The Mammaries of the Welfare State (35 page)

To resolve the uncertainty of his resignation, Kalra then advised Agastya to seek an appointment with the capital’s happening astrologer, Baba Mastram, though he also warned him that getting five minutes could well take six weeks. The Bhatnagars had tried for a month and had succeeded only when Doctor Saab had accepted Kalra’s suggestion that he himself speak to the Baba’s PA, because the latter had made it clear to Kalra each time that they had chatted, that he didn’t much care to speak to suppliants’ PAs. It was the Baba who’d advised the Bhatnagars in sonorous Sanskrit, in a three-minute session that had cost them a donation of twenty thousand rupees—not to rock the boat, to allow Luck, as it were, to clamber aboard.

The office, to a man, prayed for Dr Bhatnagar’s departure. It had prayed the previous summer too, when the UN had let it down. ‘The rains won’t come,’ Footstench, a minor oracle in his own right, had proclaimed, ‘until he goes.’ Sure enough, last year’s monsoon had been catastrophic for the agriculture forecast.

Agastya wondered whether, as a sort of surrogate offering to the gods, to egg them on, as it were, into egging on the UN, he should gift Baby Bhatnagar a couple of his sweaters. The original idea, of course, of presents to the Bhatnagar family on appropriate occasions had sprouted from the good Doctor himself. Its expression varied from the subtle—‘Agastya, don’t phone me tomorrow before nine forty-five. It’s my birthday, you see, and we’ve organized a rather long, early morning puja’—to the circuitously direct, as in Kalra to Agastya:

‘Good afternoon, sir. D’you remember the reddish-brown turtle-neck sweater that you wore to work on Monday? . . . Doctor Saab admires your taste in clothes and thinks that it would be a gracious gesture if you were to gift that sweater to Baby this week—dry-cleaned, of course. It’s a good week for Baby to receive, so the stars foretell Sherni Auntie. If you do, he might even consider forwarding your letter of resignation with his recommendation . . . no, just trying his luck, I think, seeing what he can grab before he departs. In return for the sweater, he also offers his counsel: “Don’t quit, don’t be silly. You haven’t married yet, your worth on the market’ll vanish without a trace, like hot samosas and chutney on a cold, rainy day. With your useless English Literature-civil service background, you’re unemployable. Out there in the jungle, your upbringing itself will be an insurmountable Efficiency Bar.” ’

Dr Kapila finished his lunch quite early and while patiently watching Agastya gorge his, chatted of BOOBZ, how essential it was in theory and how impossible in practice. After they had ordered dessert, easily and smoothly, like a knife cutting through crap, he introduced the subject of his daughter. At one moment, they had been debating gulab jamuns versus mango ice cream and when Agastya focused next, the moot
point had become an attractive, single, young woman with a mind of her own.

‘I want her to marry—whoever she wants, but marry. Then she’ll stabilize. After which, she can do whatever she wishes—her abandoned Ph.D on the influx into the Punjab of labour from Bihar, her Bharatnatyam—at which she showed promise—even her silly TV job, whatever. She isn’t stupid, you know. She’s tall, beautiful
and
intelligent, even if it’s her father speaking. She was shortlisted for the Rhodes scholarship in her final year in college. At the last interview, at the Golf Club, I’d sat outside in the lobby and prayed that she wouldn’t make it, because it would have upset all my plans for her. Do you think I’m old-fashioned? . . . But she’s precious, and there’s a time for everything in life, a time for fun and a time for responsibilities. I asked her whether she’d like to sit the Civil Services exam; instead, she joined some incredible fly-by-night television production company called TV Tomorrow. It pays her per month more than what I earn per year after twenty-six distinguished years in the civil service. I must say that there are times when I don’t understand the economics of the modern age. Nor its outlook . . . We—my wife and I—have built a rather nice house for ourselves in Gulmohar Vihar—do you know it? It’s a bit far from the centre of town—fortunately, I say—fresh air and all that, breathing space—but my daughter simply refuses to stay with us for more than the occasional weekend. It’s embarrassing in company, she contends, to reveal that one stays in the suburbs
and
with one’s parents. To quote her, a total loss, yaar. She’s rented a place the size of a paperback novel just off Cathedral Road. I suspect that her rent is paid by her Gujarati venture capitalist friend. Sunita’s conduct has made her mother more religious than ever. She’s changed her name too—Sunita, I mean—to Kamya Malhotra, after a character in some modern epic or myth, I forget which.’

‘Would you still consider me eligible, sir, if I were to quit
the government and join a small ad agency as its Senior Vice-President, Public Affairs?’

‘You’d be less attractive, but not entirely worthless . . . which organization were you thinking of?’

‘Softsell.’

‘But the DGP’s office reported that after your transfer to the capital, your ardour for that lady had considerably diminished.’

‘On the contrary, sir, to cite St Augustine, absence makes the fart go Honda. We’re still thick as thieves, a chain gang, Hell’s Angels, absolutely.’

As usual, Agastya exaggerated without meaning to. To be sure, whenever he and Daya met, Casper still flew with the old vigour and froth, but because several hundred kilometres now separated them, they simply met less often. They wrote occasionally and frequently wished they hadn’t. They were both by nature composed, self-centred and unhappy. They thought of each other only in fits and starts, often guiltily, puzzled at the fickleness of their desire. They would have both liked to return to the old life—the romance by night, the yoghurt with honey at three in the morning, the happy film music through the open French windows—but they—Agastya in particular—were too dazed by the minutiae of their daily lives to act, to move towards recapturing their past. Their letters to each other reflected their sadness and confusion only indirectly, that is to say, they never straightforwardly described their feelings. Daya for example never wrote: ‘Look, cut the crap, let’s be together because then we both feel very nice, and despite—or perhaps because of—the differences in age, temperament and upbringing, we should give a future together a chance. Therefore, please ask the Welfare State for a transfer back to where you belong.’ Her letters instead were altogether of a different style.

August,

That last visit of yours wasn’t such a grand success, was it? . . . you’ve definitely become thinner, weaker and more depressed
(oh-oh, she means Thursday night, when she could come just once because I asphyxiated and had a heart attack with my nose in her pussy. How selfish of the darling, how come she hasn’t blown me even once, and we haven’t fucked—in the sense of in-out, in-out, the earth moves, in-out—even once in all these nights that we’ve spent together. We’ve never even met by day. I’m not even sure that she and I can be called an affair. Which modern oracle can I ask?) . . .
Please give me a week’s notice of your next trip and I’ll set up an appointment with my doctor, a homoeopath with an absolutely luminous intelligence. Yours is a condition that can be corrected. I’ve read up a bit on your problems and am convinced that Dr Thadani is the person for you. I don’t know if you’ve ever consulted any specialist, but even if you have,
please
meet this luminary. I’ll accompany you and if you like, wait outside while you chat with him. Please, August, you owe yourself a chance. Shape up! Why do you allow the inertness of your official life to seep into the personal?

What else is new? Quite accidentally, I reread
Wuthering Heights
last week and was very impressed by Emily Bronte’s sexual energy, by its (obvious) transformation into a creative energy and by its transference onto the elements, the very landscape, of the book. Heathcliff is nature’s power wonderfully anthropomorphized, of course . . .

Agastya shuddered at the prospect of their next assignation.

Moreover, she was right; his last visit hadn’t been such a grand success. Of the three days that he’d been there, she’d had a female friend—a large, Caucasian Anand Margi whom Daya had addressed as Lazy Susie—staying over two nights and sharing her bed, hai Ram, so what was one to infer? Lazy Susie and Agastya hadn’t hit it off. She’d found August, his nickname, rather droll and him in general ill-informed when
he, to make polite conversation, had asked her whether she, as an Anand Margi, liked dancing with the skulls of wolves. Later, Daya had told him that Lazy Susie had disclosed to her that the vibrations that she, Lazy Susie, had received from Agastya had been ‘cold, sneering and anti-life’.

One of the many things that he’d liked about Daya was that she came from another planet; there existed nothing to connect her with the world of the Pay Commission, the Steel Frame, Interim Relief, Off-White Paper and the Efficiency Bar. With her, therefore, he’d felt less tired, less futile. On his last visit, however, he learnt that he should have known better; the Welfare State was truly everywhere and even those who sneered at its clumsiness condescended to suck at its dugs.

Over mugs of hand-churned buttermilk and tiny Chinese bowls of raisins and blanched almonds, they had been chatting in their usual manner of this and that; Daya had been asking him whether he’d finally succeeded in slipping either a request for a transfer or a letter of resignation past his extraordinary boss and Agastya had been describing how her health food tended to fill him up like a balloon with gas and how therefore it was the one element of his old life that he didn’t miss, when she had sighed, tied up her hair at the nape in a bun and muttered:

‘As Senior Vice-President, Public Affairs, you’d be the talk of the town.’

‘Yes, but what if I quit my job and join you and then you die?’

‘Well, I’ll try to take you with me, if you like. I mean, really. And don’t eat so much if flatulence is a problem.’

In a bit of a huff, she had swished off to the kitchen with the mugs and unfinished bowls. She’d returned, calmer and more determined, to suggest that if he gave her a copy of the letter in which he was going to ask for a transfer, she’d probably be able to swing it through Jayati Aflatoon.

‘Oh, I say.’

Apparently, they had been dear dear friends ever since boarding school. Agastya must have looked disoriented because Daya had continued, ‘In the few minutes per day that you must take off from gazing at your navel and feeling sorry for it, have you never wondered what takes me to the capital twice a month? Apart from love of you, of course. Those hotel bills and plane tickets—it isn’t the hand of God, you know, that pays for them.’ But pretty close. Daya had turned out to be the Principal Media Advisor to the Executive Group of the Gajapati Aflatoon Centenary Celebrations Committee. The Executive Group was nominally headed by the Prime Minister but the buzz confirmed that it was his power-hungry, culture-loving wife-of-cousin who actually called the shots.

She had got her friends and lovers into the group—Rani Chandra, Rajani Suroor, people she could work with. Culture was fun—tribal operas, carnivals of ethnic wear—one dressed to kill all the time for elaborate dos—not dreary and dusty like Land Reforms or the Agriculture Census. Her friends of course worked gratis, for the honour (the equity, in Daya’s words) and the fun of peeking at the behemoth from up close—and for the pickings that were to be had. Daya for example had an eye on the general elections (God willing) eighteen months away and the ruling party’s advertising and publicity plans for it. Jayati would get her cut, naturally, were Softsell to succeed in seducing the party of the Aflatoons into letting the agency manage its fabulous publicity budget. In its high places, the Welfare State could be quite exciting.

And munificent. To celebrate the centenary of the birth of Gajapati Aflatoon, statesman extraordinaire, founding father and Guide of the Nation, the Committee had over a hundred and fifty crores to spend. In Parliament, members of the Opposition, feigning outrage, had yelled and bayed for over four hours (at the rate of fifty thousand rupees per second) on
the subject of the gross extravagance of the Centenary Committee. Had the government again lost its mind? Would the Prime Minister care to explain why he had sanctioned ten crore rupees to combat the plague scare in Madna and
fifteen times
that amount to celebrate the birthday of his grand-uncle? Had he any plans for the wedding anniversary of his parents which was just round the corner? Why did the Centenary Committee have an incredible one hundred and fifty members? One fiddler for each crore—was that the idea? If so, why had the government discriminated against the backward castes? Didn’t they too enjoy the right to nibble? Why had the recommendations of the Kansal Commission not been implemented in the Centenary Committee? Did the government believe that matters of culture and heritage were above the grasp of the depressed castes? If the Committee truly comprised, to quote the Government Resolution that had announced it, the ‘best and brightest of our cultural firmament’, then how on earth could one explain the presence in it of Bhanwar Virbhim? And Madam Jayati Aflatoon and her friends? Whatever were they doing there?

The Opposition had indeed enjoyed itself hugely. When Jayati Aflatoon’s name had cropped up, Member of Parliament Bhootnath Gaitonde had suddenly jumped up from his bench and baying for attention, stridden down to the Well of the House, waving a document that he’d hollered was the New Charter of Sycophancy of the ruling party. Nobody had allowed him to speak but that had never posed a problem in the House. Shrieking over the tumult, shrugging off the hands that reached out to physically shush him, overriding the commands from all quarters of the hall ordering him to keep quiet and cock up, clambering over the benches, dancing and dodging in the aisles like a football maestro his colleagues and adversaries who rushed up to show him his place, Bhootnath Gaitonde informed the Chamber of the People of the grand plans that the riffraff of the ruling party, led by the
redoubtable Nominated Member of the Regional Assembly from Madna, Shri Makhmal Bagai, had chalked out to celebrate in a befitting manner the fiftieth birthday of the Prime Minister’s cousin-by-marriage, Madam Jayati Aflatoon.