The Mammaries of the Welfare State (44 page)

‘This tragedy would never have happened,’ lamented the SP, ‘had all officers of a certain level and above been officially allowed to carry mobile phones.’

‘Lazarus?’ enquired Bhanwar Virbhim, sotto voce, in one of his rare manifestations of speech.

‘Apparently after their leader, sir,’ explained Principal Secretary Kapila. ‘He’s an extremely angry tribal teenager who was once a temporary government servant and who’s risen quite rapidly in the last few months in Sukumaran Govardhan’s army. Into their ears has been dinned some seditious, post-Naxal, neo-Salvationist ideology. You are aware
of course that Govardhan is fed up of government inertia on the subject of his coming out into civil society and is planning some alternative strategies.’

Bhanwar Virbhim had reverted to saying nothing. Dr Kapila continued, pausing between phrases to smile, as was his wont, without mirth and principally to disconcert his audience. ‘How urgently and how near in the future would you like the captives back? A view could be taken that the event in effect is Phase Two of the OYE OYE Happening and that as desired by the Prime Minister, two town mice have gone off to experience the life of their country cousins. On our stand would depend, sir, whom we nominate as negotiator . . . I personally had in mind a very fine young candidate for the post of Officer on Special Duty in Madna. He’s been there before as District Collector and even been trained in its forests. Very fine officer indeed. An Agastya Sen. He is at present in Europe for a prestigious training programme, where he is expected to shine. I also hope to hear from him certain responses to certain career management plans that have been proposed to him. If he does not rise to the occasion, Madna would be an immediately suitable option for Mr Sen. Of course, he’ll be provided adequate logistical support. We are lucky in fact to have found a Junior Officer whom Raghupati was rather keen to have in his own team. This Lina Natesan Thomas would, I’m sure, be a perfect Deputy to Mr Sen.’

Who, though confused, didn’t really mind swapping Dr Bhatnagar and Dr Kapila’s Europe for Lazarus. He was sick of being buffeted around by the government and depressed that Daya hadn’t immediately said yes to his offer of marriage. ‘Madna again. It could’ve been worse. Personnel has apparently asked for volunteers for the UN Peace Keeping Force in Kosovo. Some thousands have applied. Perhaps I
should make a special effort in gratitude for the Special Incentive Allowance of a hundred and fifty rupees per month that I’m going to get . . . But which language, Daya, will I haggle in? An eye for an eye and a choot for a choot. I’d better brush up my trade terminology.’

‘Take your time, sweetheart, botching it up. While you unwind in the forests of Jompanna, I’ll ponder over and try and decode your offer. It was sweet of you to have made it.’

They were in Agastya’s unsightly Ambassador, en route to a Rani Chandra cassette party which, it was rumoured, Jayati Aflatoon would briefly grace. Following Lina Natesan’s example, he had decamped from Paris on the preceding freezing, wet and gloomy Monday morning, completely distracted by the first e-mail that he had received from Daya the Saturday before.

You’ll be glad to learn that our new Senior Vice-President (Public Affairs) is someone you know. I chose Kamya, among other things, for her good head . . .

To Madame Europe Olympia on Monay morning before departure, Agastya, justifying it, said:

‘Mon père est sérieux,
Madame.’

She let him go, partly to avoid having to listen to his French.

For the Rani Chandra cassette party, he would have preferred to travel to those posh suburban farms in a classier, Japanese, chauffeur-driven, air-conditioned, stereo-fitted car arranged for by Daya’s office, but she wished to be alone with him.

He was tense because he was driving at dusk in peak hour traffic. Two successive mystifying and enervating road blocks produced by the movements of some V
^∞
IP’s entourage had forced him to change routes and soured him even further. Then, just when he was on the edge of the snarl of enraged, uncivil vehicles outside the gates of the Prajapati Aflatoon Transit Hostel, the city lights went off. The volume
of the din—the honking, yelling and the invective—immediately increased; so did the collisions in the foglit smog, much like the shows of strength amongst the more macho members of a herd of animals. ‘Cool it, honey,’ Agastya advised himself and pushed the gear of the Ambassador into neutral to sit the chaos out.

‘Dhrubo phoned me yesterday to ask whether I’d like to join this new political party that he, along with another madcap Bengali, hopes to launch before the next general election. I said yes unthinkingly.’

It was doubtful whether Daya heard him. She was distracted and amused by the two motorcycles that in exasperation had mounted the pavement and were chugging their way through the pedestrians, the hawkers with their kerosene lanterns and the stray dogs. Three of the riders were dressed in police khaki. The fourth, riding pillion, was eight-armed, outlandish in a Durga mask and a tight multicoloured jacket from which protruded six stuffed limbs. He carried what looked like a very real AK-47.

The bikes stopped before the gates of the hostel, apparently waiting for the steel-grey Contessa saloon that was emerging from the compound to precede them. As the car inched forward into the muddle, the motorcyclists got off and went up to it. One figure in khaki tapped on a rear window, a second—a woman, with a scar across her cheek—climbed, in two feline leaps, from the back on to the roof of the car. Squatting and leaning over, she, with an iron rod, shattered wide open its rear windshield. Even as she jumped off, the other three opened fire.

For the rest of his life, Agastya remembered that sharp in the headlights of the Ambassador, he had seen the man in the rear left seat of the Contessa—plump, bespectacled, distinguished, with great tufts of hair sprouting out of his ears—duck down and to the right milliseconds before the other three occupants—the driver, a bodyguard and an obese,
newly-appointed Personal Assistant—were rocked and bloodied by bullets.

The assassins stopped firing as suddenly as they had begun. They clambered on to their motorcycles and turned into the compound of the hostel. In the ensuing seconds of awesome silence, above the bronchial rattle and wheeze of the Ambassador’s engine, Agastya could hear the motorbikes roar away towards the freedom of the south gate. Cautiously, a hawker of wearunders then shuffled forward to the Contessa. He seemed first to inspect the holes in its body and the reddened, spider-webbed shards of windshield before daring to peek inside.

Three dead, with Sukumaran Govardhan wounded but alive when they were all shifted to a van to be ferried to the Chintamani Aflatoon Memorial Hospital. Something however happened en route, for Govardhan was declared dead on arrival at Emergency and the unnamed chauffeur wounded but alive. While the newspaper headlines applauded the event—

‘END OF’AN ERA’

‘BLOODY DEATH OF LAST EMPEROR’

‘GANG WARFARE CLAIMS DRUGLORD’—

the unnamed chauffeur arranged to slip away from hospital and into oblivion, where, safely out of the way, he had the hair from his ears surgically removed while working out a few deft moves for a smooth entry into politics.

In that hall on the seventh floor of the New Courts, with its defaced tables, broken windowpanes, scarred walls, chipped mosaic flooring and flickering tubelights, Lina Natesan, radiant in a sari of cream georgette, had nobody to share her joy at the judgment of Justice Sohan with save her old neighbour
from the Prajapati Aflatoon Welfare State Public Servants’ Housing Complex Transit Hostel, Dr Srinivas Chakki. On his part, he was delighted to be present in her hour of need, though he’d been convinced that he wouldn’t be able to show up. Ever since he’d been suspended from service for writing articles in various newspapers and magazines that were openly critical of the policies and personages of the Welfare State, he’d become a newer, busier and even more revolutionary man, travelling, writing, thinking, exhorting, curing, debating, making an ass of himself at different forums, not caring because time was still running out at the speed of light, plunging on.

The rules provide a suspended civil servant with half his basic salary, or half a peanut per month for, as they say, a tough nut. While starving his family to death, he is meant, no doubt, to shame himself into joining them. An idealistic vision of the perfect state of things, for shame and guilt are not feelings that he has experienced often since his adolescence, or whenever it was that he lost his innocence. If he has other sources of income, he is supposed to declare them. If he leaves the town or city of his residence, he is obliged to inform the office from which he continues to draw his survival allowance. Contrary to type, as a free man, Dr Chakki scrupulously followed all the rules. To the National Institute of Communicable Diseases, he sent every fortnight an outline of his tour itinerary, attaching photocopies of his second-class train tickets. Of all the stuff that he wrote that was published, and of the meagre cheques that followed months later, he posted xeroxes to his old office, highlighting the passages that he felt warranted careful reading. Never Say Die, Mister Hope, was one of his favourite mottoes. As long as his brain ticked away, there was always a chance that some, or at least one, of his ex-colleagues—fellow-citizens, after all—would arise from his stupor to see the light.

O
n a war-footing, therefore, the Welfare State must encourage our entrepreneurs to make some first-class, hard pornographic films. Nobody who is truly honest with himself will balk at going ahead full steam with this programme, which I have tentatively entitled Operation Bestial, that is, Better Sex for Tuning Into Life. Its acronym is one of the very few aspects of the plan that remain tentative. Indeed, if I may be permitted to say so myself, as time passes, the surer and clearer the future as a whole looks
—
from my point of view, of course.

It will be necessary to define the programme at length. I have learnt from my experience in bouncing my ideas off Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha not to abandon even the smallest detail to the imaginations of my auditors. When left to themselves to fill in the blanks, they collapse into endless, low-key giggles. Nothing moves. Bad time management, therefore.

Hence Bestial, first of all, should be seen as part of a larger education policy. It is neither a joke nor a secret that our people need to be told what goes in where. The films will show
—
in close-ups clear enough to satisfy the most myopic, the dumbest and the most aroused
—
and explain the acts and processes that are in fact so profoundly moving, so beautiful and fulfilling, but in our country and in the psyche of our countrymen, have been warped and polluted, made obscene, the inspiration for sniggers and lewd, bestial thinking. I speak of terms and concepts like orgasm, clitoris,
ejaculation, pubes, erection, cunnilingus, fellatio, ovulation, spermatozoa, fallopian tubes, mammary glands and erogenous zones in general
—
the bum for some, armpits and all that. Education through positive, wholesome entertainment.

To ensure which will be the responsibility of the new- look, positive, wholesome Cinema Certification Board. All happy endings. Made for Each Other sexual organs live happily ever after. All S & M, under control, positive, wholesome. No debasement of women, no blood, violence or females as sex objects. Just great, inventive sex arising out of love. Above all no film songs oozing sexual innuendo, than which nothing could be more disgusting.

The latest platinum Hindi film hit
—
which dates from a few months after your time, and which I know by heart because Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha coo it to each other, across and right through my head, pausing only to giggle, eight hours a day, five days a week
—
is a perfect example. I translate faithfully from our official to our administrative language.

The rooster-cock of my love

Cock-a-doodle-doo,

Calls to you, my dove,

Cock-a-doodle-doo.

You’re very wet, I see.

It isn’t the rain, my pussy,

Cock-a-doodle-doo.

Go not away from me,

But cum cum welcome the rooster

Like a virgin bud the bee

For a warm shot of a booster

Cock-a-doodle-doo.

Let me see if I can bring along a tape of it tomorrow. Even your subconscious will revolt against its fat, yellow-fanged vulgarity. And it’s one of the better
ones! In fact, it’s almost redeemed by its infectious, bravely-plagiarized, Latin American rhythm. As for the others! To plumb the depths, I accompanied Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha to something called
Tushun Hi To Hai Darling, Samajh Gaye Na,
universally referred to as
THTHDSGN.
Utterly exhausting. Three hours of spurting blood, bludgeon, thwack, wham, hero indistinguishable from villain, deafening cacophonous music, silicon heroines with faces like powder compacts
—
where on earth is the romance? I put it to you, as I proposed to Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha, that you, I and the whole country would be infinitely more fulfilled by a wholesome, hard pornographic movie. Top-angle shot, followed by close-up, of heroine helping hero to correctly slip on his condom. Hero confesses that earlier he’d always donned it on his middle finger, with which he’d then mauled clockwise the nipples of the female forms beneath him. As a contraceptive measure, it hadn’t been very successful. Surely you realize the value of the message, the education, that such scenes will transmit into that hot, darkened cinema hall? The possibilities are endless. Vamp has VD, close up, passes it on to villain, who deals in drugs, whose second-in-command mainlines indiscriminately, the dangers of AIDS, and so on and so forth. A good pornographic film would disseminate through tasteful entertainment all the loaded info of the Ministries of Public Health and Family Welfare. At no extra cost.

On the contrary, while simply raking it in for the Welfare State. Of which more need not be said, save that, to reach out to everybody, I must presume that I’m addressing
—
begging your pardon
—
the dumbest of the dumb. It is safe to infer from the last census figures that we have a sexually active and eager population of some seven hundred and fifty million people. Not bad, huh. Tickets will be priced at one hundred and two
hundred rupees. The Welfare State itself will take over and run the black market in the sale of tickets outside cinema halls, thereby providing additional employment to thousands, I’d imagine, for whom one may well consider a perk of free entry to the films up to a maximum of ten times per week. At a conservative estimate, I visualize a net revenue of about fifteen crores per film. We are therefore looking at a possible thousand extra crores a year.

Almost all of which will be pumped back into the world of sex. The health of our prostitutes, their housing and hygiene, the quality of their lives, the education of their progeny
—
their own education too. I mean, what’s wrong with power to the prostitute as a welfare policy? Then we’ll always need funds to improve the quality of our contraceptive devices
—
those copper Ts and condoms
—
and the health of our womenfolk, not necessarily in that order. You know, anaemia, tuberculosis, oral cancer from chewing tobacco, terrible menstrual irregularities, that sort of thing. To any insensitive male pig who objects to this diversion of funds to favour only one sex, we will retort: A healthy woman is the devil’s workshop.

My old roommate, mentor and friend, Shri Dhrubo Jyoti Ghosh Dastidar, would require a minuscule fraction of our net profit to fund his research project on the frenetic sexual activity of the mandarins of the Welfare State. I’d be inclined to grant him the amount required for a number of reasons. One: As he himself phrases it in the conclusion of his proposal, if we don’t ourselves study our peccadilloes, then sooner or later, a Caucasian European or American academic will slip in and make off with it, and once abroad, squeeze it dry of its richness, its worth, in fifteen papers and four seminars, from which in turn he will wring out two books, which will of course be sold back to us—and indeed
—
since they’ll be on the reading lists and
bibliographies of thirty Sociology and Political Science courses here
—
will become bestsellers of a kind. It is this chain reaction that Shri Dastidar wishes his study to preempt. He sees it as a protection of our cultural heritage. Two: As a long-time resident of the Prajapati Aflatoon Transit Hostel, I myself have been witness to the nuts, screws and bolts of the suggested project. It is an open secret amongst the hostellers that many of our fellow public-servant allottees have sublet part of their apartments to prostitutes, masseurs, computer salesmen, astrologers and barbers.

If I may digress for a minute to elaborate. In your present state, you probably don’t recall the PATH
—
as the hostel is familiarly referred to. Twelve hundred one-room fully-furnished flats, six buildings in all, marvellous location, a minute from the Public Gardens. About five hundred of those flatlets, I’d say, have been sublet. It’s easy
—
undo your pyjamas, and your brother’s too
—
he’s bound to be staying with you; back home, all of us have a housing problem
—
tie the two strings together and hang up a couple of your wife’s saris across the middle of your only room
—
and voila, you’ve a one bedroom-hall-kitchen-toilet in the centre of town, of which you rent out the portion between sari and balcony for about five times the sum that’s deducted from your salary as house rent. Neat. At ten a.m., or whenever the breadwinner departs for the day, an entirely different, parallel life swivels into existence, like a change of scene on a revolving stage. I myself regularly get my hair cut in D-248 and Miss Snigdha, I understand, has her toes done in E-117. After he broke away from Baba Mastram, Dharam Chand first set up shop in B-747, an address, he is quick to point out, numerologically significant for an astrologer of the jet age. Miss Shruti frequently has her fortune told there.

As for the sex, each building of the hostel, like territories
carved up amongst the mafia, tends to have its own don of a racketeer. Any one of them, overly venturesome, trying to muscle in on the domain of another, might suddenly one Monday find himself transferred to some dump a thousand kilometres away. Hence they all follow scrupulously the rules of the game. Ministries and Departments too have been parcelled out amongst them. My Under Secretary colleague down the corridor, for instance, covers Home Affairs, Planning, Rural Development, Energy and a handful of others. He’s arranged
—
quite clockwork, smoothly
—
with the Caretaker of the Commissionerate of Estates to always have at the disposal of the passionate and panting the flats on the ninth floor of our building that are officially designated as the guesthouse of the Regional Potato Research Organization. What Shri Dastidar intends to analyse are the processes and the structures within the system. Can one discern a correlation, for example, amongst the seniority of the concupiscent official, the economic clout of his Ministry and the social class, attractiveness and youth of the service provided? What percentage of the women professionals active in all the six buildings are resident housewives or tenants of the servants’ quarters of the nearby Ganapati Aflatoon Marg, all of them terribly respectable middle- and lower-middle- class women who wish to supplement the family income incognito, and who’d be horrified were you to ask them, for instance, in a printed questionnaire:

At what do you play

When your spouse is away?

How many genuine guests does the Regional Potato Research Organization board per year in the capital? Has none of them ever wondered at the goings-on in the guesthouse, at how all its staff seems to comprise painted up, well-turned-out women rather the worse for wear? Is the billing cycle weekly, fortnightly or
monthly? Does the don accept payment by cheque and credit card? Do the rates change on religious and government holidays? As you can see, Shri Dastidar has his work cut out for him.

In his approach to the subject of his study, he has, as he says in his Introduction, distinguished two broad categories of male civil servant and one special category of female. He sees one male type as the sort who just can’t get it down, exemplified by Shri Bhupen Raghupati, last seen disappearing into the jungles of Jompanna. In contrast, the second male type simply can’t get it up, as an example of which, I’m rather surprised to note, he suggests me. Though his illustrations can be
—
and in one case, certainly is
—
faulty, Shri Dastidar nevertheless draws interesting connections between the business, the activities, of the Welfare State and the sexual behaviour of its functionaries. It is the mirage of power, he argues, that keeps Shri Raghupati in a state of permanent excitement; and significantly, when he wants to pucker down, Shri Raghupati resorts to reading Cabinet notes, demi-official correspondence, circulars, memorandums and minutes of previous meetings
—
in brief, to wading through the innards of the Welfare State, the very same stuffing that, whine the male mandarins of the second type according to Shri Dastidar, permanently prevents them from experiencing the joys of a respectable hardon. You’d agree that we should encourage Shri Dastidar to further probe these links between power, documentation and desire.

Operation Bestial will have an interesting spin-off or two. We’ll become trailblazers for the International Hard-Pornography Film Festival Circuit, for instance, and when our ageing porn film stars decide to perform in politics, their pasts will help to keep them in perspective.

Dr Chakki’s hour was up. He switched off the Walkman, stepped up to the bed and methodically removed the earphones from the head of the comatose Rajani Suroor. He took out of his backpack his sunglasses and his headdress—a Yasser-Arafat kind of thing that he’d fashioned out of a small tablecloth—and packed into the bag the machine, the earphones, his diary, pen and water bottle. As was his habit, he scanned the cubicle with experienced eye—the drips, the ECG, the catheter, the tricky air-conditioner, the voltage stabilizer—before pulling shut behind him the ill-fitting door. Outside in the ward, manfully ignoring the awesome heat, the whirr of the ceiling fans and the reek of disinfectant, he smiled at Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha, and gave off very good bad vibes. They, simperingly and in a flurry, sat up in the hospital bed that’d been placed beside the cubicle specifically for the guardians of Shahid Suroor and in which they, supine, had been pensively assessing the undulations of their forms down to their painted toenails.

Seven other beds in the ward, six of which were occupied; all six were cases recommended by local V
^∞
IPs, for one still needed clout to get close to Rajani Suroor. In the initial weeks after the attack on him, the cops, adept at bolting stable doors, had cordoned off the entire hall—sanitized it, to appropriate their phrase for a hospital—and hadn’t allowed anybody in, not even, at times, the doctors. However, time, the boss that eases up all crises, slackens just as well constables on duty, and thus with its passage, gradually at first and freely thereafter, patients, nurses, sweepers, attendants and visitors wandered in and out of Ward Two.