The Mammaries of the Welfare State (31 page)

A submissive Assistant Engineer from the Electricity Board waited a few paces away, head down, file in hand, the correct junior courtier. The false ceiling in the camp office was in place and the third air-conditioner had just been fitted; would Minister’s Secretary Saab care to see?

‘Yes, after I inspect the West Garden. Have those silly electricity bills been sorted out yet?’

The Assistant Engineer shuffled about and giggled in nervous excitement. ‘Yes sir. No sir. I understand that the Honourable Minister has written to the Honourable Power Minister, sir. I’m sure that it’ll all be settled soon.’

‘I’d even advised that the Divisional Manager be
transferred because of his attitude. Has that happened?’ ‘Yes sir. No sir. Not yet. In fact (nervous giggle), he’s appealed to the Power Minister against what he calls Unnecessary Interference in the Smooth Functioning of the Government.’

‘How smooth does he want it to be? Like the shaved cheeks of his arse?’ Shrieks of nervous laughter.

The previous inhabitant of 21, Ganapati Aflatoon Marg, had been a Hindi film actor—a matinee idol—and an ex-Member of Parliament, a Nominated Culture Luminary to the Upper House. In his time, he was reputed to have earned fifty thousand rupees a day, year after year. He owned a flat in Bombay City, a villa in the suburbs, a sort of castle by the beach and two office complexes. He had air-conditioned—at official expense, of course—the outhouses of his official bungalow to house his Siamese cats. He had surrendered the bungalow to the Commissioner of Estates after a titanic, two-year struggle (it had even been mooted that the Army should be sent in to evict him). His argument—spread over a dozen letters addressed, among others, to the President of the Union, the Vice-President and the Prime Minister—had been, more or less: 1) However can a petty bureaucrat ask the idol of the masses to move his bloomin’ arse? 2) And yet people continue to wonder what is wrong with this country! 3) Why doesn’t the Army move in first to evict its own hundred Generals from the bungalows that they’ve overstayed in for years?

Matinee Idol left behind at 21, Ganapati Aflatoon Marg, among other things, an outstanding electricity bill of some eight lakh rupees. Raghupati found it outrageous that the Electricity Board should bother Bhanwar Virbhim, the new occupant of the bungalow, with the sins of the previous one. Not that Raghupati considered it a sin—indeed, it was
standard practice. One fitted a bungalow of that size with fourteen air-conditioners and six geysers and one used them as befitted one’s status, but to pay one’s electricity bill emitted terribly wrong signals; it clearly meant that one was slipping down the ladder. Only people without clout paid their electricity bills. Those with, never received any. They instead asked for—and got—official air-conditioners in their loos.

By serving the representatives of the people, one serves the people. Were the Electricity Board ever to ask Raghupati why on earth it should forego its dues outstanding against the occupant of 21, Ganapati Aflatoon Marg, he would’ve reasoned such. Or, since every second of the official life is official, the office should bear all expenses incurred. Then again, the bounty of welfare extends in all directions and knows no bounds; only the niggardly and the shortsighted think of economies. In a large country, you have to think big.

‘The macro view,’ explained Raghupati expansively to Makhmal Bagai, in Hinglish, long after office hours, in his camp study, over glasses of Johnnie Walker Blue, ‘has always been the need of the hour. Sit on the moon, and in the cold blue light, gaze down on the remote, quiet, sombre, beautiful and tranquil earth. Distance provides perspective and objectivity. All our squabbles and tensions will be seen for what they are—fundamentally petty, trivial. What, for example, is a roadside brawl, a disruption of some piffling street play, in the grand scheme of things? Nothing, merely a ripple, just frolic’

The whisky was a gift from Makhmal, who’d flown in that evening from Navi Chipra. Raghupati loved the richness of its fumes. For years now, whenever he’d had a cold or a sore throat, he’d inhaled from, and then sipped, a peg or two of neat good Scotch. In a sensationalist article on espionage
in the
Illustrated Weekly
,
he’d read once that Indian spies could be bought over by just one bottle of Scotch. He hadn’t found the notion particularly absurd or objectionable. Of course, it depended on the whisky. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue, for example, golden, limpid, perfect, seemed a reasonable wager for one’s soul.

The stronger the bouquet, naturally, the worse the stink that one is trying to subdue. By that standard, Makhmal Bagai was a two-week-old, putrefying, maggot-ridden cadaver. He routinely doused different parts of his body with scented hairoil, talcum powder, aftershave lotion, eau de Cologne and deodorant. The charm that he always carried with him was a tiny sandalwood Ganesh, the powers of which were periodically revived, as it were, by dips in sandalwood oil. To neutralize his foul mouth, he ate over a dozen perfumed paans a day (he and Raghupati shared, among other things, the same taste in paans). He liked incense to be lit in the rooms that he occupied, however temporarily. His attendant of the day carried, beside his paan box and mobile phone, a box of incense sticks; his manifold duties included lighting one of them up before Makhmal could notice its absence.

‘Whenever the case of Miss Natesan surfaces in court, that will be my argument—me-laard, the macro view. A point of order. The sight of her sari squeezed into the crevice of her bum upset my love of order, so I plucked it out. With my thumb and forefinger. I could’ve used my teeth. Why should my love of order so convulse the harmony of the world? Me-laard, reflect instead on the larger issues—bonded labour, corruption in high places, freedom of speech, the suppression of immoral traffic, crimes against women, caste reservations, violence in politics, the Police-or the Welfare State. Leave that fat, charming and pig-headed Lina Natesan to her memos and reminders.’

‘I could arrange for some acid for her face. Take her mind off her bum.’

‘That won’t be necessary. Her face is nice, don’t spoil it. In fact, after that cock-up with Rajani Suroor last month, your father and I both feel that for a while, we could do without your help, thank you.’

Makhmal didn’t feel secure without a weapon. It was usually a switchblade. Were he to reflect on the subject, he’d’ve been both puzzled and relieved that unlike him, the wide world didn’t believe in the perfect simplicity of the efficacy of violence. My God—how much people talked, and wrote, and argued! Use a gun, boss, or a hockey stick, because time’s running out, look, gurgling down an unplugged drain.

When he’d dropped out of school, his father had packed him off to the North because he’d wanted Makhmal to broaden his horizons, get out of Madna, out of his hair, see the country, maybe find a vocation. At his uncle’s sweets shop in Dundimandir, Makhmal had sat behind the cash counter for six months, acquired a taste for the scent of rose water, improved his Hinglish, broken a bottle of Limca on the jaws of an ill-tempered customer who couldn’t wait for his change, and from his associates picked up a Punjabi manner of pronouncing English words. The accent had waned with the years but could still, every now and then, particularly in moments of stress, bob up in his delivery. ‘Jealous’ became ‘jaluss’ as in ‘jalopy’, for example, ‘shock’ was ‘shokk-uh’ and ‘memories’ ‘mammaries.’ He didn’t have very pleasant mammaries.

‘Miss Natesan’s case shouldn’t pose a problem. I’ve discovered that the judge is likely to be S.H. Sohan, who in his after-hours is a Punjabi poet. I’ve spoken to him on the phone—in Punjabi, of course—and I’ve an appointment with him early next week. Would me-laard like to be, I asked, our Official Delegate to the World Poetry Conference in Honolulu? Return air ticket, six free days in a deluxe hotel, per diem at par with international standards, facilities for simultaneous
translation into five international languages while me-laard recites his immortal verse in Punjabi before Nobel laureates, literary agents from London, publishers from New York—would me-laard do me the honour of deigning to accept? In reply, he fellated me on the phone. If the case comes up, who knows, he might send Miss Natesan to jail for conduct unbecoming of a civil servant . . . Just press the bell—I need some milk to make a new, great cocktail.’

Incompetent and dangerous, Makhmal had had no choice but to enter politics. In his late teens, he’d been quite an asset to his father during both the Parliamentary and the Assembly elections—dropping in at polling booths with jeeps full of gunmen to terrorize voters and steal ballot boxes, bribing policemen with petty cash, food and cheap whisky to look the other way, whisking away and beating up members of rival gangs, shooting rounds off into the air when things looked too quiet—ahhh, politics was the good life. After the third elections, Bhanwar Virbhim had appointed him one of the General Secretaries of the State Political Party. He’d wanted his dunderhead son to learn some of the facts of life, to revere wealth, not to remain forever retarded, to grasp that money was infinitely more powerful than the gun, that nothing was socially more respectable than power, that to be on the right side of the law, one simply needed to be above it. Expectedly, Makhmal’s record of violence earned him Z-category Black Guard Commando protection. All those guns, that screaming motorcade, the awed, frightened faces of bystanders, went to his head. Fast cars began to attract him almost as much as weapons.

In the one week that he’d spent in Madna jail, his father once again had become a Central Minister. Virbhim had let his son
stew a bit behind bars because he’d correctly gauged that it would look great on his own cv. Finally, before using his clout to extract Makhmal, he’d conveyed down the line that that would be the last time that he’d be interceding on his son’s behalf. One more misdemeanour and Makhmal would be quietly tossed out into the cold.

Being a fool, the son didn’t see—or didn’t care—with what agility his father’s ambition, his arrogance, was ascending. Not his father’s alone, for it was in the air. The stars, no doubt. Jayati Aflatoon, Sukumaran himself—already half-legend and now aiming for the heavens—Dharam Karam Chand, Baba Mastram, Bhupen Raghupati—their fortunes were all sap-filled and on the rise.

Raghupati in particular considered himself quite lucky over the Lina Natesan mess. Time and again, he’d plagued Baba Mastram for an angle on her.

‘She has a knack of attracting calamities,’ the Baba had divined after a couple of days of thought. ‘Perhaps she irritates her stars too, who knows?’

‘When they fail, mortals can but hope to try to help. I feel that I should repay the love that she doubtless feels for me but which—messed-up introvert that she is—she can never reveal even to herself in this life. So I’ve decided to recommend her name for one of our long-term, government-to-government, foreign training courses. I’m glad to learn that she will be accepted at L’Institut Europeen D’Administration Publique at Strasbourg. She’ll soon dazzle Europe with her reports. Once there, Paris and all that, who knows, she might even find true, requited love. So, after Judge Sohan, that’s my second safeguard against the siren.’

Things that didn’t concern him didn’t register with Makhmal. He was on his first visit to his parents after his stint in jail but had no wish to meet either of them face to face. He would have liked Raghupati’s counsel on how to plan his future in politics but felt that he already knew too
well—and would be utterly bored with—what he would hear. He wished to be Minister of State for Coal and Mines for he’d heard that bribes for the lease of a mine could touch a crore of rupees. Think big, think quick, that was his style. Change it, is what Raghupati’d been advising for ages.

‘Coal and Mines is Big, Big, child. Remember that just to get Heritage and Time Pass, Bhanwar-ji brushed Jayati Aflatoon’s feet with his forehead. Wait a while—the hierarchy needs patience and cunning. In the meantime—I’ve told you before—stop carrying guns. Stop slapping the Opposition with your slippers in the Well of the House, particularly when the indefatigable governor is in the midst of his inaugural address of the Budget Session. Stop lifting up your kurta to display your pyjama-strings to female members of another party. So what if the TV camera’s on you? Some of your viewers might actually wish for better returns for the one lakh rupees per second of taxpayers’ money being spent on running the Assembly. A new leaf, therefore, for the new age, Makhmal. Learn to give speeches on weighty subjects. Learn to read. Clamber on to one respectable bandwagon or the other—three or four, if possible. Make a start somewhere. Let me see . . . When you learn to read, my dear gem of the Deccan, I’ll give you a comic-strip called Asterix. Our Assemblies remind me of his life and times.’

Half in alarm, Raghupati watched Makhmal’s face crumple up with the strain of expressing an idea. ‘I must have a reason to discipline myself. In the last three years, I’ve attended as a special visitor nine sessions of the Assembly. The anti-aircraft gun scandal, the sugar deal, the securities cover-up, the bank fraud, the telecom fiddle, the fodder swindle, the urea scam, the insurance racket, the export licence rip-off, that’s what we discussed. And side by side, the desecration of places of worship, the bomb blasts, two nuclear explosions, one official and one unacknowledged border war and the riots after riots after riots. Not a whisper, in three years, about
welfare, about the good of the common man, whoever he might be. Why should I discipline myself?’

‘Hey Ram! . . . For a long time, your father and I’ve believed that the inside of your skull must resemble the stuffing of an old, old mattress, the sort that is periodically redone by those wandering mattress-makers . . . don’t you wish to follow your father’s footsteps? Distance yourself as much as you can from your past. Change it whenever necessary, it’s as natural to human beings as blushing. Look at him, it’s the silly season here, so he’s swished off to Madagascar to sign a Cultural Agreement. It wouldn’t be necessary for me, he said, to accompany him because the text of the Agreement was straightforward—just the Director (Cultural Agreements) would do. She’s forty-two, with fat chewable lips and watermelons on her thorax. Your father’s been complimenting her on her saris for some weeks now. Ahhh, the call of the flesh.’