The Mammaries of the Welfare State (29 page)

A road block and a diversion at the bottom of the flyover. Just a board in the fast lane, propped up on a flower pot. It read: ROAD CLOSED. USE—↑, the arrow pointing at the heavens. Sen braked before an awesome Ganesh belly and demanded peremptorily, ‘Who is it? PM? Real route or decoy?’

But he’d lost the chase, he knew it. He must learn for the future, though, how to dig deep for, emerge with and flick a comet, all in one smooth movement.

It would be a useful counter-missile against the flying nosey of other cyclists which, he’d concluded after a few weeks’ pedalling in the capital, was the third most dangerous thing on the roads after public buses and the white Ambassador cars of the government. One couldn’t of course fight the flying nosey of others with one’s own because when one, without pausing in one’s cycling, swivelled one’s head to blow one’s nose in the air, one’s nosey unfortunately flew
backwards
to bespatter the cyclists behind one.

He returned to his flat, defeated. He felt weird and foolish all day, tense, jittery, expecting the police to come and harass him any minute. In the evening, he dropped in unannounced—as was the custom in the Transit Hostel, it being as informal as a slum—on one of his neighbours, Dr Srinivas Chakki, an entomologist in the Ministry of Public Health. Over many cups of tea, Sen described and analysed the events of the day and life in general in the Department of Labour.

‘What was most significant, Dada, was that I, in person, even though it was only for less than a minute, could actually hand over what to them is a substantial sum of money, to some of the poorest of our poor—though of course, statistics and reports indicate that our urban poor are quite well-off when compared to their rural cousins. My beggar family actually has to pay some kind of rent, for instance, to some subterranean creature to be allowed to exist under the flyover. But nevertheless, it seems to me that I committed today a perfect, pure act of welfare that lasted all of forty seconds—that is to say, I pounced on the ill-earned money of some wicked man and handed it over—the well-thumbed, greasy, germ-packed cash, the naked notes themselves—to a bunch that needed it more than me. Could welfare be clearer, cleaner? None of that junk about helping the needy to stand on their own two feet. Because you don’t know either who the really needy are or what they truly want! Because your Village Information System functions not on fact, but on caste and clout! No fourteen-page forms to be filled in triplicate by an illiterate and submitted along with six annexures and a bribe at the Block office forty kilometres away after waiting in a queue for six hours—for all of which the applicant’ll get sixty rupees a month. No insanely complicated bank loan to buy a dried-up, malnourished cow when what the bugger really needs is water for his three square feet of plot. No, none of that. Just plain, hard, filthy cash passed on in a second to the female adults of the family for them to do what they like with. No imposing on the good citizenry that breathes at the bottom of the heap your own doctrinaire theories on what constitutes the good life. Only give them the means to define for themselves, by a process of trial and error, what the good life is.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call me Dada. Just because we’re Bengali, you think that I can and want to be called Dada. Well, as the Bengalis love to say, we should change the system. I’ve a theory or two up my sleeve that however need
some honing before I can roll my sleeves up and make them public.’

The next morning, Sen made it a point to reach his office before everyone else. As soon as his PA showed up, he asked him to call the police, declaring that within the span of one hour that morning, there had been both an attempt to bribe him and a subsequent theft. His PA had looked doubtful, had raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips and gone away. He’d returned a while later to inform Sen that they hadn’t reckoned with the Police State. The Station House Officer of the local police station had apparently told the PA that he wasn’t going to move his arse all the way to Aflatoon Bhavan for an official as lowly as an Under Secretary and for crimes as mundane as bribery and theft.

The Steel Frame in Sen had then swung into action. ‘Did you speak to him in Punjabi, English or Hindi? . . . Put him on the line, I’ll suck his balls dry in Punjabi.’

By cop standards, the SHO was tall, slim, even good-looking. Sen’s PA later explained that their particular police station tended to have slimmer and better-looking men because the entire force collectively made a—well, minor—killing—just enough for their tea and cigarettes—out of seducing, terrorizing, beating up, sodomizing and blackmailing the closet homosexuals who cruised after dark in the Pashupati Aflatoon Public Gardens.

‘Well, you ought to’ve told me all that before. Was that why the meeting was such a cock-up? I mean, was I supposed to turn him on or he me or what?’

The SHO had entered and saluted Sen with elaborate, stylized insolence, boots detonating on the floor, et cetera. While Sen’d wondered when to ask him to sit, then or a bit later, the SHO hid sat down, sighed, asked him in turn whether he could smoke and lit up while Sen had begun to point out to him that smoking was forbidden on Welfare State premises.

‘Ahhh . . . too late . . . perhaps next time,’ the SHO had
lamented in Punjabi, examining his cigarette and exhaling richly at the table top. ‘Why do we issue regulations that we can’t implement? It gives governance a bad name. Makes the public conclude that we aren’t serious—I’m so sorry, would
you
like to smoke?’

They’d got down to business. Sen had worked most of it out. ‘I usually turn up in office pretty early . . . before everybody else, before the day starts. I go through my files, plan my day, prepare for my meetings. My desk is usually spotless, from the way I’d left it the evening before. I’ve instructed my peon not to dust it. I dust it myself. He didn’t look hurt that I’d further lessened his workload. I keep the duster in the bottom drawer on the right-hand side of my desk. This morning, when I opened the drawer for the duster, I noticed on top of it a blue plastic packet. That drawer, I must make it clear, has never contained anything other than two dusters, a sheet or two of blotting paper, some pieces of chalk, and a fair amount of rat shit, both dry and fresh. My skin began to tingle, gooseflesh and all that, as I opened the packet. It contained hundred-rupee notes. I counted them. My fingers were clumsy. Twenty in all. I folded the packet neatly—neater than it was, in fact, put it back in the drawer, picked up the duster and began reorganizing the dust on my table—my mind, as they say, in a whirl. I distinctly remember that I shut the drawer before beginning to dust. To cut a long story short, while dusting, I felt an urge to visit the toilet, so I went, leaving the duster on the table beside the phone, to the Officers’ Toilet, which is in the East Wing, next to the canteen of the Department of Mines. I was away from this room for about nine minutes—not more, I’d imagine. We can time it, if you like. I returned, finished dusting and opened the bottom drawer to put the duster back. The packet had disappeared. I searched the other drawers of the desk, the cupboard, those shelves . . . it wasn’t anywhere . . . I spent some time wondering whether I should simply forget the incident or report it as a case of
attempted-bribery-cum-theft. I finally decided on being straightforward.’

By spinning this yarn and lodging a complaint with the police, Sen’d actually hoped, in a schoolboyish, Enid Blytonish, Five-Go-Off-and-Bugger-George-on-Smuggler’s-Hill kind of way, to confound his adversaries, to show them that they were dealing not with a cretin, but with a major player, who knew the ropes and could call the shots. The meeting with the SHO therefore could be considered a turning point in his official life.

For lazily, through the cigarette smoke, after hearing him out, the SHO drawled in Punjabi, ‘I’ve a constable waiting outside with your PA. We’ll call him in, you dictate your complaint, he’ll read it back to you, you both can sign it, we’ll give you a copy. But tell me, when you submit an FIR like that to your Tax Officer, saying that you’ve lost, say, ten thousand rupees—that’s simpler, and more respectable, than adding all those confusing details about the blue plastic packet and the Officers’ Toilet—does he grant you tax exemption or what?’

The upshot of the encounter—and indeed, of the whole episode—on the oblique economic implications of which Dr Kapila solicited the views of the addressees of his secret questionnaire—was that Sen decided that till his retirement from the service of the Welfare State, he would not, to use officialese, take a decision on any official matter unless and until he was sure that it did not stink. His decision considerably eased his workload. After his retirement, he looked forward to a career in revolutionary politics. At least politicians, he’d point out to himself, without any sense of being funny, were comparatively straightforward in their crookedness.

On the note from the Director General of Police on the subject of doubling the number of Black Guard Commandoes on golf duty and buying all of them shoes acceptable on the
golf course, Dr Kapila saw that predictably, his Department had cocked up, missed the point, not seen the wood for the trees and for the nth time, had substantiated his, Dr Kapila’s, axiom that very few civil servants understood Welfare State finance. For, to a man, all his subordinates—Desk Officer, Assistant Secretary, Deputy Secretary, Joint Secretary—had turned down the two hundred thousand rupees on the golf shoes as wasteful expenditure and en passant approved—as though a trifling matter—the proposed six crore rupees on the doubling of the Black Guards. Dr Kapila sighed and dictated a fourteen-page memo on the subject, thereby fattening the file a bit more. He included in his outpourings all his foreboding about the nation, his horror at the endless, snowballing waste, at the body politic completely out of joint, his conviction that the need of the hour, as always, was an intelligent review of the economics of the state, was the immediate and serious implementation of programmes like BOOBZ.

It was not wise, he knew, to send a
fourteen-page
note to the Chief Minister, but he couldn’t help himself. Sure enough, the file returned with his views clearly not read with the love and care that they required. ‘
Seen by Chief Minister. We may allow the number of Black Guards to be doubled. Security cannot be compromised. They may be allowed to buy appropriate footwear for the golf course. The police force is the backbone of the Welfare State. Chief Minister is impressed and intrigued by BOOBZ. Finance Secretary is therefore directed to consider appointing Special Boobz Officers to examine and analyse the economic viability of certain organizations of the government the reason for the existence of which has for quite some time puzzled more than one mind. Examples abound
—
the office of the Liaison Commissioner, the Director of the Official Languages Cell, the Commanding Officer of the State Mobile Civil Engineering Column, the Director of Tabulation and Punching in the Regional Sample Survey Organization, the Deputy Examiner of Books and Publications . . . the list is almost endless. Finance Secretary may also kindly examine in the first place the economics of appointing Special Boobz Officers in these bodies.’

K
um Kum Bala Mali adores Bhupen Raghupati. Bhupen Raghupati loves Kum Kum Bala Mali. Adore and Loathe, Love and Hate, Sweet and Sour, S and M—the Minister’s Secretary in the Ministry of Heritage, Upbringing and Resource Investment was pleased with the outcome of his computations. With his wang ascending, leaking, licking its lips, struggling for
Lebensraum,
as it were, in the trousers of his safari suit, he looked up from his desk at the object of his desire for that day.

She’d written earlier for an appointment with the Minister because she had a housing problem that she wished to discuss. Her letter, on fancy handmade paper—along with the compellingly negative notes of the Department—lay before the Minister’s Secretary. Her perfume suffused the room—indeed, made him breathless.

He had for long held a theory about perfumes. All human aromas—everybody knew—were an invitation to sex. They emanated from the body’s erogenous zones. The more potent the perfume, the more erogenous the zone. Bad body smells indicated a desire to be mastered, to be down below, an I-have-the-mind-and-body-of-the-Great-Unwashed-so-please-defile-me signal. Good aromas showed a desire to allure, to be approved of, to sniff and be sniffed, sadomasochistic
psychological insecurity. So sensitive was the Minister’s Secretary to odours that on his acute days, he could virtually
see
the sexual organ—whether pussy or prick—on which he’d focused all his shakti, oozing, sweating out its welcoming scented fluids through constricting cottons and into the air. He himself unfailingly daubed his armpits and crotch every morning with Yardley’s Aftershave Lotion.

While Kum Kum Bala Mali droned on, smiling at him, fluttering her impossible eyelashes, creasing her make-up, he doodled on his note pad, beside his last round of Love-Like-Hate-Adore, a Cubistic sketch of a fecund thatch, beneath it a curious apple-shaped form, from which a pair of thighs split wide apart and beckoning ripples of aroma exuded in sets of four wavy lines each. This was Raghupati’s favourite doodle. When time permitted, he’d usually add a symbolic worm emerging from—or boring its way into—the apple. It was one angle on the world.

The letter was quite another.

9, Ganapati Aflatoon Marg
8 January

Respected Bhanwarji Virbhim Sahebji,

Do I need to introduce myself? By using up a few lines to describe myself, do I not insult your intelligence and your knowledge of the world? I’d certainly have thought so, but much to my surprise, the civil servants in your ministry hold different views. I must say that I was astonished to receive, in response to my preceding letter on the same subject, a standard cyclostyled reply from the Under Secretary (Housing For Cultural Luminaries), enclosing a form that asked for my biodata.

I did not send it. Instead, in my rejoinder to the luminary, I declared that if he needed to read my biodata to know who I was, then he was not qualified to
be an Under Secretary in the Department of Culture. His latest cyclostyled salvo orders me to vacate my bungalow by the end of February.

It’s now or never, observed Raghupati to himself; remember that time’s running out at the speed of light. ‘Madam Mali, may I ask of you a favour?’

‘Why—of course.’ Smile, flutter flutter.

‘Will you have dinner with me, one evening this week? Just you and me? For me, it’ll be a dream come true.’

‘Oh, I’m very—I don’t know what to say!’

‘Then say nothing! And I’ll take your demure silence to mean a bashful yes! You don’t know—you
CAN’T know
what you mean to me! You’re the raging beacon of my adolescence—ohh, those Sixties films!
Iskq
Mein Doob Jaa, Lachhmanjhoola, Aag Ki Rekha, Ek Gaon Mein Pardesi, Bumbai Kahan Hum Kahan, Jhuk Gayi Sita, Guftagu Chalti Rahe, Naa Mat Kehna, Aakash Mein Teen Badal, Subah Ki Aasha Mein
—I could recite the names of your Golden Jubilee films forever, truly! When you announced after
Do Raaste Mein Teen Kutte
—my God, more than fifteen years ago!—that you were going to quit films, you caused as much heartache in the nation as Partition . . . there were a handful of suicides reported in the papers, I remember . . . so what d’you say, Madam? Dinner on Thursday?’

‘Yes, I suppose so—may I phone you? . . . I’ll have to check my diary which, unfortunately, I’ve left at home—but you do think that you can solve my bungalow problem?’

‘Shall we discuss that over dinner? A dinner and a long evening alone with you, Madam, is all that I ask in return. A favour for a favour. Tit for tat. The entire edifice of the government, Madam, is based on a quite feudal system of favours. It’s even been drafted into our rules and regulations in the form of the powers of discretion granted to our public servants to interpret the law . . . think of the joy that you can
give me and I you. The people that you must’ve seen in the waiting room all, all have favours to seek and to grant, like barter in a primitive society.’

Raghupati saw the ageing actress to her car. It gave him a chance to brush against her, touch her shoulder, her upper arm. Rocking on the balls of his feet, he watched her car, a steel-blue Maruti Esteem, crunch its way up the gravel to the gates of the splendid colonial bungalow, plumb in the heart of Lutyens’s City, that he’d chosen for Bhanwar Virbhim upon the MP’s joining the Central Cabinet as Minister. An exquisite villa, magnificently proportioned; on its lawns, one felt munificent oneself. Would Kum Kum Bala succumb to his ardour? Would the aroma of the sap gushing about in his veins make her swoon and wilt? Ahh, life was wonderful. Perhaps she wants it bad, and at this very moment, in the cold comfort of her car, listening to the latest Rani Chandra CD and dreaming of his, Raghupati’s, squat tight body—much like a thickening phallus with its foreskin pulled back—she was wetting her wearunder and regretting not having torn them off in the camp office. Ahh, hold on to your longing till Thursday, Janum! Later, when her file had inched its way up to Bhanwar Saheb, she’d of course have to contend with his advances as well. She might even—who knows?—be partial to his kind of attractiveness—successful, fat, powerful, black, amoral, lumpen, treacherous, taciturn, risen-from-the-depths-and-still-rising. One could never account for human tastes. Ohh, the wonder of it.

Raghupati strolled across the lawns to inspect the progress on the putting green that he’d suggested to the Minister could be developed on the West Garden. Having selected the bungalow for Bhanwar Saheb after an exhausting four-night search, he justifiably felt quite proprietorial about the place.

It ought to be said in defence of the Welfare State that it is by and large democratic. Irrespective of class and status,
it gives everybody—high and low—a bad time. The higher-up you are, though, the more clout you have to fight and exploit it.

Which is why, about a month ago, after Bhanwar Virbhim had rested on Jayati Aflatoon’s feet his forehead, and the plague epidemic in Madna had sidled off the front pages of the national newspapers, and she, pleased and tickled, had suggested to her doting cousin-by-marriage the Prime Minister that Bhanwar be accommodated at the Centre, Virbhim, even though acutely disappointed at having been allotted Heritage, Upbringing and Resource Investment, had decided to accept the portfolio with the correct facade of gratitude and joy, and to bide his time, because while waiting, he would be paid, housed and chauffeured about, and through a judicious granting of favours and an intelligent manipulation of the law, he’d use the months to augment his vote bank, consolidate his power base and expand his camp following.

As a first step, he’d summoned to the capital his loyals—Bhupen Raghupati and Baba Mastram among them—to help him organize himself. The Baba was to decide on an auspicious date and time for the Minister’s entry into Aflatoon Bhavan. Raghupati was to set up the Minister’s personal offices—one for each of the Departments of Culture, Heritage, Education and Welfare, a fifth for coordinating among the other four and a large sixth one in the camp office at home. That involved, among other things, the selection of a hundred and seventy two staff members, including Personal Assistants, stenographers, clerks, typists, peons, chowkidaars, gardeners and daily wage labourers who could cook, sweep, scavenge, and massage Madame Bhanwar Sahiba’s elephantine legs, and the choosing of curtains, carpets, tables, chairs, air-conditioners, cupboards, idols, cars and smaller idols for the cars. Setting up the Minister set back the Welfare State by the usual one crore.

‘Make hay while the sun shines’ was a principle that had
generally guided the actions of both Bhanwar Virbhim and Bhupen Raghupati for many a year. By instinct, children of the tropics that they were, they’d made money whenever they could, for who knew what the morrow would bring? With the years, however—naturally—they’d become sophisticated, the stakes had shot up to the moon—inflation and all that, it even upsets the calculations of avarice. Yet, at the same time, old habits die hard, and they were citizens of a poor country, and thus it was that Raghupati had first of all recruited Shri Dharam Chand, the one-armed peon in the Ministry of Heritage, Upbringing and Resource Investment and a valued henchman of the Minister from his Madna days, to oversee the takings from the other recruitments—at an average of twenty thousand rupees per selected candidate. The hopefuls had turned up in droves from the various other Departments and Ministries of the government, and from the employment exchanges and surplus cells of the staff selection commissions.

Of course, one could also make hay in inclement weather. Truly the land of opportunity, the Welfare State could boast of thousands of officials, great and small, who hadn’t let a single chance to rake it in slip by—the accountants who charged a percentage for each salary, increment, allowance and emolument that they paid out to their colleagues, the section officers who picked up fifty rupees for each day of unauthorized leave that they permitted their clerks, the drivers who siphoned off petrol and diesel from their official cars for sale—at bargain rates, of course—to their buddies, the peons who made thousands of rupees extra from faked overtime bills, their superiors who took cuts from them for passing those same bills—the list is long, varied and intricately interwoven, and the corruption terribly insidious. There have been times when completely honest—and comparatively honest—officers—Agastya Sen, for example, and Dhrubo Jyoti Ghosh Dastidar, Kumari Lina Natesan and Harihara
Kapila—have wondered whether they are in fact as honest as they’ve always thought themselves to be—the idea of honesty having become more and more slippery with the years—and secondly, what good being honest has done them.

One was honest when one didn’t ask an applicant for fifty thousand rupees before one issued him a telephone connection, and one was not honest when one suggested to another applicant that she could pick up that grant from one’s Department for her song and-dance routine if she slept with one—that difference had always been clear. But not much else. In the mornings, on one’s way to office, one dropped the kids off at school in the office car because the school fell en route. That wasn’t dishonest, surely. But if the school was madly out of the way and started two hours before office, and one still used the office car and driver for the kids? And to pay the driver for the extra hours, allowed him to fake some more overtime? No, that wasn’t dishonest either, that was merely a reasonable extension of the personal use of a legitimate office perk. As a civil servant, one was dishonest when one used one’s official position to hurt, exploit and abuse the citizens, applicants and beneficiaries of the Welfare State. But when the civil servant or the politician did the same things to the State itself? No, that didn’t sound very heinous either. What the hell, that was almost a perk too—one needed merely to stretch a bit the notion of a perk. Why, everyone did it all the time—faking his income tax returns, fudging the values of his immovable properties to reduce stamp duty, avoiding capital gains, wealth and municipal taxes, concealing assets in insolvency proceedings. These weren’t truly violations of the law, because the law became an ass when it was applied to its creators. It wasn’t seriously meant to be, it was mainly intended to impress on its citizens that the Welfare State meant business. Particularly when it didn’t, naturally, because one needed to keep up appearances. And it didn’t really, the State hardly ever meant business. It
was too slow, lethargic, large, will-less, smug. Smug because its directive principles were noble, will-less because having framed them, it seemed to’ve drained itself of the power to see them through. And its mandarins weren’t helping it any because they needed to help themselves first and thus move up a rung or two on the social ladder. They liked the government because milking it was both easy and respectable, anything but a disgusting crime. Stealing from it made them rich, of course, pushed them way up above the Poverty Line, as it were, but it also made them cats, lions—dragons, if you wish—major players, dynamic achievers. When one has the right background and belongs to the right class, an infringement of the legal code does not necessarily violate the moral norm, especially when, in the process, one becomes far richer without actually stealing from any one individual.

Naturally, one’s idea of one’s own honesty was continually being teased by what was going on all about one—everybody else seemed to be raking it in and quite enjoying the process. One kept one’s mouth shut and turned a blind eye because it was none of one’s business and one wasn’t being paid to wade into deep shit, particularly somebody else’s—but that was being dishonest, wasn’t it, no two ways about that. One couldn’t countenance dishonesty and remain comfortable in one’s skin. Which thickened, fortunately, with the years, so that, like Raghupati, for example, after twenty-three years of distinguished service, one really had the hide of a rhino: one could’ve skinned oneself and not noticed.