The Mammaries of the Welfare State (37 page)

‘Of course, one should marry in time, sir, there’s a time for
marriage, and a time for orgies,’ thus Agastya to Dr Kapila, to distract him from the intense scrutiny to which he was subjecting their lunch bill, ‘to quote Ecclesiastes.’

‘This is most embarrassing. Our lunch has turned out to be more expensive than I’d expected—about a thousand rupees more, in fact. It’s all that whisky that you drank, I’m afraid. I’ll have to borrow some money off you—that is, if you carry that kind of cash around. This is terrible.’

‘Yes, it is. It comes of hanging round, sir, all the time in high places. One loses touch with the grassroots. In your case, I’d imagine that the problem’s compounded by the fact that you don’t drink and that you’re a vegetarian. Which is ironic, sir—come to think of it—that you continue to be a vegetarian even after you’ve lost touch with the grassroots.’

‘From your gibberish, I conclude that either you don’t have the money or don’t want to lend it to me. Well, say it straight out, man! I’ve handled crises before! What about ideas? D’you have any of those?’

‘Well, I’ve my credit card.’

Dr Kapila transferred some of his intense scrutiny to Agastya, who continued, ‘Well, I mean, sir, don’t you? I have one in lieu of a bank balance, if you know what I mean. We’ve rented out part of our ground floor, you know, to the Regional Cooperative Bank—that scam dates from the era of the second Liaison Commissioner. The presence of the bank immediately makes Dr Bhatnagar a landlord and V∞IP in the eyes of its General Manager, who’s a twenty-first-century cow-belt Brahmin—download, CD Rom, online and all that—and me a deputy landlord. How much Dr Bhatnagar harassed the GM, poor man, when he first called on Doctor Saab to offer him his credit card gratis—without the annual service charge, we being landlords and V
^∞
IPs, you see. I haven’t used mine yet because they always swish off with it somewhere, don’t they? That makes me insecure because the waiter leaves me with no receipt to prove that he’s taken it. What
if he returns, denies that he has it and presents me with the bill again? In our system of things in the Welfare State, one produces receipts and records for everything—to prove when your domestic cooking gas cylinder was last delivered at your doorstep and whom you telephoned on such-and-such date. To mistrust is much safer, more realistic and professional. It doesn’t get you very far but all the paper that it generates makes you feel better, illusorily protected from the outrages of Fortune. Even when the records are faked and the receipts counterfeit, one still has a basis for writing letters and rushing off to court, for creating more documents and dusty off-white files.’

Outside the restaurant, while they waited for the chauffeur and car to discover them, Dr Kapila said, ‘It’s ridiculous that I invite you out to lunch and you pay. I’ll write you out a cheque as soon as we return to the office. Or if you prefer, I can add the amount to your dowry. That’s why I kept the bill. You have thought of a dowry?’

‘Not the nitty-gritty, sir, not yet. But if you’ve decided to bequeath us your house, I’d be inclined to say no, thank you, sir. I’m not much of a suburbs person either. One always feels a long way from home.’

‘I should find out whether there are other contenders in the field for your fair hand. Mrs Bhatnagar reported to my wife quite emphatically that nobody so far’s made any alarming moves. Just some postcards in your dak, I gather.’

‘Would you like to set up an Efficiency Bar for your prospective sons-in-law? Whoever drinks the largest number of glasses of fruit juice wins. Dals and vegetarian soups will be allowed but soft drink cocktails frowned upon. Look, can you swing for me a transfer back to where the action is? It’ll be so much easier then to wean Sunita away from the bosom of the Gujarati venture capitalist.’

‘What’ll happen then to the BOOBZ programme here? Well, tit for tat, let me see . . . but you haven’t answered my question about my competition.’

‘It can’t be compared, sir, rest assured, to the annual Public Service Commission exam to enrol wise men in the Steel Frame. In fact, there’s only one old friend of my father, from his college days in Calcutta, who’s been trying for the last several years for either one of his two grand-daughters.’

‘Well?’

‘As a first step, my father, the grand-daughters and I are waiting for him to die.’

‘Here it is. Thanks for the lunch. Can I drop you somewhere?’

‘Yes sir. Aflatoon Bhavan, if possible.’

Where the Under Secretary for Demotic Drama has finished his tai-chi exercises and is sitting in the visitor’s chair before the desk, calm of mind, gazing at nothing. To his left and slightly behind him stands a suppliant, head bowed like those of the statuettes of the Magi in a creche. He is a Madna type whose face Agastya recognizes but whose name for the moment he can’t recall.

Agastya to Dhrubo: ‘Why aren’t you sitting behind your desk?’

‘For a variety of reasons . . . One: it gives me perspective. Two: from here—or elsewhere in the room—on the occasions when I do answer the phone, I can with perfect truth inform the enquirer that there isn’t any response from the incumbent’s seat. Truth, you know, cannot be achieved by the weak. Three: I’m not sure whether my seat isn’t a piles-giver.’

Dhrubo then turned to the suppliant and asked pleasantly, ‘Is there anything that
you
wanted to ask me?’

‘Yes . . . I wanted to know why the funds that your Department used to give my organization, Vyatha, have suddenly dried up.’

‘Gand Mein!
Vyatha, I see! . . . What are you there?’

‘I’ve become the Number Two in the organization. You must’ve received from me at least one letter a fortnight over
the last two months. My name is A.C. Raichur.’

‘In the euphemisms of one’s nonage, Number One was pee-pee and Number Two potty.’

‘We’re still headed by Rajani Suroor.’

‘Rajani Suroor . . . He often used to grouse that everybody else in his organization had the capacity of a lazy cretin, that the only thing that all of you were any good at was cooking the books. I suppose I mustn’t speak ill of the comatose. Frankly, I don’t think Vyatha’ll get any more money from us until Suroor wakes up. There’s nobody left here, you see, to push and chase your file. I could, I suppose, but I simply don’t have the time.’

‘But how’ll I survive?’

‘Would you like some more tea? If you order it in your room, it’s more expensive and the service slower, but the tea’s better.’

Dhrubo pressed a buzzer on his table. Save for a rack that held six rubber stamps, the table was scrupulously bare. A comradely silence, while he and Agastya gazed benignly at Raichur.

Dhrubo to Agastya, while continuing to look at Raichur, ‘So how are things with you, friend?’

‘I am being plagued by my neighbour in the Transit Hostel, a Srinivas Chakki, to join him to foment a revolution.’

‘Ah yes. The plague. He once used to share this room with us.’

Suddenly the door crashed open, as though it’d been kicked, and a large, bilious-looking monkey squatted in the doorway, right arm extended to prop the door open, munching peanuts with the other.

‘Hahn, Boss, three teas please, mine without milk and sugar.’ The monkey departed without a word.

‘Acute staff shortage, I see, Dhrubo.’

‘Yes. A combination of BOOBZ and the Minister’s office, which has been gobbling up staff like the giant in Jack and the Bean Stalk.’

‘When I was last here, I couldn’t help being struck by the
large number of one-limbed, blind and deaf and dumb Class IV staff.’

‘Or is it only the lumpen, the Depressed Castes and the backward classes that lose their limbs and their faculties in accidents or at birth? How many one-armed, one-legged, Brahmin senior civil servants do you know? And are they any good? Do they—can they—deliver the goods? Does it matter if they can’t? Because isn’t it enough that the goal—of having a one-armed senior civil servant—has been achieved? Please don’t ask me these questions. Reserve them for the Under Secretary of the Kansal Commission—a Brahmin incidentally, four-limbed but with thick bifocal spectacles, though they haven’t yet decided whether they should reserve any Welfare State posts for the myopic. They could, you know, logically. The more sat upon you are socially, the more likely you are to suffer from other disabilities—of education, health, poverty—and surely the State should try to help you to the extent that you are disadvantaged. But if you ask me, we should first pump in all we’ve got into creating aware minds in healthy bodies, and then give everybody a level playing field.’

Giving up, Raichur meanwhile had dropped into a vacant seat and sighed explosively. His breath carried to Dhrubo, whose nose twitched. A faint grimace distorted his fine features. ‘Garlic for breakfast and lunch, I see—and smell. Dragon-like, your breath, absolutely. Probably excellent for your blood pressure and your bowel movement, garlic, but it won’t help either you to widen your circle of friends or Vyatha to prise some funds out of us. I should’ve told the monkey—had I known earlier, had you exhaled those noxious fumes at me in good time—to crush a dozen cardamoms into your tea. He’s resourceful and quite helpful when in the mood. He was bequeathed to me by my ex-peon, Shri Dharam Chand, who was a tremendous asset, madly corrupt and madly competent—and had sedition brewing in his head all the time.

‘For instance, in one of the General Staff Meetings last year, Dharam Chand startled everyone by wanting to know why Aflatoon Bhavan had separate loos for Women officers and Women Staff, and Men Officers and Men Staff, and why the Welfare State should officially discriminate amongst its citizens in the matter of their bodily functions. I, as Official Spokesman of the Officers’ Cadre, had pointed out that from the stink in the entire building, one couldn’t really tell the difference between a conference hall and a canteen, leave alone an officers’ loo and a lumpen loo—and that the stink was part of the Official Strategy for Equality. Anyone who’s visited our men’s toilet on this floor would’ve seen that the number of the Physically Challenged amongst its users is rather high. That is Dharam Chand’s doing. Either we have Equality or we have Reservation. So he successfully led a campaign to reserve one lumpen loo only for the PCs. God knows where the non-PC lumpen staff goes for its ablutions—perhaps into the almirahs that line our corridors.’ Then, to an agitated Raichur, ‘Was there anything else?’

‘Sir, I—my family and I—have become beneficiaries—creations of the Welfare State. We—Vyatha—signed an agreement with you to receive a certain sum of money every month. We submit every quarter to you a report of our activities and our accounts. Even though we’ve been headless for a while, we continue to flap our limbs about on schedule. We’ve planned our activities for the next six months and sent you a copy for your final approval. We invite the Department—the concerned Under Secretary and above—to all our functions, theatre events, street happenings, protest shows and drama festivals. We also keep you informed of our weekly meetings. So I don’t understand why the udder’s dried up. Do you disapprove of the programme? We can do a street play around the opinions of Mr Dharam Chand, if you wish. We’re already working on one on the life and times of Rajani Suroor—it’ll be ready by the time he either wakes up or passes over. We’ve left the ending open.’

‘Who’s your Chartered Accountant? I can’t quite make
out from the signatures in the accounts. Is it your mother or your wife?

‘My mother. I’ve time and again implored her to use her maiden name but she’s both—if you’ll pardon me—stupid and obstinate.’

Dhrubo relented only when Raichur began to weep, finally proving himself to be one of the world’s losers. ‘Stop crying and snivelling, don’t be silly . . .’ Dhrubo opened a drawer and handed Raichur from it a sheet or two of off- white paper. ‘Here, blow your nose, wipe your tears. I’ll see what I can do. Deputy Financial Advisor Mrs Tutreja’s off to Ulan Bator early next month to coordinate an exhibition on
Gotama and the Non-Violent Tradition.
That’s when we’ll slip the file through. As a last resort, I’m afraid that I might’ve to request you to arrange a fire in one of the rooms.’

Patiently, Agastya waited for Raichur to stop blubbering in simulated gratitude over Dhrubo’s hands (that he didn’t release for close to a minute for fear that he wouldn’t appear thankful enough). It never ceased to astonish Agastya that there was nothing in government that could not wait,
nothing.
Whenever somebody pressed for urgency, his hackles rose. Because then there was even more reason to wait. For the urgency was always to warp the rules to do somebody else a favour in return for a consideration or another favour. Be honest, Raichur, change the rules and the game, and redefine discretion to include dishonesty. Our consciences will then rest, our hearts won’t go thump-thump each time we note the possibilities of the fast buck in each file, so fewer cardiac arrests, substantial economies in medical reimbursement. Oh how often had he wanted to quit! Except that every time that he’d drafted a letter of resignation, a Pay Commission had been set up to hike his salary up by a millionth of a fraction. A raise, as Jesus said, is a raise. One can’t, you know, leave one’s mother’s lap. The outside world is much less funny and far more wicked. Out there, all of them would trip head over heels over the lowest efficiency bar.

T
o lessen the awesome amount of paperwork in the Welfare State, as a last resort, one government servant does sometimes request another to arrange a fire in one of the rooms of an office (not in his own, naturally, for that would be conduct unbecoming of him). A great many files are disposed of in this way. Numerous instances of this style of decision-making spring to mind—the Aflatoon Tower blaze of 1973, the Non-Aligned National Centre conflagration of 1977, the Senapati Place catastrophe of the same year, the Millennium Plaza disaster of 1983 and, of course, the Vesuvian eruption at the TFIN Complex that the Welfare State took twenty-one months to recover from.

The burning down of the last was special mainly in the magnitude of the calamity. For the rest, like its predecessors, it provided, while it lasted, terrific entertainment to hundreds of spectators and after it had charred itself out, goaded the government to review for the tenth time the existent firefighting measures in its buildings.

In the corridors of Aflatoon Bhavan, it will not be easily forgotten that to house some of their countrymen who had swarmed into the capital for the event, the organizers of the OYE OYE Happening had finally set up Camp One in the car park of TFIN Complex. Public Works had objected vehemently and recorded in a series of rapidfire confidential exchanges with the Department of Culture and Heritage that the entire happening was a grave security risk to the building.

There were thus some four hundred ringside witnesses to
the conflagration. The chosen visitors who’d never seen a washing machine before hadn’t ever seen such fireworks either. They gawked, wide-eyed with wonder and joy, their fireside entertainment abandoned, as the vast electric circuitry of the building gushed, at one corner, a shower of red, blue and green sparks that lasted half a minute, hissed menacingly as the fire careened down its wires and explosively spat out fifty metres away a large gob, a burning ball, that shot up some feet into the evening sky before descending in slow motion to smoulder and trigger off other pyrotechnics. Quite a few of the spectators believed initially that the fireworks were part of the official programme, were more awed by their grandeur than by the sightseeing of the day, were impressed by the thoughtfulness of the organizers and mentally noted that while they were there, they should explore the possibilities of other junkets. A loud collective gasp was heard right across Camp One as, all of a sudden, the windows of the east wing of the ninth floor belched out, alarmingly like a dragon, a huge tongue-like banner of fire. One of the representatives of the district of Madna, none other than A.C. Raichur, who by one of the campfires had been providing a Vyatha play with the background noises of a typically crowded lane of a red-light area the morning after, and who’d been distracted from the production of the sounds of women screeching at their kids by thoughts of Vyatha and how it could be milked—A.C. Raichur was distracted from his reveries by a deafening explosion from somewhere high up in the building that really sounded like one storey collapsing on to another, and that was accompanied by enormous, dense, noxious, infernally hot clouds of smoke and burning debris that whooshed out of the windows like the fallout of a revolution in hell. It impressed him so much that it was only on the day after that the idea popped into his head to include in his repertoire of simulated noises the impressive sounds of the father of all fires eating up a state-of-the-art building.

The thrilled crowd milled about uncertainly, drawn to the spectacle by its grandeur and at the same time repelled, even frightened, by its fierceness. In the glow from the flames, the faces looked aroused, happy, smiling, like those of children in Disneyland. The visitors stole glances at one another, bonded by the shared excitement. Not one countenance expressed shock, horror or sorrow at the awesome destruction of a national treasure. Naturally; it wasn’t theirs.

By the time the fire brigade and the police turned up to organize and spoil things, a group of musicians from the eastern region, fired, as it were, by the conflagration, had begun to thump out an irresistible foot-tapping rhythm on their drums, enthusing others in turn to clap their hands, shake a leg and chant along. Thus, for the visitors, the burning down of TFIN Complex became an enormous, memorable campfire experience, for which, at dinner the following evening at the Gajapati Aflatoon Sports Stadium, with giggles and nervous simpers, they profoundly thanked the Prime Minister.

‘My God, exactly how primitive are we? Don’t we have firefighting systems in our buildings? Alarms, that sort of thing? Or are they all—all those hundreds of them—meant to be ovens? Grill, Bake, Toast and Barbecue? Answer me, c’mon, I’m waiting.’

‘You’re asking the wrong person, sir.’ Even while conversing with the Prime Minister, the Public Works Secretary continued to be as suave as silk, all white coiffure and expensive aftershave. ‘It may be recalled, sir, that despite the best efforts of my Department, Routine Maintenance of Welfare State Property has not been centralized with us. It remains the responsibility of the administrative or residing Ministry.’

He was still smarting from his visit to TFIN Complex the evening before. He’d received a confused phone call about the fire from the Disaster Management Cell of Home Affairs
at about eight p.m. and’d decided to drive down to the site in his private Maruti car without waiting for an hour for the official white Ambassador. Two kilometres away from the building, the cops’d stopped him and forced him to turn around. Naturally, seeing his car, they’d refused to believe that he was who he was. Dazed and hurt, he’d cruised around for a bit, gazing at the vast glow in the night sky that had looked as though the night lights at the sports stadium had suddenly turned orange, the crowds in the streets rushing towards the spectacle, and had distractedly wondered whether he could get some tea somewhere.

The ancient demand of his Department to maintain all the official property of the government was a routine empire- aggrandizing move to which Bhuvan Aflatoon acceded after the father of all fires’d burnt itself out. In the first phase of its Revised Firefighting Measures Programme, Public Works proposed an additional budget of nineteen crore rupees. After an intense skirmish, Finance sanctioned one and a half.

On the buildings directly under its control, Public Works began the firefighting programme on a war footing. Their manoeuvres looked, sounded and felt like war too. At the Prajapati Aflatoon Welfare State Public Servants Housing Complex Transit Hostel, for example—one of the first to be taken up—work on the alterations to the different wings of the six buildings began within four days of the Prime Ministerial order and actually went on, without pause, day and night, for weeks. The jokers in Public Works said that the Transit Hostel’d been declared Top Priority because the mistress of the Departmental Secretary stayed there, and surprise inspections of work in progress enabled him to officially visit her once a day—over and above, that is, his regular lunch-hour assignations. He was an indefatigable man. It is true that his mistress, a short-haired, short-tempered, widowed Assistant (later Deputy) Financial Advisor, Mrs Minu Tutreja by name, stayed in Apartment C-308, but the
real reasons for the choice of the Transit Hostel as one of the first ten properties to be dealt with were: 1) that it was large; lots of money could be shown as having been sunk into it and nobody would notice—this was a crucial factor because the end of the financial year loomed perilously close and they still had this monstrous budget left, and 2) that it was full of people, legitimate occupants even at night; it looked good that the government thought first of the welfare of inhabited buildings.

Fire extinguishers had always—since time immemorial, as it were—hung on the walls of the corridors, unnoticed, unchecked, nooks for geckos, a formal stipulation in some municipal bye-law; they obviously weren’t meant to combat anything. The revised firefighting measures were altogether more ambitious. They proposed the construction, beside the veranda of every fourth flat, of a one-metre-wide wall that, from the ground floor, would stretch right up to the eighth. On the outer faces of these walls would be fixed three rows of water pipes that too—naturally—would reach up to the heavens. To these walls—and to all the strategic corners of the hostel—from the six gates of the complex, zig-zagging across the lawns, would be laid lanes of tarmac wide enough for the standard fire engine and for a total length of twelve kilometres. The new walls and pipes would of course be painted and appropriate signs put up.

Ferrying sand, gravel, drums of tar, bags of cement, bricks, pipes and stone chips, trucks roared into the Transit Hostel by day and night, at four in the afternoon and three in the morning, shattering the sleep even of the sozzled. With each arriving lorry, the entire population of some twelve hundred public servant families cocked its ears to wait for the hellish engine to calm down to an idle growl—it was never switched off—and the incessant babble from the everpresent labourers—the shouted questions, hails of greeting, the cries of annoyance and whoops of incomprehensible glee—to again
become audible; then the clink, clang and clatter of the sides of the truck being unfastened, followed by the infernal din of drums of tar simply being pushed off the vehicle, or the steam-like hiss of sand streaming down. Even at three in the morning, some families could be spotted on their verandas, breathing deep the fog of dust that hung over the entire complex like a curse in a fairy tale, and dazedly watching the construction simply because they couldn’t sleep—not only because of the noise, but also—as February slipped into April—the heat. There was hardly ever any electricity because the contractors’d tapped the mains for their construction work. Besides, the numerous fires that’d been lit all over the lawns to melt and mix the tar, sent up shimmering waves of heat that seemed to drift in through the doorways and open windows to settle on one’s wet skin like a warm shawl. Were one philosophical, one would admit that watching the leisurely—but steady—rhythm of the workers was lulling, and that one could rest as in a daze, with eyes blinking and smarting, observing the road-rollers that trundled up, down and all over the lawns with the ponderousness of elephants, like children’s cars from some primitive giants’ amusement park; the bidi-smoking masons with towels wrapped around their heads, who materialized like magic outside one’s sixth- floor bedroom window, stopping their regular slapping of cement on brick to ask—quite politely—the housewife on the veranda for a drink; the buckets of water being hauled up by precariously-knotted rope from the cement tank by the car park; the hammocks made out of old saris in which slept the infants of labourers whose drying drawers, vests, lungis and saris dotted the gardens like corpses after a skirmish.

Before the invasion, the lawns had been fairly green, with lush grass and tastefully-placed bushes of hibiscus and jasmine, ideal for burp-releasing after-dinner promenades. However, save for the occupants of C-401, Dr Srinivas Chakki and of A-214, Agastya Sen, no other inhabitant of the Transit Hostel
seemed to really mind—or mind enough—the degradation. Karma, tolerance, maya and all that, no doubt. Some of the residents actually welcomed the change. The eight-to-fifteen age group, for example, obsessed with cricket, went mad with joy at the sight of all those walls coming up, each with three parallel, perpendicular, perfectly-centred pipes and an even asphalted surface leading up to it, to boot. Some of their parents too, tired of squabbling and scrambling for parking niches for their cars and two-wheelers, were overjoyed at the unexpected quadrupling of available tarmac surface. The support systems as well of the Transit Hostel—the vegetable and fruit vendors, for example, who for lack of space had had to park their handcarts just outside and around the gates, narrowing the passageway down to the width of one car, causing unimaginable—but permanent—chaos, resembling a fishmarket set up on a crowded railway platform, only noisier, with angry horns and yelled curses being exchanged like gunfire on the border—they too were happy with the largesse of the Welfare State. Thus, within a matter of a few months, when the walls and the pipes were up and the lanes for the fire engines all neatly laid out, one could glimpse, on a Sunday morning, fierce cricket matches crisscrossing one another, like life on a city’s roads viewed from far up in the sky, being played out amongst cars, two-wheelers and handcarts parked all anyhow, sprawled out, as it were, like sunbathers on a spacious beach.

Agastya was an illegal occupant of A-214. That is to say, the flatlet had been allotted to him three years ago during his tenure in the Ministry of Labour. When he’d been transferred out to Navi Chipra, he’d simply forgotten to surrender it to the Commissionerate of Estates. ‘Surrender’ is the verb officially used to denote the restitution of government property to the Ministry of Urban Affairs. It is in keeping with the
idiom of general hostility in use amongst different departments. No one anywhere had noticed Agastya’s lapse. The records of the Estates office were at that time being computerized. The consequent chaos had helped cases like his considerably.

Even though he was aesthetically revolted by the renovations to the Transit Hostel, he, being an illegal occupant, felt at the same time a bit removed from all the turmoil of building construction. He was a bird of passage; when things became insupportable, he could always take wing.

‘But things became insupportable a long time ago,’ objected Dr Chakki to his attitude outside the Mammary Dairy milk booth at six in the morning on a fine day in April. ‘What is left of the body politic if its steel frame takes wing? We must fight the rot on a war footing. Prod the middle classes awake.’

‘I’m upper middle class, I hope. What about us?’

For them all, as a first step, Dr Chakki wished to spread the word. Firefighting too was best begun at home. Since he was on leave and dangling between two posts, Agastya helped in the drafting.

Anyone who’s ever lived in this hostel, surely the ugliest building
—
pure Public Works
—
in one of the suburbs of hell
(complained Dr Chakki in the letter that he sent to the Minister and to a dozen newspapers, and a copy of which he endorsed with compliments to Mrs Minu Tutreja of C-308, with a humble request to push the plaint with all the clout at her command),
will testify that on the good days, that is to say, three times a week in the monsoon, all the flats on the third floor and above get water in their bathroom taps from six to six-thirty in the morning and from six-thirty to six-forty-five in the evening and in their kitchen taps from five-thirty to six-fifteen in the morning and from four- thirty to five-fifteen in the evening. On the bad days,
that is, for the rest of the year, the taps of those eight hundred-and-fifty-plus flats are as dry as the mammary glands, so to speak, of an old desiccated male of the species. Those less-fortunate residents have worked out a deal with the inhabitants of the first two floors; they haul buckets of water up in the mornings, when the pressure is strongest, by elevator when they’re in working condition, and up the stairs or by rope or knotted saris from their verandas when they’re not
—
which, naturally, is very often, this being hell and electricity being as rare amongst us as statesmanship and honesty. Each bucket of water costs three rupees. It will interest you to know that w.e.f. January 1 next, the rate will be made more specific and scientific, i.e., three rupees for twenty litres of water or, if you prefer, fifteen paise per litre. Payment in kind is officially discouraged because it tends to cloud the clarity of the exchange.

Of course, you’re well aware that in most offices and schools, when a latecomer is asked why he isn’t on time, his perfectly genuine reason, that he stays on the third-floor-or-above of the Pashupati Aflatoon Transit Hostel and that he spent three hours that morning hauling water up by bucket, is not accepted. This fatheaded attitude of government needs to be reviewed, or water provided to all of us, whichever is simpler.

Our Welfare Association also wishes to propose that our elevators be converted to a manual pulley system that will function exactly like a well and for much the same purpose. I enclose with this letter rough but reliable sketches and diagrams of the minimal changes mooted in the two lifts in each residential block. Their weights
—
with and without buckets of water in them
—
have obviously been taken into account in our plans. The counterload suggested is our litter. We consider the proposal a rather fine example of Appropriate Technology, well adapted to need and availability.
Gastero In, Garbage Out.

Blueprint C provides the overview of the plan. It was truly inspired architecture that originally placed the garbage chute of each building right beside the lifts, because now connecting the two will be a piece of cake. Of course, at the moment, the chutes aren’t very popular with the residents because they
—
the chutes
—
all choked up some five years ago
—
somewhere between the third and fourth floors in Wing B, that’s for sure. A dead body, insist our oldest inhabitants, of a chowkidaar who was far too drunk to distinguish between an open elevator and the chute with its lid raised; of course, to be fair to the dead, one doesn’t have to be intoxicated to be confronted with the problem. But he’s there, maintains the pro-chowkidaar lobby, because the stink bears him out. Which isn’t being fair
—
again
—
to the march of time, because
—
naturally
—
the chowkidaar hasn’t prevented the stuffed polythene bags from landing on him, even though at the same time his stink has deterred some of my neighbours from getting close enough to the chute to open its lid to junk their rubbish. Thus, on each floor, the entire corridor area around the chute has become an awesomely-colourful garbage dump, each plastic sac
—
if you permit
—
like a faded, puckered, birthday-party balloon resting on the vegetable scraps and banana peels that have burst their skins of polythene and with time come to resemble the good earth. Aaaaaarrgghhhhhhh, gags the unsuspecting newcomer as he exits from the lift, that is to say: Where in heaven have I arrived? Hell’s refuse dump? What this place needs is a bloody sweeping flood.

To which we’ll gladly contribute our buckets. Frankly, while on the subject of our water problem, we need to fight fire with fire. Our Association
—
we have a dream!
—
would be quite happy to consider your fire engines to be water tankers that will use the new
cricket-stump-pipes of our energetic adolescents to pump water up to our deprived neighbours round the clock
—
that is, if the fire engines can ever negotiate our gates and the new parking lanes to reach the new walls.

As a citizen, I wish to know: whatever happened to the water that was freely available
—
to return to where we began
—
at TFIN Complex, which is just down the road from us and whose rich glow on its last night we sadly miss during the evenings when we lack electricity? ‘
Water theft,’
whisper the contractors who supervise here the convulsion of the structure of our lives, ‘
in our country, remember, we even sell cowdung.’
Naturally, we’ve discussed the subject with them in some detail and suggested that they steal some more water, which they can sell to us
—
we don’t want them to lose in the deal, obviously
—
at a rate less harsh than fifteen paise per litre. Our negotiations have been significantly hindered by the lobby
—
a wretched breakaway group—of the denizens of the ground and first floors.