The Mammaries of the Welfare State (23 page)

At the sink, apprehensive of the monkey munching away a bare two feet above and to the left of his head, Dr Alagh, standing on one leg, rinsed his left calf and foot. He almost lost his balance out of fright when, suddenly, from behind the animal and out of the blue beyond the window, bobbed up a human head, curly-haired, thick-lipped. It didn’t startle the monkey, however; the latter merely turned and perfunctorily bared its teeth at the painter who in turn aped it.

Just then, the lights went off, but only in the toilet and a section of the adjoining corridor. It could have been a routine power failure, terrorist sabotage, a routine economy drive, a snafu due to overloading or routine illegal electricity tapping. Agastya felt that they would do better to get on with their appointments than to hang around in the dark in a weird loo.

To their discomfort, as they left the Gents’, the monkey abandoned its food, hopped off the sill and began to trail them. Nobody else seemed to notice or be perturbed by it. Its small restless eyes squinted ceaselessly about as it followed them into the Departmental Canteen. It paused momentarily as they settled down at a plastic table near one of the windows, then, red bum held high, stalked regally off to perch on another window sill. Agastya relaxed just a bit.

The monkeys of Aflatoon Bhavan weren’t hostile, they were simply unfriendly. There were at least three thousand of them. They’d been there longer than anyone could recall, since the Word, practically. Administration had summoned Pest Control once, but he’d said that they didn’t do monkeys. Under Secretary (General Maintenance) had also written a couple of times to the Ministry of Environment and Forests to prod the zoo to come and round them up. (During the first week of the plague scare, incidentally, a rustle from their building
had
been heard but it’d later turned out to be only a woman clerk shifting in her seat while knitting during the morning session.)

Three thousand monkeys. Agastya wondered where on earth they stayed. Perhaps they had addresses with pin codes or some of that www stuff. It was funny—uncanny, really—how they—the monkeys—had a problem only with Personal files. Just once in the history of Aflatoon Bhavan had one of them actually pounced on a civil servant and made off with his file. The victim had been Chhote Lal Nilesh, then Section Officer, Departmental Enquiries. The monkey didn’t even scratch him, unfortunately—it was repelled, so the story goes, by Shri Nilesh’s general sliminess. It simply landed on Nilesh’s shoulder, coiled its tail around his neck—not out of love, one would imagine—reached down for the file, kissed Nilesh twice, once on either cheek, in the French manner, in gratitude and farewell, and then lazily loped off with its booty. Personal files tend to be a bit exhibitionistic, after all. All bound in red parchment, with those flags in huge letters simply screaming for attention—CONFIDENTIAL, FOR
RESTRICTED CIRCULATION, TOP SECRET, FOR SECRETARY’S EYES ONLY, Civil servants should rather blame themselves for arousing in the first place the curiosity of their resident apes, who became quite popular after the attack on Nilesh. Missing files still continue to be attributed to them. It’s much simpler, everyone agrees—though less permanent—than arranging, in somebody else’s room, for an accidental bonfire.

Waiters continued to careen past them, bent sideways at alarming angles to counterbalance the weight of five-to-six trays, one atop another, poised equably on left shoulder and upturned, backward-pointing left palm. On each tray, Agastya could see rows and rows of identical, tiny steel bowls; those on the top tray were full of some mud-coloured gravy. The waiters wore crumpled, off-white khadi uniforms and extraordinary, foot-high, maroon turbans all brocaded in gold; they looked like the proud crests of a flock of some rare, gigantic birds bobbing, bouncing and nipping about against the grey-and-brown shabbiness of the canteen. To each waiter who shot past them, Agastya serenely and pleasantly repeated their order for tea. Some of the waiters’d grunted, but one couldn’t be certain that it’d been in response.

The tea finally arrived, tepid, sweet, mild dishwater in a cracked cup. Well, what else could he expect for fifty paise, demanded Agastya of himself, Darjeeling Flowery Orange Pekoe from Fortnum and Mason? A fundamental law of economics in the Welfare State, Sir—subsidy breeds substandard. You’re in a Departmental Canteen, remember, a welfare measure for the
employees
of the government, not to be confused with any of the welfare measures for the
citizens
under that government. The canteen buys its raw stuff—rice- dust, oil-and-used-engine-oil, flour-dust, potatoes-and-worms, curry-powder-and-the-good-earth, cockroach-and-lizard-shit—from the Department of Raw Materials and Civil Supplies—
pretty cheap, special rates and so on. It’s a tortuous, instructive journey for the bags of sugar and the cans of kerosene, from one warehouse to another godown, from a depot to a storehouse to a truck to Aflatoon Bhavan.
Everyone
steals en route—it is Clause 28(iv) of the Public Distribution of Essential Commodities Act.
Notwithstanding any law or regulation to the contrary and for the time being in force, all dealers, purveyors, transporters, merchants, middlemen, tradesmen, caterers, canteen managers and the suchlike, of food, raw materials, provisions, foodstuff, provender, rations, groceries and the suchlike, meant for the eventual consumption of the employees of the Welfare State, may, whenever deemed fit, adjust to their convenience, the quality and quantity of the edibles and consumables under their charge.
It is the reason why there’ll always be rats in government warehouses, their ground excreta in government wheat, monkeys in Aflatoon Bhavan and gods in Heaven—somebody has to be around to take the shit, to foist the blame on, scapegoats for human misdeeds. If he analysed the ingredients of his cup of tea, he’d find that it
wasn’t
worth more than fifty paise. It was completely off the point to argue that outside the sphere of the Welfare State, far far away from that indescribable Departmental Canteen, in a normal, decent, ordinary cafe or restaurant, a cup of tea cost about twenty times more. That was only natural because it was twenty times closer to what a cup of tea should be. The Department’s Class IV Employees’ Union had till then strenuously resisted all attempts by the Canteen Management to raise the prices on the menu. The proposed hike for tea was to one rupee—a hundred percent increase. Criminal! Would people never understand? In the Welfare State, everything was free or as close to free as cheap could get. Give us this day our daily crud.

They temporarily parted ways after tea, Dr Alagh to try and find the two Under Secretaries whom they’d come to meet, Agastya a quiet corner where he could smoke a joint.
Eventually, the Civil Surgeon located at least the room of one.

Not many more signs could be put up on his door. Beneath his bilingual nameplate hung a board that took up half the door. It described his designation in full, in both Hindi and English:
Under Secretary: Gajapati Aflatoon Centenary Celebrations, Our Endangered Tribal Heritage, Promotion and Diffusion of Demotic and Indigenous Drama and Other Such Forms of Self-Expression.
The third sign read:
No Visitors Without Prior Appointment,
underneath which was the suggestion:
Please See My PA In Room 3872, D Wing, Desk IV.
The fifth board reminded all passers-by that
Visitors Without Prior Appointment
(were)
Not Encouraged.
The sixth stated quite simply:
Please Do Not Spit Here.

The seventh and last plate read:
This Area Meant for Parking of Official Cars Only. Any Car Unauthorizedly Parked Will Have Its Tyres Deflated. By Order of the Under Secretary Administration. Thank You.
It had been stolen about a year ago by the Under Secretary from the car park downstairs because he’d liked it and had wanted to see how many passers-by would actually read it on his door and find it odd. In one year, no one had complained.

Dr Alagh knocked. No response. He knocked again, then bravely opened the door. A tall, plumpish man concentrated on his tai-chi exercises in the centre of the room. At the second desk, a solemn, bespectacled attractive woman paused in her writing to glance up forbriddingly at Dr Alagh.

‘Oh hello! . . . I was looking for the Under Secretary for Demotic Drama. I’ve an appointment with him.’

Without quickening or disturbing the slow, flowing rhytnm of his arm movements, the exerciser pointed to the vacant chair behind the first desk and remarked in soft, measured tones, in harmony with the undulations of his body, ‘There is no response from the incumbent’s seat. Please try after some time.’ Then the exerciser pointedly—but fluidly—turned his back on Dr Alagh.

Who, nonplussed, shut the door and read the boards and nameplate on it one more time. Had he just encountered one Under Secretary and her gigolo or two Under Secretaries, of whom one, for reasons of state, was nameplate-less? Mr Tai-Chi had been more poised than unfriendly. How many minutes was after some time? Perhaps he should go off somewhere to unearth the Collector of Madna. Or he could ferret out in one of these warrens the Under Secretary for Freedom Fighers (Pre-Independence). He ambled off, nervous.

Meanwhile, to avoid passing under a monkey that squatted atop a steel almirah and bared its teeth at everyone that tramped past, the Collector of Madna had purposefully turned into the first open door. A huge room that looked small because of the usual chaos of tables, chairs, almirahs, shelves and hillocks of files. There was just one man in the room, hunched in a chair by a window. Agastya threaded his way across. The man wore a brown suit and sparkling-white, new tennis shoes. He had yellowed, sad eyes. Beside him, on the table, lay his opened lunch box. At his feet glowed the room’s single electric heater, on the wire frame of which were being reheated, in twos, the chapatis from the lunch box. On one of the cleaner files beside the heater lay the chapatis that’d already been done. The silence was companionable.

‘How will you reheat the vegetables and the dal?’

The man pointed to the flat metal pen-tray. ‘That fits very well on the heater. We stir with the stencil pen. Have you had lunch?’ asked he courteously.

‘Yes, thank you, but please do go ahead . . . It’s way past lunch hour, isn’t it? . . . Actually, I came in in search of a light for my cigarette.’

‘Smoking is forbidden in all Welfare State offices,’ said the man sadly, dextrously replacing the chapatis on the heater with the last two from his lunch box. ‘I tend to have
my lunch late because of my arthritis and my piles. I have to complete my special joints-and-neck-exercises every morning, so I can’t reach office before eleven. Where’s the time for lunch at one? . . . during lunch hour, everybody saunters off outside to soak in the sun and eat peanuts and oranges . . . in our Department, only Under Secretaries and above are entitled to electric heaters in their rooms. Presumably only they need to keep warm in winter. I represented, arguing that I ought to be issued one on account of my arthritis. General Administration ordered me to face the Medical Board. I represented, arguing that the members of the Board committee belonged to castes traditionally hostile to mine. A final decision is still awaited. Meanwhile, I befriended the Section Officer, Stores, at our Lunch Club.’ He picked up the pen tray from the table, tipped its contents—ballpoints, pins, clips, erasers, markers—into a drawer, wiped it with a duster, then paused to glance shyly at Agastya, ‘Are you sure you won’t join me for a late lunch? . . . If you really want to smoke, you may light your cigarette from the heater. Here, use this paper’—handing him part of a blank sheet that he’d torn out of the nearest file—‘but please smoke at the window and try and exhale with your head
out of
the window, if you don’t mind.’

‘With pleasure. You wouldn’t mind, of course, if my cigarette is crumpled, hand-rolled and smells a little eco-friendly?’

‘Not at all.’

The phone rang, a muted but insistent, urgent, brr-brr. The man in the white tennis shoes ignored it, perhaps because he’d started lunch, at all times a sacred business. It wasn’t easy to discern which phone to pick up, since each of the eight desks in the room had an instrument, and they all seemed to be ringing.

Agastya made himself comfortable on some files on the window ledge. It was a good place to finish his joint; then he’d get back to locating Dhrubo. Sighing richly, he exhaled dragon-like through where the pane was meant to be. Before
him, not a hundred feet away, were the rows of windows of some other wing of Aflatoon Bhavan. From his seat, he could see nothing else, no sky, no ground, just the occasional pipal sapling tenaciously finding life in the damp walls, the black waste pipes and the trash of fifty years thrown out of a thousand windows. Where they weren’t slimy-green with damp, the walls of Aflatoon Bhavan were a dusty grey. One in two window-panes was broken, two in three windows wouldn’t shut. Pigeons roosted on the occasional air-conditioner. Families of monkeys went about their business on diverse floors, under different ledges, much as though his seat was a vantage point from which to view a cross-section of some simian apartment block. He couldn’t see much, though, of the interiors of any of the rooms that faced him. Those windows that hadn’t been sealed off by air-conditioners had been stoppered by brown files, by mountain ranges of off-white paper, chunks of which, in landslides, had joined, on the overhangs below, the plastic bags, the newspaper wrappers of lunches, the dry ink stamp pads. Nothing, no record (the mountain ranges seemed to say) is ever thrown away. Naturally not. After all, government is based, and acts, on its records. Records are its history and the ground for its planning, are vital for Audit and Parliament, for continuity in governance, for the protection of the taxpayer’s interests. In 1950, the Hakim Tara Chand Committee, in its report on
Documentation and Codification in the Welfare State,
had pointed out that to house the permanent records of the Central Ministries and Departments alone, the National Archives, against its 1949-capacity of twenty linear kilometres of shelves, would need four hundred-plus linear kilometres.