The Mammaries of the Welfare State (20 page)

‘My party will also raise two issues of finance with the Prime Minister. One: that since the district of Madna didn’t have a helipad, one had to be built just for his visit. Does that bother him or not? Two: Twenty lakhs has been given to the Madna Civil Hospital to clean itself up for his visit. Our Civil Surgeon is mentally not equipped to handle such a vast sum of money. Cynics at the hospital have suggested to him that on that day, he should issue himself a certificate of illness. I’ve been told that you’ve officially disclaimed all responsibility for the PM’s visit to the hospital.’

‘No, no, not at all,’ laughed Agastya with innocent joy, ‘I merely wrote to the Department of Public Health that our Civil Hospital was one of the filthiest places that I’ve ever seen in my life and that a sight of it might upset the Prime Minister no end. Which is why I’d suggested that Rajani Suroor be moved out of there while the going is good. I don’t give him any chance if he floats up out of his coma while he’s with Dr Alagh and actually sees what he’s been lying in now for almost two weeks. If you ask me, he comes to every morning, struggles up into consciousness, eyes his surroundings and shocked, relapses into a deeper swoon. Then the nurse on her rounds notes that he’s slipping.’

‘And Chamundi?’

‘What’s that? A new goddess?’

Bhootnath Gaitonde chuckled politely for a nanosecond and elaborated, ‘ . . . The boy has simply disappeared from the Commissioner’s house. About a fortnight ago, the Commissioner was interrupted during his afternoon massage by a telephone call from you. When, after a couple of minutes, the Commissioner returned to the massage room, Chamundi had vanished without a trace. Odd, but due to the pressure of office work, Commissioner Raghupati had absolutely no time to think of it then. Nobody has seen Chamundi since. This is his brother here, Dambha.’ Gaitonde indicated one of the vaguos, more red-eyed than the rest.
Like a well-rehearsed exit in a play, at that point, the others rose and quietly left the room. ‘ . . . Chamundi’s relations tell me that the Commissioner was—is—greatly attached to the boy. They want to register an FIR with the police but have been unable to so far. They then of course came to me. The police and the Commissioner believe that the boy simply went home into the forests of Jompanna. He succumbed to a typical tribal instinct, they maintain, that all of a sudden revolts against order, routine, discipline, work and all the other indicators of our notions of the civilized life. He was fed up, in short, and needed a break.’

‘It is not improbable.’

‘Chamundi’s family thinks differently.’

Agastya waited for Bhootnath Gaitonde to get to the point. He was curious to hear exactly how the other would phrase it. Some beating about the bush, then finally in English, ‘homosexual assault’, like a Latin legalistic term, ‘in situ’, or ‘pro rata’.

‘Oh dear. Sodomy and suspected murder. In the circumstances, it isn’t surprising that the police want to wait for a body to turn up, dead or alive. So should you, at least till the Prime Minister departs. Think of how much you’ll hurt the Commissioner with your accusations.’

‘We will of course link it up with the other sexual assault case, that of the civil servant, Kumari Lina Natesan Thomas. She’s accused Raghupati of sexually attacking her at an official dinner and he’s apparently going to receive a court summons. You’re no doubt aware of that?’

‘Ah yes—Kumari Lina . . . already the stuff of legend, Gaitonde-ji, and utterly admirable. A great pity, that I haven’t yet had the honour of meeting her. Yes, it does seem that the Commissioner’d offended her in some way or the other at their first meeting, and on a matter of principle, she refused to let the matter rest . . . a useful thing, principle. One wishes one had more of it oneself. No meetings, files, paperwork, inspections, reviews . . . one can focus all one’s energies on
representations and written complaints instead, addressed to all one’s bosses from the PM down to Shri Raghupati. You of course know that he’s due to move now, any day. He’ll be going to the Centre as Joint Secretary. Minister Virbhim can’t wait to surround himself with his henchmen, naturally. Meanwhile, the pressure is on us to prepare a backgrounder for a White Paper for the Department on this whole Rajani Suroor business. I told them that it’d be easier to draw up an off-white paper.’

Bhootnath Gaitonde’s manner seemed to suggest that Shri Sen shouldn’t be chuckling in office all the time. ‘For us, the class implications of the mysterious disappearance of Chamundi are clear. We intend to give this resonantly symbolic act the widest publicity. It is what in essence all your Welfare State programmes do to all your beneficiaries—what else is buggery but base exploitation, tell me? . . . Vyatha, Suroor’s drama group, is very enthusiastic about the theme that I’ve proposed to them. I met its second-in-command at the Madna International a couple of days ago. An absolute tiger in his enthusiasm, though in appearance, more a dragon—a Bengali too, perhaps you know him?—I’ve suggested a full-length street play that will revolve around Chamundi, how the innocent boy has been ensnared by the web of the Welfare State . . . the entire family frankly rues the day when the grandfather became one of the first beneficiaries of the Integrated Tribal Development Plan . . .’

Well, not perhaps the
entire
family, since it is more accurately an enormous tribal clan that stretches up to the horizon and beyond. Beyond because Chamundi’s agnate uncle, for example, a one-legged father of two nubile daughters and half-a-dozen younger siblings, has for some years been residing far away in the capital—more precisely, beneath the new Trimurti Aflatoon Centenary Celebrations Flyover. As for his more immediate kin, his sister has been discharged from the
Madna Civil Hospital with a livid scar on her cheek and a numbness in all her faculties. She returns to the International Hotel to learn that they don’t want her back with her new face. She is thus poised to sink back to her roots in the jungles of Jompanna. Chamundi’s elder brother, Dambha, is fed up of riding an auto-rickshaw in Madna rigged out as Durga and is on the lookout for starting off anew elsewhere. He would have quit the district months ago had he not been dissuaded by his wife, who is blind and was last in the news eight years ago when she had been attacked with a hot ladle by an attendant at the Hemvati Aflatoon Welfare State Home. A truly unfortunate—but representative—clan, dispersed in an enormous diaspora and up against it everywhere, its members individually and haphazardly thrashing their limbs about to stay afloat and above the Poverty Line, dimly aware that unless they seized and moulded their futures themselves, the single miracle that could officially deliver them would be the arbitrary decision of some state planners to improve the economic health of the nation by simply lowering that crucial line.

Up against the plague too, even though it was one of the few misfortunes that hadn’t touched them yet. For Commissioner Bhupen Raghupati had decided—and suggested to the Police Superintendent—that the AWOL Chamundi could profitably be considered a victim of the epidemic and should anyone enquire about him anywhere, he was to be told so. Inspired by the idea, Makhmal Bagai, fresh from jail but unrepentant, had proposed the same diagnosis—or else—for both the scar on the face of Chamundi’s sister and the long trance of Rajani Suroor. The Civil Surgeon had taken three days’ Casual Leave to mull the theories over.

‘Hmmm’-ing, and ‘I see’-ing intelligently at regular intervals, Shri Sen switched off while Bhootnath Gaitonde ran on. His
conscience reminded him that he was being paid, inter alia, to listen to whoever sat in front of him. In turn, he pointed out to his conscience that he was sure that his concentration was commensurate with his pay.

In his years in the Civil Service, time and time again, usually when he’d been plumb in the middle of something, Agastya had stepped outside himself, observed for a while whatever he’d been doing, and then asked himself whether it—his activity of that moment—would in any way, directly or indirectly, immediately or eventually, actually help the absolutely poor, the real have-nots, the truly unprivileged, the utterly godforsaken—in brief, the supposed primary beneficiaries of the Welfare State. His answer had always been no.

For one thing, development, to be successful, had to be achieved by stealth. No one must know. If the word spread, everybody would move in and walk all over one.

For another—well, how
did
his
day pass? 1) Listening, off and on, to Bhootnath Gaitonde, a middle-aged, dark star of an unimportant, Leftist-ish political party. That was certainly not going to help anybody. What else?

2) Pushing files on different subjects. Signing a clerk’s General Provident Fund Loan Advance. Grabbing hectares of some hapless soul’s land for a thermal power project that would take off two decades after. Answering tedious Parliament and Legislative Assembly questions. Allowing agricultural land to be used for generally illegal, non- agricultural purposes. Enquiring into the misdeeds of a Municipal Officer who retired four years ago. Replying to lengthy audit objections. Sanctioning special holidays in the district. Permitting the Electricity Board to build a substation beside the Primary School. Sending two hundred different kinds of statements to fifty different offices. Writing stinkers to subordinates, drawing their attention to earlier stinkers. Ordering other offices to depute their staff for special drives.
Disallowing a peon’s Medical Reimbursement Claim. Gearing up for a V∞IP visit that would always start three hours behind schedule. Unwinding thereafter. Tearing down encroachments and slums. Watching from his car their inhabitants attack the police. Inspecting the records of a district treasury or subordinate office. And so on. None of that even remotely touched the lives of those at the bottom of the pile. What else during the day?

3) A seven-hour-long District Planning and Development Council Meeting, the miasma of which was interrupted only by a stultifying lunch. At such gatherings—Members of Parliament and of the Legislative Assembly, local politicians, prominent citizens, chums of the party in power—all harangued the government in general and the bureaucracy in particular for their misdeeds. Their revelations and accusations were on the whole accurate and had the sting, the fury, of those done out of a deal. Not even one such allegation or denunciation, in Agastya’s experience, had been prompted by any sense of justice, propriety, fairplay, ethics, decency or right. However, being fundamentally clearsighted—or innocent—he still believed that these concepts existed and had meaning in the Welfare State. As far as possible, for example, and without cracking up, he wanted to ferret out and help the neediest of the needy, the sort who actually died every now and then of hunger; he wished to work out a system, a method, by which these millions could be precisely located, to cleave through the mountains of off-white paper to arrive at the heart of the matter, the essence of the Welfare State. Of course, working out that system would require more off-white paper. Fortunately, there’d never be a shortage.

Sure enough, he’d ruminated in his black diary:

Out of all these schemes, plans, projects and programmes of ours that look so snazzy on paper, who benefits in the end? After every bugger down the line, that is, has wolfed down his cut? It’s almost always
someone familiar with the system, isn’t it? He’s benefitted before from some other programme, so he knows how those dreadful forms are to be filled up, which twenty-three documents are required, whom to bribe to get what faked. If he himself can’t apply the second time round under his own name, then his mother, father, wife, sister, sons, uncle or cousin can, or he himself can under an assumed name. Not that he doesn’t need the peanuts that we dole out, but surely, in this monstrously populous, economically haywire country, there exist millions who need them
more
.
Of course, one column of the dreadful form will routinely ask the beggar whether he or, his near and dear ones have ever sucked before at these dugs, or at other dugs, of the State.
We
might run out of milk for them, but not for ourselves, and never will we run out of paper. If only we’d all been cows.

Bhootnath Gaitonde left after decades, with an assurance, however, that they would see each other again within the hour at the special meeting convened by the Commissioner to discuss the minute-to-minute programme of the Prime Minister’s visit.

The special meeting was actually two. To the second meeting had been invited the Army, the Air Force, the police, Public Works, National Highways, the Municipality, Public Health, the District Council, the Intelligence Bureau, the Security Branch, the District Education Officer, the press and media staff, General Administration and of course Protocol. All of them had to attend the first meeting too, formal invitations to which had only gone out to the elected, political and other heavyweights of the district. The two meetings would naturally discuss the minute-to-minute programmes of the Governor and the Chief Minister as well, since they were the principal among the many dignitaries expected in Madna before and for the PM. The second meeting would actually chalk and iron things out—who would garland whom, when
the Army would salute and where the schoolkids with their paper flags and patriotic songs would be lined up. The first meeting had been organized mainly to ensure that no one felt offended at being left out of the Top—but open—Secret deliberations of the second—which of course the invitees to the first wouldn’t attend, it being hush hush and restricted only to about a hundred officials.

To be honest, the second meeting—which would be the first of a series of many, held with increasing frequency and panic and decreasing method—would map everything out but the nitty gritty. How many in the helicopter? Who were the others? The exact time of arrival? Was Bhanwar Virbhim part of the entourage or was he now officially in some other camp? Would the PM’s food taster be on the flight? Where was lunch? Was the helipad to be sanitized twenty-four or forty-eight hours before the landing? Could they presume for heavens’ sake that the police would not insist on photographs on the temporary identity cards that would be issued to the privileged who would be allowed into the V?IP enclosure at the helipad? No V∞IP enclosure at all? Did they know what they were saying? Would his route to Aflatoon Maidan skirt the plague or pierce through it? Was it really necessary to have armed gunmen on the rooftops all along the route? Provide them packed lunches and bottled mineral water? Really? Why don’t we set up Committees for each macro event and sub-committees for the micro events? Well, micro as in bottled mineral water for armed gunmen en route? Who would clear, from the Security angle, private video cameras? Not you? You only do TV channels? Then who? Will we need separate passes to have access to the twenty-four-hour control room? Is the visit to Rajani Suroor in the hospital official? Oh, a private diversion? At the Maidan, a maximum of how many chairs on the dais? Chairs with armrests? Are sandalwood-scented garlands acceptable to the PM? You know, because of sandalwood and Sukumaran Govardhan?