The Mammaries of the Welfare State (6 page)

I
n different parts of the country, people reacted differently to the news of the plague in the district town of Madna. In Madna itself, for example, the Chief Revenue Divisional Commissioner and Agastya’s boss-to-be, on scanning the headlines in
The State of the Times,
merely said ‘Hmmm’ and focussed with more intensity on the Love-Like-Hate-Adore game that he was scratching out on the side on a memo pad. Whereas fourteen hundred kilometres away in the capital, in marked contrast, Miss Lina Natesan Thomas, Junior Administrator (Under Training) in the Ministry of Heritage, Upbringing and Resource Investment—and eventually Agastya’s subordinate-to-be—submitted, on the subject of the plague, a thirty-page memorandum to the Head of her Department. To each his own, particularly in a vibrant democracy.

Love-Like-Hate-Adore isn’t as well-known a game as it should be. It is a splendid time-killer because while squandering away one’s most precious resource, it permits one at the same time to rove from one object of one’s lust to another to gauge whether—and to what extent—they reciprocate one’s affections—and indeed, deep in one’s heart, what one oneself truly feels for them. It—LLHA—also encourages one to spell correctly. On a piece of paper, one writes the name of whoever one is idly itching for at that moment, or on that day. For instance:

Beneath the line that one draws under the name of the lustee, one writes one’s own:

One then sifts through the names and strikes out the letters in common. Thereafter, on the letters left over, one bounces, in order, the choices of Love, Like, Hate or Adore. The sentiment at hand at the end of the name is what the person truly feels for the other below or above the line. Emotionally, it is, so to speak, the bottom line.

Lina Natesan Thomas likes Bhupen Raghupati. Bhupen Raghupati adores Lina Natesan Thomas. Vexed, the Chief Revenue Divisional Commissioner, groping for loopholes, wondered whether she—Bunswali—spelt ‘Natesan’ with an ‘h’. Wouldn’t that transform the outcome? He would’ve so liked the stumps of both names to nucleate to Adore, to skim, like a flat stone across water, past the choices Love, Like and Hate, and swoop jubilantly down on the last, somewhat like a buxom, burly, imperious woman, the chairperson of his thoughts of the past eight weeks, descending on her timorous adorer. Whenever both the names climaxed in Adore, he felt that the deities had beamed refulgently on his itch of the month.

His visitor, Rajani Suroor, cleared his throat for the second time. The Commissioner transferred his blank, baleful stare from his memo pad to him, to his modish, beige kurta, his wire-frame spectacles, the golden bracelet on a hairy wrist, the black-and-white, wavy, dreadfully groovy hair that Suroor, narcissistically, fondled without pause, the sardonically respectful, damn annoying half-smile. This fool, the Commissioner felt, should massage him, long and slow, glisteningly, with mustard oil; when he’d been sated, he’d lumber up off the mat and with his belt, thrash Suroor into hushed rashers of crimson flesh; then he’d come all over whatever remained of his smirk.

For Lina Natesan Thomas, the plague was altogether a graver subject.

Confidential
By Registered Post

From

The Junior Administrator (Under Training)

In the Ministry of

Heritage, Upbringing & Resource Investment

New
—

Dated: December 9, 19
—

To

Dr Harihara Kapila

Secretary to the Welfare State

(BOOBZ and Official Grievances)

In the Ministry of Heritage, Upbringing and Resource

Investment, Aflatoon Bhavan

New
—

Subject: General administrative difficulties faced in the functioning of the above-mentioned department

Sir,

I must record that I was surprised to receive yesterday a State Order directing me to report, within three days
of its receipt, at the Office of the Municipal Commissioner, Madna, for emergency duty to combat on a war footing the plague that has been raging there for the past two weeks. If I fail to comply with the order, I understand that the severest disciplinary action will be contemplated against me. For ready reference, I enclose at Annexure A a copy of the State Order (No. SUS/Plague/ Crash-FCN, signed by D.
Sengupta, Desk Officer, Home Affairs Disaster Management Cell, dated December 5, 19—)
.

Upon receipt of the said order yesterday, I sought appointments with your good self at 10.30 a.m., 12.45 p.m., 3.15 p.m. and 5 p.m. On the fourth occasion, your Principal Private Secretary told me to put down in writing any items for discussion with you that I might have. I pointed out to him that had he informed me at 10.30 a.m. of these instructions of yours, he would’ve saved the Welfare State one full working day of a Junior Administrator which, when computed in time and money, must surely amount to something. I don’t think that your PPS understood my point. Had I known Punjabi, I would have spoken it and he might then have followed me. I have not known him to speak any other language. In fact, in your office, one gets the impression that Punjabi is the official language of the Welfare State.
’

This present application is handwritten because I do not have any stenographer or typist attached to me
—
that is to say, to the post that I occupy. In fact, ever since I joined this Department two months ago, I haven’t been assigned any personal staff—no Personal Assistant, no peon, no clerk. I have failed to understand why. Representations in this regard have been made periodically to the Deputy Secretary (Administration), Joint Secretary (Administration), Additional Secretary and your good self (reference may be made to Annexures B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J and K). It will not be out of
place to mention here that when I first arrived in this Department, in lieu of my own desk and office room, I was offered a seat on a cane sofa in the chambers of the then Deputy Secretary, Shri O.P. Chadha. I had at that time complained in writing that it was neither possible nor proper for a Junior Administrator (Under Training), a lady officer, to function out of the chambers of the Deputy Secretary (Administration), a satyr. My complaint, which can be perused at Annexure L, had inter alia noted that Shri Chadha had verbally proposed to me at that time that if I did not care for the cane sofa, I could work sitting on his lap. I had requested him to make me the same offer in writing, but I received no response from his seat. My complaint (at Annexure L), like all my other complaints, has been ignored.

Since I have no personal staff, I will have to go myself to the railway station to book a berth on the train to Madna. My trip to the station itself will be a waste of the time and money of the Welfare State unless it is clear beforehand precisely what I am scurrying off to Madna for. Desk Officer Shri D. Sengupta of the Disaster Management Cell will have no idea because he’s one of us. Between cups of tea, he’ll blink and sign whatever is placed before him.

Which he does, invariably. A characteristic of his that Lina Natesan can vouch for since they, once upon a time, for a couple of weeks or so, actually shared a room—with five other officers, fortunately of comparable rank—in Aflatoon Bhavan, housing being one of the more acute problems in the Welfare State.

When she had refused Deputy Secretary O.P. Chadha’s offer to function from out of his lap, he had arranged for Miss Thomas one chair and one half of a desk in a fifteen-by-fifteen room on the fourth floor between the Gents’ Toilet
and the canteen of the Department of Mines. The smells from the toilet and the canteen had been her faithful companions week after week, had mingled in her consciousness and at their most potent, had every now and then blended to make her swoon.

One half of a desk means that she sat on one side and Under Secretary Shri Dhrubo Jyoti Ghosh Dastidar occupied the other side. She made it clear to Shri Dastidar from the very first day that he was welcome to the visitors’ side of the desk. To his credit, he didn’t seem to mind, either then or later. Nothing upsets him much, unless it be the sight of work.

The room therefore, to begin with, had four desks and seven officers. Apart from Under Secretary Shri Dastidar, Desk Officer Shri Sengupta and her good self Miss Natesan, there were Assistant Director Dr Srinivas Chakki and Assistant Financial Advisor (Housing for Cultural Luminaries) Mrs Minu Tutreja, who faced each other, and Assistant Heritage Advisor (Pending Parliamentary Questions) Mr Govindarajulu, who shared his desk with Additional Counsellor (Delayed Pensions and Republic Day Parade) Mrs Govindarajulu. As per norms, each officer had been assigned one large Godrej steel almirah, one three-tier open wooden file rack, one heater, one wooden teapoy for his or her official water jug and glass, and a second teapoy for his or her telephone. At Annexure M of her memorandum, Miss Thomas has provided for the reader’s perusal a fairly accurate sketch of the room as it stood two months ago.

The sketch makes it clear that to reach the door from their seats, both Shri Sengupta and Mrs Minu Tutreja had to squeeze through between the wall and Miss Thomas’s chair. Shri Sengupta always preferred to rub his private parts against her shoulder while Mrs Tutreja liked Miss Thomas’s upper arm to knead
her
buttocks
en passant.
We all have our quirks. Miss Thomas complained in writing (Annexure N) about
both the private parts and the buttocks. They were consequently removed. Then there were five. Miss Thomas has always believed in the power of the written word to move mountains, what to speak of buns.

For the record—and for a clearer picture of the room— about a week before the plague, Shri Govindarajulu went to hospital and hasn’t returned yet—not at least to his old desk. During lunch hour one day, Mrs Govindarajulu reached across the files that they all found so convenient to use as table mats and whammed her husband on his skull with her steel lunch box. The others present couldn’t glimpse much of Shri Govindarajulu’s face, because of all that curry and blood. Domestic discord, no doubt, spilling over into office hours. A couple of days after, Mrs Govindarajulu availed of the Leave Travel Concession facility and undertook an apparently unending religious tour of the South. Then there were three.

Dr Srinivas Chakki’s sudden disappearance from the room was effected by the Disaster Management Cell. He left for Madna on plague duty. Then there were two. To quote from
Housing Problem
of Miss Natesan’s memorandum:

Dr Chakki is also my neighbour in the Prajapati Aflatoon Welfare State Public Servants’ Housing Complex Transit Hostel near the Pashupati Aflatoon Public Gardens. Does your good self know the Transit Hostel? Twelve hundred one-room fully-furnished flats built at breathtaking speed by the Ministry of Public Works four years ago for the
International Man, Woman and Child in Nature
Conference that was eventually held at Djakarta? Anyway, I stay in B-318 and Dr Chakki in C-401. We have been meeting almost every morning at six for the last four years or so because we both go and buy milk at about that time from the local Mammary Dairy booth. It was while we were returning from the booth on the morning of
November 27 that Dr Chakki revealed to me that he had received orders to join the Central Team of Experts that was being Rushed to Madna that very day.

I should add, to place matters in perspective, that he is an Assistant Director in the Ministry of Public Health (and thus, according to pay scale, half a rung senior to the undersigned).

He returned from Madna on December 7 with the plague and both a red alert and the police out for him. As one of our national newspapers puts it, he is truly the hero-villain of the Prajapati Aflatoon Transit Hostel. He is a hero for having gone to Madna to fight the dreaded disease and a villain for having returned with it.

He is an entomologist by profession. Entomology is defined as the science dealing with insects of public interest, much like a litigation. Dr Chakki has over twenty years’ experience in the field. He is a veteran of the Menugunta Typhus Epidemic of 1973, the Gaurangabad Malaria Scare of 1976 and the Phatna Encephalitis Rout of 1979. His open letter to four national newspapers, on which I rely heavily, is at Annexure V for ready reference.

After two days of intensively combing the plague-affected areas of Madna for insects of public interest, he contracted high fever and a cough. He attributed the first to the heat of Madna and the second to his cigarettes, and continued working till on the third day, his associates Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha insisted that he consult a doctor. He snarled and pointed out to them that he was one himself. His sudden display of choler
—
for he normally is one of the mildest of men
—
convinced Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha that something was seriously amiss. Abandoning him and their combing, they fled to the Office of the Municipal Commissioner and returned with a couple of fierce-eyed constables. Your good self will no doubt be aware that the police
and para-military forces are all over the place in Madna. Nothing in our country moves or happens without them
—
naturally
—
we being a Police State as much as a Welfare State. In Madna, they have enough work to keep them occupied till their retirement. They track down and force the absconding Municipal sweepers and scavengers to return to work, they then protect them from the wrath of the citizens of the town, they guard the abandoned houses in different wards and the clinics of the doctors who have fled, and the persons of those who’ve returned, they prevent suspected plague patients from escaping from the hospitals and they defuse potential rebellions amongst the overworked, stressed-out medical staff.

It took six policemen two days to locate and cart to the Bhupati Aflatoon Memorial Hospital a comatose Dr Chakki. He was found sprawled in an alley beside an enormous garbage dump, clutching a fat dead rat in his outflung right hand. He took a day to come around. Then, to quote from his open letter, he ‘had a look at the conditions in the hospital and promptly relapsed into unconsciousness because then I felt safer.’