had worn a tie and carried a briefcase in which he’d put his tiffin box, a bottle of boiled water and the day’s snipped-out crossword from
The State of the Times.
He’d been on leave for close to six months before that and had put on weight. When he’d take off his shirt and tie, he’d feel as free as toothpaste emerging.

After eight and a half years in the Civil Service, his professional career had fallen into the rhythm of a few months of work followed by as many months of leave as his bank balance and the Welfare State would allow. The government was usually quite generous with Leave Without Pay.

On his return from Aflatoon Bhavan in December, he—apparently due to Makhmal Bagai’s lobbying—had been booted out of the Collectorship of Madna in the last week of the year and been made Deputy Chairman of the Coastal Regions Manure Supply and Marketing Structures Authority. Within a fortnight of his taking over his new assignment, the recommendations of the Central Ninth Pay Commission had finally been accepted and given effect to by the State. As a result, civil servants all over the land had received: 1) numerous cyclostyled circulars in the regional language full of inferences and reasoning, percentages, months, years and the sign @, and 2) at last, long after the circulars, a bonus the equivalent of about two months’ pay. It hadn’t been called either bonus or pay, but Agastya couldn’t be bothered. It had seemed
ridiculous to him to waste time, energy and paper differentiating between emoluments, arrears, defrayments, acquittances, settlements, remittances, disbursements and payments when all that was being discussed was a couple of thousand rupees. When he’d seen the State Order distributing the chickenfeed, he’d counselled himself, ‘Time to take wing, my dear. Set the wheels in motion.’ So he’d written to his boss, the Coastal Region Zonal Commissioner, ‘I beg to take whatever leave is due to me because I need to visit my native place urgently since my mother is serious.’ His command of officialese was excellent and one was hardly ever refused leave when one’s parents were serious.

Once every fortnight, from a hole in the Prajapati Aflatoon Welfare State Public Servants’ Housing Complex Transit Hostel in the capital, he’d sent a telegram to the Zonal Commissioner:
Mother still serious.

He waited in the waiting room of the Liaison Commissioner’s office from ten-thirty onwards. The Commissioner’s PA, one Shri Satish Kalra, periodically looked in on him, first to usher in a peon who’d brought him sweet, milky, rather nice coffee, then to silently thrust into his hands, at intervals of half an hour,
The India Magazine, Business Today, India Abroad, What Business of Yours?, India Today
and
Inside Outside.
Shri Kalra was an averagely tall man with a huge head, a young expression, grey hair and a stoop. His facial skin sagged. He dressed impeccably. Later, Agastya learnt from the others in the office that Kalra had once been immensely fat, out of some book of Don’ts, but had, some five years ago, mysteriously and rapidly lost weight.

From ten-thirty till two, one by one, different heads popped in around the door to briefly stare at him—just checking the new Deputy out—he in his tight cream shirt and tie, all tits and tummy, inhaling and feeling slightly sick at his day’s nth cigarette. Just after two, Kalra came in once more to escort Agastya to his own room. On the way, he told
him that the Liaison Commissioner would be a little late that day in reaching office.

Agastya finally met him the next morning. Dr B.B. Bhatnagar was in the midst of dictating to his PA. He liked being called Doctor Saab. He had a Ph.D on Third World Economic Initiatives from the Bhupati Aflatoon International Open University. The Ph.D had of course been attained on office time. For two full years, he’d made various subordinates of the Liaison Commissioner copy down for his thesis different paragraphs from a dozen other Ph.Ds. Then, with his contacts in the government, he’d sent his Ph.D supervisor and others on his jury panel off on one official junket after another—a seminar in Bangkok, a symposium in Hawaii, a conference in Rio, three nights and two days in Hong Kong, four nights in Sydney. After his Ph.D, he preferred to refer to himself as an Economics man, Commerce and all that.

Dr Bhatnagar had four receding chins, soft, dimpled, demure folds of skin shying away in layers from his bird nose, his Hitler moustache and his gold spectacles. He had pink lips and eyes. Behind his thick glasses, the edges of both his upper and lower eyelids were turned outward, thus lining his eyes pink and giving his expressionless pupils a rosy tinge.

Behind his enormous desk, he sat balanced on a chair that rested precariously on just its rear legs. With a pencil in his left hand, he explored the jungle in his left ear for crud and animal life. His right hand clutched the desk for support. Periodically, to simulate the Thinker, he would raise his right hand to his chin, lose balance, flay his arms about for equilibrium, and finally lunge forward to land the chair with a thump on all four legs.

‘Good morning, sir. I’m Agastya Sen.’

‘Good morning. Don’t disturb my chain of thought just now. I’m feeling very creative. Kalra will tell you that I’m usually at my most creative in the mornings. You may sit down. You couldn’t call on me yesterday because I’m too
senior, that’s all right. I joined the Service twenty years before you did, while you were wetting your short pants probably. We won’t meet very often because of your juniority. I will leave notes for you with Kalra, and you may phone me at 8.30 every morning to receive your instructions for the day because, as I pointed out just now, I’m at my most creative in the mornings. If I’m in the middle of my puja at that time, you may phone me again at 8.45 and—I’ll be frank—if need be, again at 9 a.m. You may now listen carefully to—and try to understand—this first draft of a White Paper on BOOBZ, that is to say, Budget Organization On Base Zero. Yes, Kalra, where was I?’

Agastya quietly collapsed into the chair next to Kalra. On the edge of the seat on his left perched the office’s Public Relations Officer, a small, fat, wicked-looking man with eyes radiant with anxiety, eyebrows that wouldn’t stop wriggling, and a goatee. He’d taken off his shoes and socks and was vigorously rubbing the spaces between his toes. He’d overwhelmed the large room with a prodigious foot stench. Agastya wanted to leave the room and the job at once. Dr Bhatnagar, however, dictated right through the foot stench, so senior an officer was he.

‘Hahn, Kalra . . . please take down . . . on the other hand, as a resultant implication of my feedback comma which is based on integral considerations comma—no, Kalra—make that integral subsystem considerations comma there is bound to be a sharp interface in coordination stroke communication stop. The specific criteria for the regulated flow of effectual information will have to be worked out per se comma but it is imperative that there is an initiation of critical paradigmal development comma and a crucial tertiary feedback on the functional interrelationship of hardware comma fourth generation technologies and the system rationale stop Regards stop Read it back to me.’

Kalra read it out loud, dispiritedly, in silence and
footstench. After he’d finished, Doctor Saab pushed his pink lips out in a thick, dissatisfied moue and after a long, contemplative minute, suddenly landed his chair with a decisive thump, startling them all and snapped out, ‘Okay, fax it immediately, send a telex too, crash, and in the post copy, highlight the thrust area.’ They all watched Kalra get up heavily from his chair, lumber to the door and leave the room. Doctor Saab seemed to wait for him to reach his seat, then he picked up the intercom and brayed, ‘Hahn, Kalra, Doctor Saab here . . . come in, please, I want to add one more line to the fax.’ While they waited for him, Doctor Saab looked at the PRO while informing Agastya, ‘It’s terrible, I’ll be frank, but I can’t leave these policy statements to anybody . . . Hahn Kalra—’ Dr Bhatnagar rocked back to an impossible angle to observe his PA through his nostrils. ‘Take a line before Regards. Quote In any case comma I’m having examined the commensurate set-off that the PO stroke HA may like to give in a costing exercise to such an eventuality Unquote.’

Doctor Saab called Agastya by his first name because it was a sound Management technique. He’d picked it up when he’d been ‘in Commerce . . . later, I’ll be frank, Business Administration at Harvard and all that. They asked me to stay on for my Ph.D but I said no, my government needs me—which is not quite true, because only a section of government needs me, the forward-looking, dynamic, creative section . . . Why were you on long leave before you joined us? Family problems? I understand from Personnel that you’ve availed of long leave quite often, in fact, virtually twice a year in the last eight years.’

The entry just then of a small, sexy, North-Eastern woman mercifully prevented Agastya from replying. Doctor Saab’s face became the colour of his lips and he began to trill incoherently. To make the room worthy of her, he sent Footstench out at once. Babe and Agastya exchanged Looks.
‘Ah . . . come, come . . . Madam Tina is our Office Superintendent . . . this is Shri Agastya Sen, the new Deputy Liaison Commissioner . . . he’s been posted here to assess the new BOOBZ programme . . . you may go now, Agastya . . . Kalra will help you familiarize yourself with the office . . .’

The Liaison Commissioner liaised between two governments, the regional government several hundred kilometres away, and the Centre. He was a sort of ambassador of a particular province to the government in the capital city of the same country. Hundreds of cases of the regional government, in any one week, would be pending with Big Brother at the Centre—a Ways and Means Advance with Finance, a Drought Relief Sanction with Agriculture, Political Clearance for the Chief Minister to travel abroad with External Affairs, a proposal to take over a sick cloth mill with Textiles, Industries, Commerce, Economic Affairs and Labour, a scheme to mutilate the coastline beyond recognition with Environment, and so on. The Liaison Commissioner was meant to chase up whatever was important. He was Mr Fixit. His entire office had been created and existed only to doggedly prod the Welfare State into moving, shall we say, different portions of its mammoth, immensely sluggish arse. In him, the government thus officially acknowledged that—God damn the citizenry!—even for its own OFFICIAL work, nothing moved in the Welfare State unless it was prodded. The Office of the Liaison Commissioner cost the country about one crore per year. There were thirty-four of them in the capital. Plans were afoot to have each province similarly represented in each of the thirty-three other provinces in the land.

Quite often, the government posted a jerk as Liaison Commissioner. After all, it had to post its jerks somewhere. They loved it, the perks, the absence of stress, the hundreds
of kilometres between them and their boss. Dr Bhatnagar had three phones on his desk that never rang. They occasionally buzzed, Kalra asking him whether he wished to speak to whoever was on the line. Dr Bhatnagar never did, because the people that he would’ve loved to speak to—the Secretary-General of the United Nations, for example, or the President of the World Bank—never called, and their organizations never even acknowledged his letters. Kalra routinely transferred all of Dr Bhatnagar’s calls to Agastya.

Accepting them was pretty unpleasant. They were almost always from Headquarters, i.e., the Secretariat hundreds of kilometres away, and almost always accusatory, sarcastic, recriminatory. The entire office had been tutored to say that Dr Bhatnagar was away at a meeting in the Ministry and when pressed, to add, the Home Ministry. Presumably, Agastya had concluded, since it was the vastest, the size of a bloody city, and also because it was sort of true, wasn’t it, since the bugger was always at home, scheming with, and being pushed around by, his wife, a pale, fat, unpleasant woman with fish-eyes and shoulder-length hair. Agastya was quite nonplussed to discover that Dr Bhatnagar too, and quite seriously, meant home whenever he said Home Ministry. ‘I’ll be tied up all morning in the Home Ministry.’ From him, such a statement could not be a witticism, and certainly to a subordinate twenty years his junior, unthinkable—unless it was a literal truth. Perhaps, long long ago, it had been a joke between husband and master, so rare that it had been cherished, and therefore oft repeated, and thus had become so familiar that to the ears of the bureaucrat, it’d begun to sound just right, not a witty euphemism, but the thing itself.

‘I run my office from the Home Ministry.’ Dr Bhatnagar’s boast simply meant a costlier telephone bill for the office. Every one hour, both Kalra and Agastya were to telephone him at home to report the significant events since the last call. On the fourth day after he’d joined, Kalra advised
Agastya to concoct a bit, since the statement that ‘Nothing’s happening, sir,’ particularly when sleepily delivered, would exasperate Dr Bhatnagar no end. Fabrication came quite easily to Agastya, but the passing years had also taught him the virtues of moderation. Buddha-like, he chose the Middle Way. Doctor Saab was never to be told either that 1) anybody more senior than him had phoned him, or that 2) somebody from an Economic ministry had called the office. Such cooked-up reports would fluster him and Sherni Auntie (Tigress Auntie, Kalra and Co’s affectionate name for Mrs Bhatnagar) beyond measure. They’d go into a huddle from which they’d emerge after half an hour with the decision that Dr Bhatnagar should hare off to work to harass everyone there till well past closing time with nervous, mindless crap of a quality of which only he was capable. ‘Kalra, take a fax to the Commerce Secretary . . . Agastya, speak to the Additional Private Secretary to the Industries Secretary and ask him whether he wants me to phone his chief now or later . . . Tell the PRO to deliver personally this evening a bouquet of fifty yellow roses to Mrs Khullar, you know, the Chairman of the Public Service Commission . . . he should first take the flowers home and have Mrs Bhatnagar okay them . . . Kalra, take a fax to the Finance Secretary . . .’

Thus Agastya, following the Middle Way, every hour, to Dr Bhatnagar’s house, in Hindi: