The Mammaries of the Welfare State (33 page)

Had that been all, it wouldn’t have interested Dr Chakki in the least. What intrigued him, in fact, was that Bhanwar Virbhim always sat in the front left window seat of any plane (or car or bus or bullock-cart, it may safely be imagined). He had been advised so by Baba Mastram. It had probably something to do with staying ahead of the competition, though while up front, he’d be well-advised to watch out for his back. On that Wednesday’s flight, however, he couldn’t get the seat of his choice. Apparently, the boarding card for it had already been issued to the wife of the Domestic Aviation Minister. Physically lifting the aircraft and carrying it off the runway would have caused less of a stir than trying to convince her to change her seat. In any case, why on earth should she?—one could have asked, most reasonably—once allotted, allotted.

Bhanwar Virbhim hadn’t thought so. After beaming a greeting at Madam Minister, all through the flight, he had sulked and unseeingly flipped through the pages of some glossy. Behind that enormous chocolate-brown dome of a forehead, however, the great brain had been ticking away. Two days later, he formally petitioned the Privileges Committee of the House.

Like many other citizens, Dr Chakki was a bit foggy
about the Privileges and other Committees of the House, but he surmised that their work had very little to
do with the welfare of the people. Bhanwar Virbhim’s argument before it, he imagined, would be that as a Principal Minister, he was entitled to certain privileges, one of which was the seat of his choice in the Executive Class section of an aeroplane whenever he flew. When he can’t sit exactly where he wants to during a flight, he must argue, somebody or some institution has breached his privilege and thereby insulted him—and through him, the State that he represents at all times. Not granting Bhanwar Virbhim the front left window seat on
all
flights that he cares to take, therefore, would be like making wearunders out of the national flag.

Over the weekend, Dr Chakki had asked around. Apparently, the privileges of the privileged hadn’t been either defined or codified. Naturally, he concluded. The vaguer the law, the larger its ambit. The more the privileges, the more refined the caste. In his ideal republic, the welfare of Bhanwar Virbhim was not a subject that the State would want to spend much time and money on.

He had been piqued even more by the Starred Question that the Minister had parried and deflected in the House. It had been asked by a witless Independent, the usual front for some disgruntled backbencher.

Has the government finally decided on the proposed surrender of Sukumaran Govardhan? Why on earth is it taking so long to fix a date? Astrological clearance? Or haven’t the national parties finished squabbling yet over which of them he will join?

Insidiously, over the past few weeks, the transfiguration, the apotheosis, of the fabled dacoit-smuggler had begun. A newspaper report in the
Dainik
of Madna had stated that Govardhan had donated, incognito, several lakhs of rupees to
start a primary school in his mother’s name in a predominantly tribal area of the coastal region.
He waits for permission to bow down in contrition before the people,
trumpeted a full-page advertisement in
The State Today,
without specifying the
he.
A second news item claimed that he had sent by envoy a blank cheque for the Plague Relief Fund to the Regional Principal Minister. Philanthropist, humanitarian, champion of the poor—the phrases had started to appear—even statesman. In some of his posters, after the phrase
Wanted Dead or Alive
had been neatly stencilled,
For Parliament.

In one of his speeches at a public function in Madna, Bhanwar Virbhim had gone even further and suggested that Govardhan was blessed in that he had at last seen the light. The occasion for the speech had been a routine three-in-one: Virbhim’s first visit to his constituency after signing up as central Minister, his dropping in as sitting Member of Parliament on the unconscious Rajani Suroor in hospital, and thereafter his benediction of A.C. Raichur’s never-ending hunger strike, to mark the forty-fifth day of which, the Minister had, from a dais rigged up under the trees in Aflatoon Maidan, held forth in his typical, slow, deep, soporific way on the similarities amongst Govardhan’s desire to be restored to life, Suroor comatose in Madna, and Raichur’s self-denial for a better world.

In the sparse audience that afternoon could have been spotted two players of Vyatha, in town on an emergency, namely, an infection of Suroor’s urinary tract. At Vyatha, they all took turns to visit Madna once a fortnight, not that they were of any help at the hospital. All that they ended up doing was squandering their tight budget on second-class rail fare. Had Suroor, to a man felt they, been shifted out of that town and taken to the capital, at least the troupe would have saved its finances.

He wasn’t—so the players learnt that afternoon from the horse’s mouth while listening to the Minister—because Madna
was considered to be as good a damned spot as any in the world for miracles. Suroor must rise from where he has fallen in time to be part of the committee that would welcome and accept Govardhan’s surrender. One must always give the godforsaken—whether small-town, gross man or distinguished villain—the chance to make good. If they goof up, why, it simply means that one has underestimated their underprivilegedness.

In his reply to the Starred Question in the House, Bhanwar Virbhim had impressed even that jaded audience with his disingenuousness and his double tongue. He skirted all the facts that even the children of the alleys knew. Sukumaran Govardhan after all was to sandalwood smuggling what Kellogg’s is to breakfast cereals. For over two decades, his gang of murderers had razed hundreds of acres of sandalwood plantation, hanged by the same trees forest officers, shot dead police officials, terrorized and exploited entire villages, and God alone knows stolen how many hundreds of crores of rupees of the national wealth. His surrender would only marginally be less of an event than the nation’s achievement of independence. It—the surrender—was to be televised live for over two hours on the National Channel. His life had already inspired eight violently romantic Bombay films, in all of which he’d been depicted as a modern Robin Hood. Hood he certainly was. After over two decades of brutal criminality, he had nowhere to go but into politics. It was being bruited about that he intended to officially and legally change his name to Sukumaran Aflatoon and contest the Parliamentary elections from Baltod, where he’d already bought up his entire caste vote. He had once over two hundred criminal cases registered against him. Of course, before the law, one is innocent until proved guilty—and so he was free to fight the elections, but in the last ten years, the two hundred cases had been as effectively forgotten as the sandalwood, for their
witnesses had quietly retracted their statements and been encouraged to crawl back into the woodwork.

In the discussions in the House, the Minister eulogized Govardhan’s philanthropy but omitted to mention that behind the setting up of almost all the smuggler’s charitable trusts could be seen terrifically well-planned moves to either evade tax or grab land. Always a sound investment, land. Well, felt Dr Chakki, if the record of the House was going to comprise Virbhim’s fictions, there would be no harm in adding the half-truths, the rumours, the whispers. It could include, for example, the one from last March, namely, that to escape unscathed from the urea scam, Sukumaran paid the Minister in the PM’s Secretariat two crore rupees just to have forty-five seconds alone with the Prime Minister, on the red carpet, on the tarmac, before the Great Man boarded his plane. Or the old one from his past, that he’d arranged for the deaths of his father and an uncle when he’d sensed that they were going to sell him out to the police. Or the near-certainty that he had abandoned ivory only because he found the cocaine traffic as lucrative and less cumbersome. Or Dr Chakki’s favourite Sukumaran myth, that no matter how late the hour, at the end of the day, after his bath and his prayers and before nodding off, he needed to deflower a virgin every night—perhaps again on a red carpet.

In the future, Dr Chakki fancied that he himself would be appearing quite often before the Privileges and other Committees for both his incendiary journalism and his reformist thinking. Well, he was quite ready. Once he had broken through the avarice of the self-serving classes and prodded them to see that the welfare of all was in their own interest, he could with an airy heart explain to the Bhanwar Virbhims that he wished to be judged not by those legislators for whom he had scant respect, but by the people. The Committees, nonplussed, would half-heartedly threaten him
with jail. He would welcome the idea, for it had for a long time been one of his intentions to expose prison conditions in the Welfare State. To save face, as it were, they might even sentence him to four days’ imprisonment in the Apnalal Aflatoon Marg jail, but grant him A-one status in it; to wit, a Brahmin among the inmates. He would be provided a cot with a special mattress and bedsheets and be entitled to the luxuries of newspapers and food from home. He would take along with him an amulet of a tiny sandalwood Ganesh—to remind himself, with its perfume, of why he was there—and he’d write about those four days for the next four weeks.

Bhupen Raghupati did not notice that the Dambha who brought in the jug of milk and an ice bucket had changed since the afternoon. At five o’clock, he had received in the servants’ quarters-cum-milkman’s dhaba an expected, long telephone call from Madna. He’d spoken guardedly, in dialect; in any case, nobody around him could have followed the coded talk of money, accomplices, hits, dry runs, his Durga suit and weapons. After the talk, he had looked happier, more confident. With his ambition rising, he’d felt on top of the world, quite the emissary of the gods.

It took Makhmal a couple of seconds to place the vaguely familiar face. ‘Ah—it’s you.’ He’d of course forgotten the name. ‘Settling down here?’ Dambha blushed, pleased at being recognized. Makhmal stretched out a regal hand. Dambha touched it, then abashed, dropped to his knees and touched his feet. He hesitated for a moment, then got down on all fours and brushed Makhmal’s toes with his forehead. Makhmal grunted in appeasement, reached forward and proprietorially squeezed the youth’s anus and all of a sudden, guffawed, ‘I hope Jayati Aflatoon responds the same way with my father!’

Red-eyed and abruptly pensive, he gazed searchingly at Dambha’s face, at the adult, knowing mien that had emerged from behind the artlessness.

T
he following October. Early in his career, while examining the junk in the official pen tray on one of the desks, Agastya had come across an ear-cleaning pen. Steely-grey in colour, it was made of some aluminium-like metal. Its nib, about an inch long and made from the same material as the body of the pen, was like the end of a ball-point refill, only more rounded, considerate, more moulded to the intricate inner spaces of the ear. When he’d realized what it was for, Agastya had been touched by the wisdom and the courtesy of the Welfare State. Instinctively, in each new office, he’d looked for it first thing on his desk and had never been disappointed. Tickling one’s earwax with it was a wonderful way to unwind when the tensions of office became insupportable.

It was in his left ear and he in the midst of his pre-lunch office crash (that is to say, with eyes wide open, body behind his desk swaying in sleep, mind at home, files open before him, hand jotting and signing away) when the door opened to admit a man who looked as though he expected Agastya to spring out of his chair to receive him. He was tall, fiftyish, slim, with gold-rimmed spectacles, a trim jet-black wig, well- fitting dentures and bottle-green safari suit and no moustache. While Agastya struggled to wake up, he, not a man to waste words, strode up to the desk and introduced himself. ‘Mr Sen? Good afternoon, I’m Dr Harihara Kapila, the Regional Finance Secretary. You’ll recall that we were in Labour together three years ago. I’m in the city for a dozen meetings with the Centre, but I thought that perhaps we could lunch
together, that is, if you’re free?’

‘Yes sir . . . no sir . . . of course sir, what an honour . . . if you’ll just give me a minute to . . .’ He rushed to Kalra’s room. ‘What gives?’

Kalra too was surprised, a rare occurrence. ‘Maybe he’s heard of how well you work. Would you like a drink to buck you up?’

‘Yes . . . What of Doctor Bhatnagar’s post-lunch trauma-meeting? You’ll tell him, of course. I can
see
the envy and curiosity pushing his colon up, up and out of his mouth . . . You know, he caught me with the stencil-pen in my ear.’

Dr Kapila had naturally been given one of the office’s newer Ambassadors, air-conditioned, black-glassed, fitted with a stereo and a bottle of scent on the velvet-coloured dashboard. ‘Where would you like to lunch, Mr Sen?’

‘The Bageecha, sir.’ Mr Sen was feeling happy after two large, quick rums. ‘It’s new, sir, an air-conditioned greenhouse, very interesting, tropical lush stuff, enormous potted plants, practically sky-high, all fake plastic, and sometimes a live band that specializes, according to the crooner, in rarities—which means terrible songs that no one in the restaurant has ever heard before. He’s clever, thinks the crooner, because if you send in a request for one of your favourites, an oldie goldie, what in my youth I would have called An All Time Classic—
Now Or Never,
for example . . . did you too, when you were young, sir, categorize books, movies and songs into All Time Classic, Classic, All Time Great, Great, All Time Time Pass and Time Pass? . . . Agonising, these decisions of one’s nonage . . . But the fuc—crooner. He’ll read your request, blowjob the microphone, crack a joke into it about your request—very personal, in bad taste—and then sing something else, which’ll sound as though he composed it that morning in the bus, squeezed in the crush of peak hour, with his nose jammed into a couple of armpits.’

‘Twenty-five years ago, when I was Assistant Collector at
Pinchpaguda, your father was my Commissioner. How is he now?’

‘In fine fettle, to use one of his phrases. Strong enough to break a camel’s back. Not that he’d want to, of course.’

‘Please give him my warmest regards when you next communicate with him.’

‘Certainly sir. Raj Bhavan has a fax now, for sure. Do you want to fax him yourself, directly? When your regards arrive just like that, out of the blue, I’m sure that he’ll be very—well, warmed.’

‘I have the Raj Bhavan fax number somewhere already, thank you.’

Their waiter was moustached and in the black and white of a penguin. Dr Kapila waved the booze menu away. Agastya recalled it to order a Scotch and soda. ‘I’m nervous, sir, if you don’t mind, to be frank. Alcohol, I’ve noticed, sharpens my wits. In office, at least. And this is a working lunch, certainly. Finance Secretary and all that.’

‘When I chose you for your present BOOBZ post, I’d remembered what you were like. You must be a chip off the old block, I’d reminded myself. Menon in Personnel told me that you’d whizzed off on long leave because from your Manure Supply post, you wanted to avoid going back to Madna as Collector for a second time—and that you returned from leave for the BOOBZ post only because you ran out of money.’

‘Ah, but Menon the triple agent didn’t tell you
why
I ran out of money. Because I had neither a PA nor a peon while I was on leave, that’s why. Meaning that to collect my monthly pay cheque from the Treasury, I had no lackey to send, so I’d to go myself. The Treasury of course is part of your empire, isn’t it, sir? The clerk wanted three hundred rupees before he released me my salary. Don’t be silly, you fool, I retorted, I belong to the Steel Frame, you can’t expect me to bribe you, harass somebody else.

‘My reaction must have offended him because as a result, he packed me off on a sort of treasure hunt in the Treasury. Here, get an authorization from the Treasury Officer, the Drawing and Disbursing Officer’s clearance, the signature of the Accounts Officer, the counter-signature of your Controlling Officer and a copy of the sanction order, duly certified by at least the Assistant Financial Controller. Toughski-shitski, marathon man, chip off the old block, absolutely, that I am, I plodded off on the first round of the hunt. I joined a queue of forty-odd losers, all lumpen, waiting to meet some bugger who wasn’t, as we say, in his seat. The peon at the door, crafty and smelly like some creature out of a fairy tale, officially had no idea when the bugger would return but for a bribe could ensure that I slipped in to meet him first of all, way before the lumpen. Class consciousness, I dare say.

‘Look here, I thundered, Steel Frame and all that, the lawful Descendant of the Child of Empire. The peon retorted that he’d summon the police and turn me in for impersonating an Honourable Member of the Civil Service. Shattered by the encounter with the real world, unable to control my trembling calves and chattering teeth, and with my blood at sub-zero, I prepared to wobble off to borrow some money from my uncle to last out the month. Man, what a fucking jungle. At the next table pleaded a doddering old bird whose pension they had suddenly stopped. It had taken him
six
devastating visits to find out that the cause was the Proof-of-Life Certificate that he needed to submit once every five years, that he obviously hadn’t deposited in time and—silly man—that was not to be confused with the attested receipts of payment that were required every month. It simply wasn’t enough proof of life that he had showed up in person before the clerk.

‘Who was being admirably logical, patient and unhelpful. He was a nobody, a mere clerk, a file-pusher and -preserver, certainly not a taker of—ugh!—decisions. Go and meet my
boss, he’d suggested helpfully—after taking pity on the old man, as it were. The boss of course hadn’t been available on any of those six visits. The clerk had even mooted that it was time for a revolution.

‘It boggles the mind, sir, that
millions
of similar cases of harassment occur
every day.
I’d even propose that as an economy measure, we substitute for life imprisonment for our criminals a series of such encounters with the Welfare State at what Dr Bhatnagar—our Ace of Spades—would call the operative level. It would surely finish the criminal off within weeks and we wouldn’t moreover have to suffer any of that tiresome rubbish about Human Rights in our jails. I’ve thought most of it out. The thugs can choose from the electricity, telephones and municipal offices. The complaints that’ll be thrust on them will be some of the standard ones—the phone’s been dead, for example, ever since it’s been installed and just because one’s written in in rather strong terms, one’s received a bill of two lakh rupees, that sort of thing. One can pick and choose from the Grievances columns of any of the daily newspapers.

‘Two: I’ve decided that the rapists and murderers will be dispatched to our State hospitals to be treated for tuberculosis. That wouldn’t be—if you’ll pardon the expression, sir—a criminal wastage of resources because apparently we all have either active or dormant TB. If not, it can be quite easily picked up from the OPD itself. Rest assured, sir, that the hospital will take care of them all. They’ll cut them open, insert—and abandon—a rusted pair of scissors in the folds of the small intestine, stitch them up again right as rain and send them off with a pat on their backs for being so cooperative on the operating table. Each time the rapist returns with a complaint of high fever, pus in his belly button and an agonizing tummy ache, they’ll slice him open and slip in another rusted instrument. No wonder that our hospitals whine all the time about shortfalls in surgical appliances.

‘Three: Should women criminals be packed off to the labour room? Need more be said? Your kind attention is invited to one of the State hospitals in the north somewhere, where, just before lunch, an intern found himself alone with a woman in labour in the delivery room. Alone because, according to the muddled newspaper report, everybody else had downed tools—a vulgar expression, I’ve always felt—in a lightning strike. The intern must therefore, before anything else, be applauded for his heroism.

‘The foetus was in breech. The intern, having no idea what to do, panicked. He rushed up and down the corridors for a while, blubbering for help, but found nobody else on duty, apparently, except a second heroic intern who was going nuts trying to patch up some fat puling hunger-striker who’d been shot at by passing terrorists while he’d been protesting against something completely different—the Kansal Commission, I think. The first heroic intern returned to his responsibility, steeled himself, groped, found a leg of the foetus and yanked. He must have heaved pretty hard because, according to the box item, he stopped only when he realized that he’d left the head and shoulders behind. The report added that it was then that he zipped off to participate in the lightning strike.

‘From your expression, sir, I gather that you didn’t think that to be an appropriate yarn to accompany an aperitif, and that you wouldn’t wish such an adventure even on a criminal. But why do these horror stories happen only to the poor, the wretched, the fucked of the earth? Why not to our serial killers or to Dr Bhatnagar? The Welfare State exists—has been created—for them, hasn’t it, for the economically, socially, culturally damned. So we build them a hospital to which they walk fifteen kilometres to have their babies delivered. When we satisfactorily face these questions, we’ll be on our way into the next millennium with BOOBZ.
God Deliver Us from Our Interns,
by the way, was the title of the news item.

‘One of the biggest fears, sir, of the old block, incidentally, is that he’ll have his heart attack while in harness, that unconscious, he’ll be limousined off to the Intensive Care Unit of a Welfare State hospital—from which, naturally, he’ll never return because he’ll be at the mercy of the behemoth. After so many distinguished years in the civil service, what is
my
daily prayer? Heaven help me, O Lord, from any encounters with the State as a private citizen. Against the cop, the telephone linesman, the property tax assessor and Dr Bhatnagar, I must have my PA, my peon and my white Ambassador car. How many civil servants do you know, sir, who zip off on long leave just for the heck of it? A handful, I bet. They’re too scared.

‘Calves still trembling, I’d phoned Dhrubo for counsel. Dhrubo Jyoti Ghosh-Dastidar. Do you know him? He’s a couple of years my junior in the cadre, but we’ve been friends since KG. He’s here in Aflatoon Bhavan and is my mole at the Centre. He knows people in Personnel. Last week, he managed, for example, to avoid being posted as Deputy Chief Assessor of Confiscated Contraband. He tells me that the villains are unhappy with me and want me out of the way. A monstrously unjust world.

‘Dhrubo it was who had suggested that I immediately return from leave, join an office somewhere and send a cop off to the Treasury for my salary arrears. We aren’t a Police State yet, I’d reminded him loftily. Once installed here, I requested our top agent, a genius at liaison, the backbone of this dungheap, Madam Tina, to do the needful. She returned with the bank. Arrears that I hadn’t dreamed of existed, lots of Regularization of Pre-Revised Pay Scales Emoluments, and Advance Interim Reliefs. Spirit soaring with visions of freedom, sick to death of Dr Bhatnagar, I applied for leave on the grounds that my mother’s become serious once more.’

‘Doesn’t he know that she’s dead?’

‘He’s God’s bad joke on Asia. Nothing that doesn’t
concern him moves a bloody centimetre. So he hasn’t yet recommended my leave application. Fed up with him, I then sent in last week a letter of resignation from the civil service. Those are the only two pieces of paper on his desk. He can’t handle either.’

A second waiter drifted over with the real menu. Agastya ordered a third Scotch, chicken tikkas, prawn fried rice, mutton curry and pork vindaloo. In pointed contrast, Dr Kapila asked for some light vegetarian crap, an eggless salad, a raita, mineral water, that sort of thing. Agastya gazed at him both happily and warily, that is, he’d half-guessed what the lunch was for, he didn’t care, he liked the impression of his companion that he’d received of a shy, gentle, well-bred and slightly boring nature, and he still wanted to see how he, Dr Kapila, would play his cards. It was good to be drunk. Sober, such a lunch with a teetotaller, vegetarian, Brahmin, senior civil servant who had, moreover, a genuine Ph.D in Economics, for him would have been inconceivable.

He’d been reluctant to speak of their work in the office and had tried to hide his unwillingness by babbling of other things. He couldn’t see how he’d be able to convincingly explain to an outsider the pointlessness, the horrifyingly comic futility and irrelevance of the daily acts of their official lives. Dr Kapila wouldn’t believe him and would probably mentally dismiss him as juvenile, silly and unnecessarily mean. He couldn’t have believed himself.