The Mammaries of the Welfare State (39 page)

Sure, he’d asked him directly too. The Director (Official Languages) had been quite taken aback.

‘Prepare for our Hindi Week, sir,’ he’d elaborated after a minute’s thought.

‘The essay, the elocution and recitation competitions, a play, film and non-film songs, and a dozen speeches for the Minister, the Chairman, the members, me and you. But the other fifty-one weeks of the year? What goes on in your room?’

‘Well, sir, in the time left over from preparing for the future, and analysing the previous, Hindi Weeks, we translate into Hindi the Parliament Questions, correspondence, orders, circulars, resolutions, notes, memorandums and Unofficial References of the Committee.’

They’d been conversing, of course, in Hindi. The Director thought it proper to speak nothing else in office In a sense, he was being paid, he reasoned with himself, to set an example, to hear himself enunciating in the official tongue. His newly-arrived temporary boss, though a bit theatrical, was perfectly fluent too—with a deep, resonant voice, moreover. They should get together in the after-hours for a poetry reading—rum, cashew nuts, kebabs, deathless Urdu couplets, that sort of thing.

‘But you yourself, personally, don’t do any translating,’ Suroor’d countered, a bit startled by the Director’s laziness. Dammit, the bugger doesn’t even have the energy to invent a set of tasks for himself. ‘I see from this chart here that you have with you two Deputy Directors, four Assistant Directors and six Senior Translators. What do
they
do? Put up for your approval their translations of memorandums?’

‘Yes, sir. And their ideas for Hindi Week.’

‘Well, I’ve some too.’ Vyatha thus slipped into the programme that year and considerably improved it. Demure, disciplined, it was ready to shoulder all the low-profile, rural,
small-town stuff. It was quite welcome, given Rajani Suroor’s clout. Equally naturally, once he fell into his long doze, the standing of his troupe plummeted correspondingly, particularly since it’d been at one of its performances that, to use a phrase popular with the coterie, a joker of a happening had snicked Suroor’s balls—and cracked his skull.

Headless Vyatha remained, flapping its limbs about in the corridors of Aflatoon Bhavan, wandering around in the dark, stumbling into cupboards and monkeys, looking for direction, succour, inspiration and funds. By the time that the money started flowing again—in a sad trickle, a cruel parody of the munificence of the golden age, barely enough for Raichur’s phone bill and petrol costs—a few more months had passed and the drifting about in Aflatoon Bhavan had become habit. Thus, when the Ministry began to warm up for the grand meeting of the Gajapati Centenary at TFIN Complex, and the panic started to set in, and hundreds of hands—and more important, feet—seemed to be needed every hour, to dash off to the printer’s, zip down to Jayati Aflatoon’s office, run around in circles in the city hand- delivering invitations, careen around in intersecting circles hand-delivering corrigendums, and scurry up to the Zonal Municipal Office for permissions to put banners up across some streets, the headless staff of Vyatha came in handy. They were quite happy to be peons for the Welfare State. They were after all paid for their labours and their routine was unpredictable and undeniably dramatic—hardly routine, in fact.

Thus when Agastya Sen looked in on Shri Dhrubo Jyoti Ghosh Dastidar on official work, the Under Secretary’s chamber was crowded with the amateurs of Vyatha waiting to be packed off on errands. They stood and sat about in different parts of the room with professional listlessness, like actors out of work, who’d given up waiting for their cues. Raichur sat opposite Dhrubo, breathing heavily, diffusing
garlic into the air. Dhrubo himself was on the phone, strongly advising his auditor against seeing some striptease show.

They were always very glad to see each other. ‘I’ve come with a complaint from Dr Bhatnagar. The agenda that you’ve sent him for your jamboree-meeting has a pale green cover. He’s discovered that you’ve another agenda—or rather, the same agenda with a yellowish, glittering cover, which is meant for Additional Secretaries and above. He wants that one in exchange. He’s very offended.’

‘The yellowish cover was supposed to be golden. It was my symbolic protest against the Centenary. All that glitters is not gold, you follow? I told the printer a hundred times, golden, golden, golden—but I hadn’t reckoned with
his
symbolic protest. He apparently spends only his spare time at his printing press. His real vocation, profession, hobby and passion is trading in gold, the prices of which’ve fallen like a diver off a ten-metre board. We are pissed off with his cavalier treatment of us. I’ve put up a stinker of a note proposing that we blacklist the printer from all future dealings.
Yellow, yellow, dirty fellow,
begins my note. So how’ve you been? . . . Have you met Raichur-ji? The heart, soul and—I might add—breath of Vyatha . . .’

‘Yes, of course . . . How d’you do? . . . your room’s a bit too crowded now for your tai-chi gyrations, isn’t it? What d’you do nowadays for peace of mind?’

‘There’ll always be room for tai-chi . . . Tell me, what should we serve at our Centenary meeting? The last circular from the Finance Controller specifies two Britannia Marie biscuits and tea per head if the meeting is chaired by a Joint Secretary or above. Cashew nuts, potato chips and colas are allowed only if the diplomatic missions are invited. We haven’t decided yet between Bangladesh and Finland.’

‘Cashew nuts are good. Everyone’ll turn up if you mention them in your letter of invitation. Dr Bhatnagar, for example, won’t have breakfast that morning. An economy measure.’

‘Everyone’d better turn up. The invitation in fact is in the form of a veiled threat, phrased in masterly prose, if I may say so myself. You see, the meeting is a grand event for a variety of reasons. One: the re-inauguration of TFIN Complex. Two: the first reunion of the committee under Jayati Aflatoon, her coming-out occasion, as it were. Three: she’s planned, with an astrologer’s approval, a huge cultural rite, like a religious mega-happening, for Raichur’s ex-boss. Therefore, the meeting just has to be held in Hall One, which seats two thousand. It goes without saying that the auditorium has to be packed choc-a-bloc with bureaucrats taking notes, carrying files, ferrying memos; otherwise it’ll be a terrible insult and Bhanwar Virbhim, flattened by Jayati’s vengeance, will find himself back in Madna, perhaps alongside Rajani Suroor. Whom
haven’t
we sent invitations and agendas to, that’s the question. Everyone’s on the hit list—Energy, Rural Development, Civil Supplies, Defence Production, Parliamentary Affairs, Food Processing, Labour . . . Our own Department’s unofficially shut on the eighteenth of November because everyone, absolutely everyone, has to attend the meeting. Even I’ve had to change the timing of my second tai-chi session to accommodate the centenary. Would you like to be there?’

‘Yes, very much. It’s begun to sound like our very own Kumbh Mela. I was riffling through the agenda on my way here. A masterpiece of bilge, if I may say so. Superb.’

‘Ah yes, that was necessary. The literature simply had to be as weighty as the event—the prestige of the Department’s at stake, you follow. The inclusion of the unpublished poems of Rajani Suroor at Annexure B was particularly inspired, you’ll agree.’

He would, in general for the entire document. It was a hundred and fifty pages of culture-related information doubled
simply by having been made bilingual, a procedure urged by courtesy to the Department of Official Languages, which had agreed to give eight crores, in the first phase, to the Centenary (for a further four crores, the seminal contribution of the terrifically Anglicized Gajapati Aflatoon to the propagation of Hindi as the State’s official language would first be concocted, then highlighted). Each left page of the agenda was in English; the right faithlessly translated it into Hindi. Statistics, headings, figures—of expenditures proposed in the next three years on any culture-related matter by any body of either Central or regional government, of costs incurred in the last five years on seminars, conferences, publications, festivals, lectures on culture anywhere in the country—balances, amounts carried over, sums lapsed into oblivion, seemingly-relevant extracts of audit reports—all that, the very stuff of government, its records, its heart, its dugs—were slipped in whenever possible, whenever nobody was looking, as it were. Nobody’d had the time, certainly, to check the senseless repetitions that bounced about on the same page and the entire lists that returned in every other chapter to tease the page-flipper, in passing, with a sense of deja vu.

Some sections of the agenda’d impressed even Agastya into emitting low whistles. The Central Archives, for example, in assessing its activities in the previous financial year, had submitted that it had prepared for storage 15,612 sheets, bound 4,326 books, supplied 48,623 photocopies to scholars against a demand of 1,37,091 and answered 1,846 queries on the telephone. The printer, in disapproval perhaps at its performance, had printed the entire paragraph that dealt with the Archives upside down.

He’d objected, justifiably, in similar fashion—so Agastya had noticed as he’d browsed through the pages, in a pleasant, drunken haze, in the car that had ferried him to Aflatoon Bhavan from his second lunch with Dr Kapila—to the contents of the last paragraph of the section on the activities of the
National Secretariat Library. Agastya had turned the agenda around to see what he could be missing:
Other recent acquisitions of the Library include Natwar’s
Compilation of Medical Attendance Rules, Including Lists of Admissible and Inadmissible Medicines
(With and Without Notes) (Five Copies) and Natwar’s
Compendium of Rules and Regulations Regarding Office Uniforms and Office-Uniform-Related Allowances for Permanent Group C and D Employees of the Welfare State
(With Notes Only) (Ten Copies).

Daya was delighted to learn that Agastya would officially be present at the Committee reunion. They spent the night before the meeting together in her hotel room. They hadn’t met for some weeks. She played Heathcliff, he hard to get, she won, hands down and thighs up and all over his face. In the middle of the night, she ordered yoghurt and honey from Room Service while he smoked a terrific cigarette and marvelled at the latest Woman-to-Woman Rani Chandra cassette.

Out of the blue. ‘August, would you like to meet Jayati—tomorrow evening, after that chaos finishes? Or whenever you shed your inertia?’

‘Is it a roundabout compliment? You give good head, so I’d like to loan you out to people who matter?’

‘I’ve already told her about your luminous intelligence—he has a good head on his shoulders, I said. After you’ve impressed her with it, I’ll suggest to her that we open a mini- Secretariat of the Centenary in what you most appropriately and poetically call Our City, and that we post you there as Officer on Special Duty.’

‘Without specifying them—the special duties. Wonderful idea, Daya. But can’t you swing it without my meeting Jayati-ji? I feel nervous and small in front of greatness, as under you. Not at all like Charlton Heston when he’s dragged
before that sexbomb Egyptian queen—quite Jayati-like—in
The Ten Commandments.
But then I have neither his jaw nor Yul Brynner’s tits.’

The next morning, TFIN Complex looked like the setting for a modern film epic. Clear sky, clean sun, trees rustling in the breeze, multicoloured flags, bunting and banners brightening up the enormous renovated courtyard, millions of cops just hanging around, dressed to kill in mufti but still looking like cops, harassed bureaucrats tensely waiting for either a heart attack or a flap, whichever was earlier, ghastly instrumental music—the sort that one suffered, sweating, on domestic flights before take-off—from the speakers hidden in the trees. The selection of the music had been a minor point of discord in the Secretariat. Minister Virbhim had wanted a piece quite solemn and epic, the sort that heralds the arrival of monarchs. It was to be played first for Jayati—but naturally—and then, as a sort of afterthought, for the Prime Minister, who’d be inaugurating the event. That—the inauguration—had been a second minor point of discord. The debate—on how best to kick-start the occasion—had revealed deep cultural differences. Minister Virbhim—naturally—had wanted a series of symbolic rites lasting close to an hour—fire, ghee, priests with tits, bells, incense, Sanskrit, dhotis, garlands, spices, more ghee, that sort of thing. Warm but primitive, had commented Dr Harihara Kapila, the recently-appointed Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, in Hindi, as usual confounding everybody with his mind that truly functioned, simultaneously and all the time, as both razor and corkscrew. He’d won, of course, and the PM would now alight, set free a white pigeon, light one lamp before Payṇchom—miraculously untouched by the father of all fires—a second on stage and leave.

As for the music, soft, sweet if possible, Kapila’d decreed,
and unobtrusive, something like a pleasant whine, like a beneficiary grovelling for more with a shehnai in his mouth—and as long as it’s switched off before anyone important arrives.

The important numbered almost two hundred. Even Dr Bhatnagar, it will be recalled, with his new agenda, had become one. They’d been given special car passes of different colours and could zoom right up to the grand portals of the main lobby. The passes, like the invitation cards, were numbered, coded and strictly non-transferable—with exceptions, of course, as always in this hierarchy-sensitive system. Even a Private Secretary, for example, was known in an emergency to stand in for his Minister who couldn’t make it because he had to go away—officially, of course—to the South, where he’d shaved his head and was somersaulting around the perimeter of a temple atop some hillock to appease or thank one of the gods, their calls being more peremptory than the summons of the Aflatoons. Thus one explained the presence at TFIN Complex that morning of Chanakya Lala, who drove up in a sparkling cloud of perfume and glided his way from the deep aromatic recesses of his Minister’s holy-white Ambassador to his assigned seat in the tenth row like a product on a smoothly-moving assembly line, shaking hands with and namaste-ing the waiting bureaucrats who mattered and painlessly slicing through those who didn’t. A gentleman to the core of his heart, which was a five-hundred-rupee note neatly wrapped around a Parisian bottle of aftershave.