The Mammaries of the Welfare State (11 page)

Such were the anonymous letters that he’d never actually written, leave alone posted. What he had often mailed, however, to all sorts of acquaintances, were almost-blank sheets of Welfare State off-white foolscap onto which he’d ejaculated while lolling about in his office chair. At home, in his camp office, he typed out the addresses on a Devanagari manual machine: after all, as far as possible, all correspondence was to be in the official language. He’d been sending these billets doux out for some years now—rather generously, some four or five a week, to his office staff, colleagues, deputies, assistants and associates, to his ex-brothers-in-law and the office-bearers of the Madna Club, and further from home, to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Governor’s Secretariat, to the Resident and Executive Editors of
The State Today
and
Our Time,
the Chief Executive Officers of Chipra Zinc and Vindhyachal Oil, the Managing Directors of Airports
Authorities and Highway Transport Corporations, to the Cabinet Secretary and the Chairman of the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction. On all sheets he—before fouling them up—typed in Devanagari,
Namaha Shivaya.
He thought it appropriate.

When he’d been jerking off, in a rather business-like manner, once, a couple of months ago, onto a letter addressed to Dr Harihara Kapila, his once-upon-a-time boss, he had been slowed down momentarily by the thought that forensic science could pretty easily trace his spunk back to him. Then he had recalled with a guffaw,
Hell, don’t be silly, not our policemen
—and that very day, had posted off two more billets doux, one to one of the constables who was most often on night duty in the sentry-box at the gate of his Residence, the other to Madna’s Police Superintendent.

For close to decades now, by and large, only sex-related statements had registered with Raghupati—that is to say, at official meetings and so on, he sat up in his seat, pricked up his ears, or blinked slowly, many times, only when a stray word or phrase, expression or idiom, hinted at, or suggested, the sexual. For example:

‘Despite good rainfall, the production of rape in Pirtana this season has been poor, sir.’

‘The trainees at our Industrial Institutes do not have even tools to get the hang of things with, sir.’

And,

‘This is conduct unbecoming of a civil servant, sir.’

On his good days, when Raghupati was being bright as a button, it could be said that to him, everything sounded, looked, smelt, tasted and felt like sex. Experienced subordinates, when they wished him to focus on a topic, would use an appropriate idiom: ‘VD’s on the rise, sir, amongst the young of Ranamati, because of the improved irrigation in the area.’ Button-bright Raghupati would correctly interpret this remark to mean: Better irrigation = richer sugarcane yield = more money = profligacy.

Aroused, keyed up, overheated, day in day out, round the clock, week upon week, like a mythic punishment that felt like a reward, a rut that had dominated him every second of his past two decades and had shattered, amongst many other things, his marriage, transforming each pore of his tingling skin—or so it seemed—into a hard-on. That is to say, twenty-three years in the service of the Welfare State had cracked him up. Its waste, inefficiency, sluggishness and futility had honed his sense of time running out at the speed of light and thereby sharpened as well his consequent excitation that was half-foreboding. Twice, sometimes three times, a day he would summon his PA Shobha just to paw her; at home, he’d rub against his dog or Chamundi—he’d always, with the approval of Baba Mastram, lined up someone, a sweeperess, a driver’s daughter, a gardener. No backlash could sting him if he abused the right people. No backlash could sting him if he knew the right people—and indeed, himself remained one of them.

His sensualism was legend, of course, but officially, in all his years, he hadn’t suffered any disciplinary action except for his frequent transfers—each to a post of substantial clout, patronage and personal gain, angled for with ferocious concentration and guile for months on end; from Deputy Director (Information and Public Relations), he’d moved to being Regional Joint Secretary (Home Affairs, Police Personnel); after four crucial years as Private Secretary to the Chief Minister (the eight-month-long wheedling for which had been so intense, so focused, as to be almost sexual), he’d arranged to become the Managing Director of the State Industrial Development Corporation; he’d spent two years as the Zonal Development Coordinator because he’d needed pretexts to officially wander up and down the West Coast states looking for nice tracts of land to invest in; when he’d learnt of these hectares south of Pirtana that were being developed as teak farms, he’d begun lobbying to become
Settlement Commissioner but just then, the government—his government—had fallen.

Totally befitting its waste and futility—Raghupati’d felt when he’d been Liaison Commissioner at the Centre—that the Welfare State, out of its contingency funds, had even forked out for the occasional prostitute that he’d slept with. They’d been organized by his Personal Assistant of those days, Satish Kalra, a Man Friday whose resourcefulness and amorality any Navi Chipra smuggler-builder would’ve been proud of. The expenditure on those encounters with the whores—a salesgirl from Mallika Arcade, a telephone operator from Aflatoon Bhavan, a part-time compounder from a private blood bank—had been passed off as having been incurred on liaison meetings with other state governments, on tea, Marie biscuits and so on.

Fondling himself, Raghupati coldly recollected that the part-time compounder had hinted—simperingly, with just a veneer of obsequiousness—that she’d be ready to forgo the fees for her visits of an entire year in return for permanent employment in any lowly capacity, in any of the several reserved categories of jobs, in any of the million warrens of the government.

‘Don’t be idiotic, I can’t take a bribe from you.’ Outraged, yet close to laughter, and at the same time obscurely aroused by the notion that he’d periodically possessed, squeezed and nibbled a body which’d all the while hidden a mind so plebeian, socially so inferior that the ultimate that it could aspire to were the drying-up dugs of the Welfare State.

She’d claimed that her name was Tina, and that she came from Mayong, in the North-East. She’d been short and cute, with wiry, shoulder-length, rather dirty hair. She’d always carried condoms in the zipped side pocket of her handbag, an indication of her preparedness that he’d liked. She’d looked sceptical about his outrage and had forthwith stopped
scissoring his waist (his ‘solid waste’ is what DIPRAVED Kapila had always called it: ‘learn to manage your solid waste, I say’) with her shapely, hairy legs.

‘Look, as per BOOBZ, there’s a complete ban on all new recruitment, no matter which Department or Ministry, Centre or regional government.’ He’d then rocked her a couple of times with his hips, to distract her from her silly conversation and get her back to work.

‘No, not in all Departments—there isn’t any ban on the police, or in the emergency services, hospitals, firefighting.’

The Welfare State hadn’t been paying her either for her views or for the mulish determination that’d changed her face, and he hadn’t cared for the ease with which she’d stopped calling him ‘Sir’ or ‘Saab’ in bed, so he’d rammed into her for another fifteen seconds, and then declared in farewell, ‘You know, our country’s not progressing because of people like you only.’

The following week, she’d sent him the first of her two anonymous letters on the subject of employment in the government. She’d signed both
Tina Munim,
but since that hadn’t been her actual name, he’d considered the petitions to be simply two more in the endless list of unsigned letters received every week in numberless offices across the land.

The language of the letter had been the usual gibberish and the matter naive suggestions on how best she herself could fill up any of the vacancies in various posts reserved for candidates from the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Depressed Castes, Backward Clans, Suppressed Groups, Repressed Classes and Other Underprivileged Phratries. She’d attached her c.v., a page of preposterous lies.

He’d been stupefied. As always at such moments, blood had rushed not to his head, but to his crotch. The pages in his lap’d begun to dance in his twitching hands. Controlled by passions larger than himself, he’d unzipped his pants and tucked the sheets in between balls and tool. He’d come first over the c.v. During the second coming, God had hollered in
his skull, ‘Yes! This, this is what you’ve longed to do for years on every memo, note, receipt, reminder, report, paper, statement, return, application, minute, annexure and file! Yes, blobs of spunk on dust and cockroach shit! On an obsequious, hand-written, illegible, incoherent submission of a debatable claim, supported by a sheet of lies about the claimant’s life! When someone grovels for your favour and you can jerk off on his entreaty—that is shakti! If there be Paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.’

Kumari Lina Natesan and her complaint remained on Raghupati’s mind all day. ‘Her conduct is unbecoming of a civil servant,’ he grumbled to his PA Shobha. ‘Please connect me to the Regional Principal Secretary, Personnel—and give me the line
before
his PA gives
him
the line, okay?’

Dr Harihara Kapila had recently taken over as the Regional Principal Secretary, Personnel. Raghupati had to endure his wit for the first five minutes before he could circuitously enquire what had become of his devious efforts to have Miss Natesan transferred, however temporarily, to Madna on plague duty. His question led only to a second explosion of KJs— ‘the conduct of a civil servant is unbecoming, I say, only when he can’t rise to the occasion!’—(a KJ was the Civil Service epithet for the Kapila Joke. Rebel wits had even mooted once, at one of the quieter meetings of the Civil Service Association, that the State should frame a KJEA, an Endurance Allowance payable to those lionhearts who worked with Kapila).

On with the day. Raghupati summoned Moolar, one of his few Assistant Commissioners, to direct him to find out everything about mobile phones and to organize two for his official use. Moolar clacked his dentures in agreement and left. He was an efficient man.

Raghupati had known him for seventeen years, from his tenure as District Development Officer in Tekdigaon, the
waters of which region had been reputed to be so full of harmful minerals that no native inhabitant had retained his teeth beyond the age of thirty-five. He believed that he’d never forget the vision of his first mammoth crop-cutting- training meeting there, during which, after lunch, dozens and dozens, row after row, of patwaris, Circle Inspectors, Block Development Officers and tehsildars (including Moolar), almost as one, had removed their dentures and rinsed them in the glasses of water in front of them.

‘The mobile phone system hasn’t yet reached Madna, sir,’ Moolar reported half an hour later. His upper denture threatened to leap out and he paused to restrain it. ‘At present, mobile phones can be used only at the Centre and some of the regional capitals, sir.’

Raghupati had always been alert to God’s communications with him. Of course, you fool, you’re being told to gift Baba Mastram not a phone, but a set of dentures. The present would also hopefully take care of the Baba’s halitosis, usually a lethal deterrent to any sustained intercourse with him. Raghupati hoped that Mastram’d be pleased.

He was delighted. In return, on Thursday, just before he left for his second session with the dentist, he advised Raghupati that he could now go ahead with Chamundi.

‘This week, sir, is propitious for the transfer of your heat energy to anyone with whom your skin is in physical contact. If you don’t transfer, your surplus heat energy, finding no outlet, might attack your vitals.’

During lunch-hour, in his puja room, naked and elated, with his tool rising like a beast from sleep, Raghupati simpered at Chamundi, grasped the nape of his neck and dragged his head down towards his crotch. The boy, quick like an eel, jerked his head away. Blood swamped Raghupati’s reason. He thwacked the boy’s nose with the back of his hand. He was both inflamed by the jolted expression on Chamundi’s face and moved by the blood that began to dribble out of his nostrils. A half-thought muddled him for a second—this was
karma, whatever had this jewel of the sewers done to deserve this? An arousing pity made him fumble with the buttons of Chamundi’s half-pants, and then with the worn elastic of his peculiar, mustard-coloured wearunder. The boy remained will-less, spellbound like a prey before its predator while Raghupati sat down on the edge of the pedestal of an idol of Ganesh and tugged Chamundi to him by his penis. A shaved pubes the colour of toffee and a black, fat tool. He tweaked back its foreskin and didn’t notice the rich rings of crud beneath it before his tongue slithered out to tease the pink head.

Aaaaaarrgghhhhhhh. The pong of Chamundi’s penis flung him back against Ganesh. Ggrrraaaaaaghhhhhhh. He wanted to vomit. His mouth, his nostrils, his tongue reeked of the accumulated smegma of weeks, months. He glanced up at the boy. Behind the blood on his face lurked a simper of nervous embarrassment. While getting up, almost mechanically, Raghupati picked up the brass incense stand and lashed out at Chamundi’s nose. The boy staggered back, stumbled, cracked his skull against the wall and slumped to the floor, where he remained in a heap, still. Blood started to trickle out from his curly hair. Raghupati lurched out of the puja room.

In the bathroom, he gargled with Listerine for a minute or two. Bit by bit, as the smell of the mouthwash overpowered the stench of smegma and whatever-else-it’d-been, his rage shrivelled up and his sanity returned to him. While contemplating himself in the mirror, instinctively pulling in his tummy and puffing out his tits, he continued to mutter to himself, ‘Cleanliness before godliness . . . These leeches of the Welfare State . . . Discharge your dues to your creator . . .’ and other such disconnected phrases.

Exhausted, with the tang of Listerine now burning his tongue, he shambled across to his bedside table for paan masala. Abruptly, he remembered a vignette from the days when he’d been Assistant Collector at Koltanga. His neighbour
in the Civil Lines Colony had been a doctor whose name he for the moment couldn’t recall, a trainee at the local Primary Health Centre who had whiled many of their evenings away with tales of horror culled from his daily routine.