The Mammaries of the Welfare State (43 page)

‘Ha-ha, that’s very witty, Madame, if you
permit . . . thank you . . . May I hold forth for a while, Madame, if you permit? . . . thank you . . . It is true what you say, we simply can’t be trained. We are as seasoned and hardened as criminals, if you wish. In my world, no one makes it because of the diploma that he’s picked up from somewhere fancy. Please don’t get me wrong. It’s wonderful to spend these months in Europe—particularly Paris—and be paid for it. But as for going back home a changed, more capable, administrator—as Mahatma Gandhi told Jinnah at Bandung in 1944, “In-service training is a science that provides gainful employment to in- service trainers.” It—the training, that is—is simple hard, common sense blended in a mixie with some Management jargon, some boxes, arrows, arcs and circles on charts and transparencies with not more than four magnified words per frame. May I digress here, Madame, if you permit, to include an anecdote? . . . thank you.’

Madame Director agreed because she wanted the Third World to remember her as patient, attentive and wise. She also had very little actual work, despite her packed agenda, which mainly comprised interviews (with others of Agastya’s kind, all of whom she’d have to bully and harass for one silly slip or the other) and meetings with different officials to chalk out more short- and long-term courses for other Third World types so that the Institute’s impressive budget could be justified and—who knows?—perhaps even increased.

‘One day, Madame, in my last week as District Collector of a place called Madna, one of my hundred-odd visitors was a spirited, eighty-year-old woman. If you’ll permit me to digress for a minute from the anecdote itself, I wish to add here that our District Collectors are a bit like the French Prefets, only younger, in general . . . The woman’s name was Saraswati Something-or-the-Other. She asked me whether I’d heard of her. I hadn’t. She was a little taken aback by my attitude. So was I, I confess, by hers. Visitors of the District Collector, even at their angriest, do not introduce themselves and then grimace in disapproval because they aren’t household
names for their interlocutor. Saraswati Something turned out to be one of our Veteran Freedom Fighters. Fifty years ago, she’d been a captain in our Patriotic National Army, Burma and all that, and had even been awarded a couple of medals. Some months before she came to meet me, she applied for a new passport. Her application was rejected, though—naturally—nobody would tell her why. It took her quite a few visits to the Regional Passport Office and a couple of nervous breakdowns before the door of some unheeding official to learn the reason, which triggered off a third collapse.’

My dear Dhrubo, Madame Europe Olympia didn’t have as much time as I needed to finish my instructive tale. She dismissed me in mid-sentence quite charmingly and then sent a letter of warning after me, threatening anew a stoppage of the scholarship if I don’t in future finish my anecdotes on time. This above all, to thine apportioned time be true. May I therefore, to an old friend, and since I don’t like to leave any business unfinished, recount and round off the fable?

Saraswati Something discovered that her name was on the Intelligence Bureau’s list of Dangerous Persons. She had to burrow a bit more to learn that whichever cop office dealt with Intelligence work in her home town of Madna hadn’t updated its lists for about fifty years, which thus continued to have in them the names of those who’d once posed a threat to British national security.

Which of the principal characters in the above narrative would you choose to send abroad for training? That’s the question. I myself would’ve opted for ol’ Saraswati. I’ve asked Madame Europe Olympia for a second appointment, in which I wish to suggest to her that to prepare us for the UN, she could invite a European Dr Bhatnagar to come and take some classes.

In their course calendar, Puy-St-Etienne had been put down as a study tour to acquaint the foreign trainees—and their numerous shepherds too, no doubt—with some aspects of a typical European mountain economy. The skiing began at ten sharp. Everyone was punctual since none of them wished to be left alone to catch the others up on a pair of skis, to traverse hundreds of slippery metres—half on one’s bum, a bit undignified, but safer—to the ski-lift, to board—and later, to descend from—which, under the derisive eye of some lazy, unhelpful operator, would be subsequent nightmares. Since the group did everything alphabetically, Agastya shared his turn on the ski-lift with his predecessor on the course list, an ancient, amiable but taciturn South-East Asian who settled down on the bench as in a lecture hall for an after-lunch snooze, chin tucked deep into chest, one gloved hand cupping his balls and the second hand covering the first. Agastya’d noticed the posture before and had found it oddly moving, elemental; a primal act, of defending even in sleep one’s most vital possessions. On the ski-lift, moreover, that position of repose also helped to significantly increase one’s chances of losing one’s batons, which one left dangling on the edge of an armrest, where they swayed more crazily and clicked against one another the more one mounted. Of course, were they to fall, the disapproving instructor would naturally order one back—on foot, mercifully—to retrieve them, and that would take care of the morning.

Windy, sunny, sub-zero and breathtaking; Agastya could feel the ice wrapping itself around his bronchial tubes and had to remind himself that he still had a few degrees Celsius to descend before he could claim in his postcards home that he’d slipped into an Alistair Maclean novel.

‘Your compatriot has missed the experience of a lifetime, is it not? Puy-St-Etienne? She doesn’t return or what?’ Conversations amongst dear colleagues tended to be in French, straightforward, elementary. For in his sojourn in Europe,
Agastya had sensed, or recognized anew, the obvious fact of the variety of our planet, of the millions on it from whom English was as remote as Spanish, French and Portugese were from him. They embarrassed and saddened him—his narrow Anglocentricity and the insidiousness of all colonialism, by which succeeding generations of the once-colonized too were obliged to think and to communicate in perpetually-alien tongues.

‘I’ve no idea. I received a long letter from her last week which doesn’t mention us, the Institute or the course even once. She had to go back for her lawsuit, as you know. That’s taken up most of the letter—and her time, I imagine.’ At the mention of Lina Natesan, warmth from the base of his sternum had oozed out in all directions, uncontrollable, thick like the sauce of some meat that slowly cooks in its own juices. Man. What a weirdo, with what an arse. All she needed to become divine was a sense of humour. He really should’ve written to that judge of hers. Me-laard, the case for the defence rests only on the mute evidence of its one witness, on its irresistibility, in brief. Me-laard, I call upon the arse of Lina Natesan to come to the witness box and take the oath. Meanwhile, I urge you, me-laard, to thine own self be true, observe carefully and imagine a piece of a sari, of grass-green georgette, that’s stolen into that cleft and that remains there—snug and warm—for minutes on end. Fifteen. Twenty-two. Thirty-seven.
Oh quel cul t’as
!
How can anyone possibly resist digging that sari out and, as it were, allowing it to breathe?
Lebensraum
!
And substituting for it one’s nose? The defence rests its case, me-laard.

Agastya had proposed more or less the same argument to Lina Natesan herself in the one fortnight that she’d spent in Europe. More less than more, to be honest. They would never have become friends in any other place. This had been her first voyage out and since she’d sensed behind it a conspiracy designed to deprive her of justice, she’d found the
whole experience of her first fortnight rather trying. In her hour of distress, she’d turned to Agastya only because he always seemed to be there, smiling like the moon whenever and wherever she’d turned around. On his part, he wouldn’t have minded much had she—a suspicious type—not swivelled around all the time to see who was following her because man, what an arse. I shall sink my teeth into that mass before the month is out or my name is Anthony Gonsalves, me-laard.

It irked him that she never smiled at anything witty that he said but he’d always find her tittering politely over the Maltese’s jokes. Fortunately, he got on reasonably well with the Maltese, who was a couple of centimetres shorter than him. As a rule, he didn’t much like people taller, save for Dhrubo, whose case, reasoned Agastya with himself, was special because in school the bugger had been a millimetre shorter till they’d both turned eleven, which is when the bugger had begun jerking off like a monkey and calling him August; both factors had helped him eventually to look up to Dhrubo.

What he, Agastya, dreamed of most was to make her, Lina, laugh so much that even her arse jiggled. Oooooooooh. He was stupefied to learn—and that too from the Maltese—that she was going away.

‘Don’t be crazy, you can’t go back now. You’ll cause an international incident if you use your stipend to buy a plane ticket—Interpol and all that. Don’t be stupid, you yourself told me that Raghupati has the judge in his pocket peeing in. The game is so obvious that even a retard would see through it. Announce the dates for the hearing a couple of times in your absence, and then especially since you’ll be representing yourself, dismiss the case because the prosecution doesn’t show up. Look, leave Raghupati be. He’ll entangle himself in any one of the thousand intrigues that he’s spun in a long, murky career. There’ll always be some petty injustices that
simply aren’t worth struggling against—Oh dear—foot in mouth again. I mean, here we are, in Paris. I love Paris in the summer, when it sizzles—though by our standards, it’s mild winter. Oh why oh why do I love Paris? Why on earth do you want to leave the Jardin du Luxembourg and return to see Raghupati! Look around you, Lina, couples kissing on every bench, children playing in the sand, laughing on the backs of ponies, Americans at tennis, lonely hearts soaking in the sun, and you and me, babe. Think of
me,
Lina! How can you leave me alone in the midst of these corny aliens!’ He held her by the shoulders and lightly kissed her on her right cheek, then on her left. She didn’t freeze, neither did she look him in the eye; she seemed to be biting her lip and to have reddened a bit, so he hugged her hard and while nuzzling her neck, which smelt nice, though he was no bloody good at identifying perfumes, squeezed, in turn, her shoulder, her waist and a fistful of her bum.

A turning point in her life, though nothing changed in her immediate future. She still insisted on returning home to fight Raghupati and on his—Agastya’s—not accompanying her to the airport. But it was the first time that she’d liked somebody else’s hands on her. Reflecting on the experience on the long flight back, she attributed its strangeness both to their dislocation and to Paris. Call it the warmth of loving human contact, if you will, but a turning point it was, nevertheless, because out of the blue, against all expectations, she won her case. In fact, Justice Sohan went out of the way to ensure that she did. On
his
long flight back from Honolulu, where, at the World Poetry Conference, neither his Urdu couplets nor Punjabi haikus had bewitched either audience or any literary editor, and where everybody else—Z-grade poetasters in Spanish, Arabic and Chinese—had appeared to be drinking tequila, laughing and slapping English-language publishers on their shoulders all the time—on the long flight back, the boorish air-hostesses had refused to upgrade his
Economy ticket to First-Class. His was a Special-Price Concession offered by Civil Aviation to its Sister Ministries in the Welfare State, they’d explained. Not that he’d understood.

‘I’m a judge, d’you follow? Do you know my place in the Warrant of Precedence? On this same ticket, how did I travel First-Class on my way out, tell me!’

The air-hostesses had neither any idea nor were they interested. The least blasé of them even fetched Justice Sohan the Flight Complaint-Book
without
his demanding it, thereby infuriating him all the more against Bhupen Raghupati.

Whom he sentenced to one month in prison, a fine of fifty thousand rupees and dismissal from service. The gist of his wordy, forty-page judgment was that the law must come down with a heavy hand indeed on any conduct unbecoming of a civil servant, on crimes against women and on the abuse of hierarchical power and a junior’s trust.

‘Payṇcho,’ a bitterly-amused Raghupati doubtless would’ve muttered had he been present on the day of judgment and, after consulting Baba Mastram, appealed against the decision. His rights of appeal would’ve shielded him for a decade or so; after which, he’d have thought of something. How could the struggle for injustice ever end?

He’d intended to be present in the courtroom but wasn’t because he hadn’t returned in time from the lightning trip that he’d made, on Makhmal Bagai’s squeaking-with-excitement appeal, down to the district of Madna, to swing and clinch an earth-shaking land deal of acres and acres for the development of teak farms south of Pirtana. Curiously, on the day after Raghupati’s departure from the capital, Dambha, the tribal lackey whom Bagai had recommended for a post in his father’s domestic establishment, vanished from
21 Ganapati Aflatoon Marg without a trace, much like an unlucky soldier into a long war.

Or a jeep into a jungle. Raghupati and Bagai were last seen driving off into primeval forest by Assistant Commissioner Moolar of the Revenue Department. ‘They were going to inspect some sites, sir,’ declared he a thousand times to senior police officials, Intelligence men and buttoned-up civil servants. To further probing, he could only respond by clacking his dentures.

‘We should wait, sir, now for the extremists to announce the kidnapping and demand their ransom.’

Which occurred within the fortnight. The Superintendent of Police of Madna received at home an ordinary off-white government envelope containing a cassette tape of the All-Time Classic film songs of Mutesh and two sheets of paper. The first sheet, presumably the proof of identity, was semen- stained and blank. The second was a typewritten note in Hinglish from a hitherto-unknown outfit called the Neelam Sanjeevam Lazarus Youth, or NeSLaY, for short and sweet. It demanded from the Welfare State, in return for the safe release of a representative criminal-politician and a singular senior bureaucrat, twenty crore rupees in cash and the creation of a new regional state for the tribals with Madna as its capital.