The Mammaries of the Welfare State (40 page)

Almost all the bureaucrats who didn’t matter were lowly Escort Officers charged with the responsibility of conducting the members of the Centenary Committee from their cars to their seats, in case they lost their way en route. This reception was in part a warm welcome and in part a security measure insisted on by the police, who naturally didn’t want to accidentally rough up a V
^∞
IP, lost and found wandering
around in an insecure daze in the vast labyrinthine spaces of the building, stammering before the unspeakable menace of the law, unable to explain who was what and thus being mistaken for an assassin or an arsonist or both. The happier Escort Officers, like Personal Assistant Dharam Chand, were those who recognized their charges. Dharam Chand was to lead the living legend Kum Kum Bala Mali and show her her place. His bum’d been twitching with excitement for a week just at the thought of swaying a foot ahead of the hips of the ex-actress for a full ten minutes.

He’d offered himself for Escort Officer duty and’d specifically asked that the ageing Bharatnatyam wizard—or rather, witch—be assigned to him: Now that he worked as Principal Private Secretary to Baba Mastram, he usually got what he wanted. He was still ascendant and had his eye on nestling up to Sukumaran Govardhan once his surrender was sorted out. His old friend and one-time boss, Under Secretary Dastidar, had suggested to him that since they were running short of reliable staff, could he also escort a couple of other minor headaches, Dr Bhatnagar, for example, whose office plagued him, Dastidar, four times a day to learn whom Doctor Saab should expect to find awaiting him the
instant
he alighted from his Ambassador.

The good Doctor himself had proposed Agastya, who’d parried, ‘If you permit, sir, would that be in form? Seeing us together, the other bureaucrats present might construe that you and I—to quote you, sir—enjoy the same juniority.’

Thus freed, Agastya’d hoped to sit beside and savour the meeting with Daya. But that was not to be, at least not initially. She was important enough to be seated somewhere in the first ten rows, whereas to him was pointed out a corner of the twenty-seventh. He didn’t much mind, having prepared for the meeting by smoking a killer joint and wearing new wraparound dark glasses to hide his consequent red eyes. ‘Conjunctivitis,’ he’d smile at anybody who glanced at him
pointing at his goggles, raising the pale green agenda in his left hand to establish his bonafides. Nobody gave a shit.

He didn’t smoke marijuana any more before lunch, not routinely. Middle age, no doubt. That morning was special because the night before’d been remarkable, and ruminating Thinker-like on the pot at seven a.m., he’d admitted to himself that he preferred a room, a day and perhaps a life with Daya in them, so how was he going to handle this mid- life crisis? Well, smoke a joint, yes, but after that?

He was surrounded by bureaucrats discussing the latest transfers, their bosses and colleagues, Jayati Aflatoon, Sukumaran Govardhan, the budget of the Centenary and in the agenda before them, a sub-heading that at times sounded like Beyond War and at other times like Bjorn Borg. ‘This figure in the second column—is it ninety-seven crores or sixty-seven crores . . .?’ asked Agastya’s immediate neighbour of the auditorium in general. He wore a brown safari suit and well-scrubbed tennis shoes. He began to riffle through the pages of statistics and figures with professional disdain. ‘ . . . Either way, the numbers are all wrong—they don’t add up . . . Last year’s expenditure on Beyond War was Plan or Non-Plan? . . .’

‘I find that the best method is to take a sip of tea the moment you get the cup, very noisily; then nobody steals your cup,’ declared his colleague, seemingly in reply. He was pale, with long, slicked-back grey hair. He was using his agenda as an ashtray.

‘I’m quite curious,’ confessed the brown suit, ‘to see how they interpret these statistics. D’you see? The details, heads and descriptions of expenditure are on the left page, whereas all the columns of figures are on the right; during printing, however, the figures’ve slipped one—and sometimes two—lines down.’

‘Non-alignment.’

‘A turdle. Do you know the word? My son taught it to
me. They use it in school quite often. It’s short form for tremendous hurdle. I like it.’

A one-armed peon sidled up to Agastya and sullenly pointed out to him a commandingly beckoning Dr Bhatnagar. Tranquil, at rest, sleepily horny and stoned, Agastya didn’t in the least wish to struggle up out of his chair and shuffle down to listen to and note down some utter rubbish. Which it would be, as sure as and worse than death, meant mainly to remind Dr Bhatnagar himself in a moment of stress, brought on by the presence of so many V
^∞
IPs who were ignoring him, that he possessed a mind bubbling over with brilliant, viable ideas and that he, for the betterment of the world, continually needed an amanuensis or he would lose it. ‘Hahn, Agastya . . .’ he would say, looking at him through his nostrils and at everybody else out of the corner of his eye to note how many of them’d noticed how busy he was with affairs of State, ‘ . . . remind me to send a fax to the Commerce Secretary repeated to Industries . . .’

Agastya instead decided to send Dr Bhatnagar a paper plane. He could write on it all the faxes that he wanted and fly it back to him. An economy measure, even though for Agastya, a doubtful career move. He opened his agenda to decide which page to use and was distracted for a while by the wide variety of choices. He finally settled on the Table of Contents but the plane never took off because while he was making it, all of a sudden, the buzz and murmur of fifteen hundred bureaucrats changed to an extended rustle and swish, like a breeze in a forest, for at the entry of the PM and his entourage, the entire auditorium rose.

The cortege was all in dazzling white. Agastya was reminded of the advertisement for Rin, the detergent that washes whitest. Jayati’s white sari had a gorgeous maroon border. Clumsily, Bhanwar Virbhim led the PM and Jayati to the tall brass lamp stand at the left of the stage, where waited two nervous young women dressed in glorious, practically-
bridal, silk. With the earthen lamps in their hands, they drew concurrent and symmetric circles of welcome in the air before the PM’s and Jayati’s heads, chests and for some reason, stomachs. With a sudden, convent-school curtesy, they then handed over the earthen lamps to the Aflatoons and hesitantly motioned them to step forward to the lamp stand.

Since all the eyes were on the stage, Agastya used the moment to steal away to the opposite side of the hall and settle down a couple of rows further back, right next to an unimportant-looking exit, to locate him where myopic Dr Bhatnagar, despite his contact lenses, was likely to take fifteen minutes. Ah, what have men not done for freedom? Or for love. He should send a note to Daya—whose perfect, tastefully-grey head he could glimpse, he was glad to note, a few rows ahead of Doctor Saab—informing her of his change of address. The unimportant-looking exit opened furtively and the Public Works Secretary, criminally late and therefore flustered, and not as marvellously coiffured as usual, slipped in and dived, virtually in one movement, like a soldier hitting the ground, into the seat beside Agastya; clearly, the stares of the auditorium were to be avoided like shrapnel.

In Agastya’s lingo, a deep-shitter was a person wallowing in it. Recognizing a mega-example in the Public Works Secretary, he smiled at the senior bureaucrat’s profile and to make him feel better, took off his own dark glasses. The Secretary continued to vigorously chew gum till he relaxed a bit in his chair, then, without glancing at Agastya, asked, ‘We haven’t obviously reached Item Number Two on the agenda. Has anybody said anything so far?’

‘Not from the stage, sir.’ Agastya consulted the Table of Contents. Ah, Item Two was the vexed question of the placement of the statue of Gajapati Aflatoon in the Arabian Sea. He regarded Deep-Shitter’s profile with a little more interest. If what he’d done to the file of the statue was any
measure, Agastya was in the presence of a bowler of world- class googlies.

For the last decade or so, certainly as long as he’d been in service, the Russians’d been wanting to gift the Welfare State a hundred-metre-high granite statue of Gajapati Aflatoon which they both—the Russians and some of the living Aflatoons—wanted set in the bay just off Bhayankar. When last estimated, the operation was to have cost twenty-four crores. Agastya’d seen photographs of a model of the statue; it’d remarkably improved the original. More hair on the head, an intelligent, handsome expression, terrific shoulders and pectorals under the shawl, right arm raised in paternal benediction—and it had still resembled Gajapati! Great art, except that Public Works—not being confident enough of not fucking it up—simply didn’t wish to be saddled with the headache. Permissions from Environment, Defence, External Affairs, Home and Petroleum were sought, the last because it’d nothing to do with the subject and would therefore take the longest to reply, since the file would tour each Department and Section of its Ministry, relayed by one to the other with the terse note:
Not ours. Yours perhaps?
Clearing—and overriding—all those turdles took six years. (External Affairs, for example, had battled as heroically as Porus against Alexander:
This Ministry will agree to this project only if the Russians allow us to gift them in exchange a statue of comparable dimensions, sculpted by one of our best artists, of Lenin or Stalin, that would enjoy pride of place amidst the ships of one of their warm-water ports.)
The Prime Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Secretariat then began to lean on Public Works, the only one of the Ministries that hadn’t—officially—definitively replied. They both wanted the statue to be in place and inaugurated in the centenary year.

It was then that the Secretary had asked:

Is the statue to face the sea
(in a confidential minute in the file)
or the shore? If the sea, we’d be symbolically
declaring that Pundit Gajapati Aflatoon has turned his back on us. If the shore, are we not in danger of offending our neighbours across the seas by a permanent, grossly material, display of the rear of the Founding Father of the Welfare State? Public Works is not to be held responsible for the international repercussions of this subject.

Secondly: The bay at Bhayankar is one of the prettiest in the country, but its waters have helped the inhabitants of the world’s largest slum in their morning ablutions for generations. A view will have to be taken on whether we wish the statue of Pundit Aflatoon to preside every day, till the end of the world, over a million squatting figures and indeed, whether we wish its granite to be washed forever by
—
well
—
rather polluted waters.

It is suggested that the entire subject of the statue be placed before the Centenary Committee at its next meeting and a collective decision taken.

The dozen V
^∞
IPs had settled down on their assigned chairs on the stage and Minister Virbhim had placed himself before the state-of-the-art microphone, which was on when he loudly cleared his throat before beginning his welcome address. The impressively-magnified hawking that boomed in the hall—and that sounded like a thousand throats doing their thing in the early morning, in unison, before the sinks of some railway platform loo—served to completely unwind, amongst others, the Public Works Secretary. ‘The first sounds from the stage, sir,’ annotated Agastya helpfully. His neighbour chuckled and nearly gagged on his chewing gum, which he then took out of his mouth. Agastya noted with interest that it wasn’t chewing gum at all but a long, very curly, black, much chewed, nice and wet strand of what was definitely pubic hair. He observed the Secretary’s face change and soften with the memory of a recent pleasure as he examined,
played with, wound round his fingers, turned over and over, and squeezed for the feel of its wetness the strand before returning it to his mouth, lovingly and carefully, like a gem being re-imprisoned in its safe. Agastya was impressed. This is true passion, honey, he told himself as he watched the Secretary’s flaccid jaws begin again their masculation, but this time more rhythmically and contentedly, slowly. Inspired, he decided to write to Daya at once.

I’m here in Seat 2901. Time is running out. Will you marry me? Please?

He folded the sheet of paper twice, wrote her name atop it, changed his mind about the name, scratched it out till it became an illegible mess, waited for the ink to dry, manfully summoned the one-armed peon with a low but carrying
pssk,
explained where Daya was sitting, gave him the note and asked him to hand it to her. The peon hinted at a nod; his half-shut eyes and unshaven, sullen face discouraged all but the essential communication. Agastya watched him go with the tenderness of a father bidding farewell to a son boarding a train or ship to embark on a new life. The die is cast. I’m in your hands, Daya. Be kind to me. Immobilized by a mess of emotions, he observed the peon drift all the way down to Dr Bhatnagar, pass him the note, half-raise his arm to point in Agastya’s direction and amble off to lean against a wall from where he could mindlessly gaze at Jayati Aflatoon.

Who rose from her chair in respect as the PM got up to walk over to the microphone to say, to quote Minister Virbhim, ‘a few sweet and wise words’. Agastya rose too, to sidle out of the auditorium, wander down, shell-shocked, to the car park, locate the office car, lean against it, roll and smoke another joint, feel better, ramble off to find the driver, run him down finally at the tea stall outside Gate Fourteen, muttering and playing cards, sweet-talk him back to work, be driven off home to pick up his trunks, then to the pool at the Royal Eastern Hotel for an hour’s frenzied and graceless,
juggernaut-like, tidal-wave-displacing mimicry of the butterfly and the front crawl. When he returned to TFIN Complex, well in time for pre-lunch snacks, things looked better. Dr Bhatnagar and the PM had disappeared, Jayati looked tired, harassed and more attractive, Daya was clearly visible in the seventh row and a new set of more interesting personages—Baba Mastram and the cadaverous, almost-legendary Dr Kansal recognizable among them—had replaced on the stage the old lot. The atmosphere was more relaxed, more governmental, almost chaotic; delegates drifted about apparently without purpose, officials signalled responses to one another across rows, junior bureaucrats huddled in urgent conference in corners. Agastya noticed quite a few vacant chairs—two fortunately on either side of Daya, towards whom he headed with winged feet.