Read The Mammaries of the Welfare State Online
Authors: Upamanyu Chatterjee
The Mammaries of the Welfare State
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Upamanyu Chatterjee was born in 1959 and joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1983. He has written a handful of short stories and two novels—
English, August
(1988) and
The Last Burden
(1993). He is married and has two daughters.
In memory of friends:
Alok Roy, Vikram Malhotra and Anuradha Chopra
A
gastya was so enervated by his life in the city that ever so often, when he was alone, he found himself leaning back in his desk chair or resting his head against the armrest of the lumpy sofa in his office that served as his bed, shutting his eyes and weeping silently. The cry generally made him feel better.
His office was his home, so hard-working a civil servant was he. Just a week ago, he’d been placidly content in his position of a Joint Commissioner, Rehabilitation (on Leave Not Granted and Without Pay), snugly afloat on the unplumbed murk of the Prajapati Aflatoon Welfare State Public Servants’ Housing Complex Transit Hostel in the country’s capital. As an illegal occupant of flat A-214, he had felt in those days cocooned and distanced from the swirl around him. Marathon power cuts in summer, a cleanish Municipal swimming pool a minute’s cycle ride away, great dope, no sex though—all in all his life on leave had been okay-minus. Then out of the blue—Personnel always moved like lightning when it wanted to fuck somebody’s happiness—he’d received his transfer orders to this fifteen-by-fifteen boarded-up section of veranda on the fourteenth floor of the New Secretariat in the western province’s capital city.
The grimy, once-orange, lumpy sofa was for V∞IP visitors. His predecessor had won it from Protocol and Stores after a stimulating five-week struggle. Beneath the windows lay the plain wooden bench that Agastya had stolen from down the corridor. It was his kitchenette; on it stood his kettle, cafetière,
electric stove and tea things. Beside the door, on a desk, sat a personal computer swathed in dusty dust sheets—the Ultimatum System Configuration Module 133 Mhz Intel Processor 8MB RAM 1 GB HDD 1.44 FDDSVGA Megachrome Monitor Skylight 99 was entitled to air- conditioning, so it had to remain. The windows of his section of veranda offered a breathtaking view of the world’s largest slum undulating for miles down to the grey fuzziness of the Arabian Sea.
Agastya spent three to four nights a week at Daya’s, a forty-five-year-old divorcee whom he’d met on the luxury coach that he’d caught out of the Transit Hostel on the occasion of his transfer. They’d found themselves sitting side by side at the rear of the hot and crowded bus. Luxury simply meant that its tickets cost more. Daya was bespectacled, and had been dressed in a whitish salwaar-kameez. Agastya had been in his valedictory present from the staff of his Rehabilitation office, his new blue jeans. After eight years in the civil service, he’d come to dread farewell gifts chosen by subordinate office employees; after the tearful speech-making, they’d routinely, on each occasion, given him a clock.
‘So that even though time flies, you’ll remember us,’ they’d explained when they’d felt that he hadn’t looked grateful enough. At the Rehabilitation Commissionerate, therefore, he’d summoned the Office Superintendent and asked:
‘Do you plan to collect some money for a farewell present for me? Yes? How much will it be? If you don’t mind, I’ll accompany whoever’s going to buy the thing . . .’
The long last seat of the bus had been intended for six bums; eight had been a disgraceful crush. Agastya’s right thigh had virtually fused with Daya’s left; thus the ice had been broken. The heat had helped too.
She’d taken off her glasses rather early in their relationship.
She had large, tired eyes and a wide mouth. Agastya had immediately yearned to go to sleep with his face restful between her ample, firm breasts. Only repressed homos, his soul had pointed out to him then, long to fuck women old enough to be their mothers, especially when their own mothers are dead. Ah well, que sera sera.
She’d wanted her sunglasses and some tissues from her travelling bag and he’d got up to take it down from the overhead rack when he’d noticed an uneven dark blue strip running down the outside of the thigh of her whitish salwaar, like a ribbon down a bandmaster’s trouser leg. His new blue jeans had been shedding colour like a snake its skin. Destined To Fade, ran their ad; they were called Eff-Ups. He’d died of embarrassment for four seconds, then had plonked down with her bag on his lap, determined not to get up till journey’s end, or till she lay down on the floor of the bus, wriggled out of her kurta, peeled off her salwaar, sighed and begged him to gnaw off her panties with his teeth—whichever was earlier. Hadn’t she noticed how he’d touched her up? Ahh, her spectacles were off. Ohh, the blessings of imperfect sight.
‘Where in the city will you be staying?’
‘Oh . . . at the Raj Atithi State Guest House.’ Daya had looked blank, reminding him that the world of the city encompassed much more than the universe of the Welfare State. ‘That’s on Pandit Samrat Shiromani Aflatoon Mahamarg.’ She’d continued to look blank. ‘On Cathedral Road, between the Secretariat and what must be the world’s largest garbage dump.’
Her face had cleared. ‘Ah. The Secretariat was a splendid colonial structure before they boarded up those verandas and installed those Freedom Fighter statues.’
The Raj Atithi Guest House was a fourteen-storey building crawling with low life. A five-foot-high wall separated its
compound from the world’s largest garbage dump. Atop the wall stretched four rows of barbed wire, from various points of which sagged torn polythene bags of diverse colours. These contained human shit in different stages of decomposition. They’d been flung, of course, at the dump and hadn’t made it across the wall. They in fact looked pathetic, like POWs in a Hollywood movie ensnared in a vain attempt to escape from a concentration camp.
‘Hmmm . . . breathe deep, my dear, this fragrant, invigorating air,’ said Agastya to himself as he crossed the covered car park towards the stairs.
Amongst—and in—the twenty-odd white Ambassador cars there nested the low life with its charpais, kerosene stoves, lines of washing and racing children. It included some of the drivers, peons, bearers, attendants, cooks, orderlies and sweepers who worked in the Guest House and the Secretariat. Like a million other servants of the Welfare State in the city, they faced a housing problem. They’d got themselves enrolled in the list of those needed for Emergency Services and in almost every other list for priority housing that they’d heard of, namely, Priority Housing List, Top Priority Housing List, Chief Minister’s Quota, Housing Minister’s Quota; Scheduled Castes Percent, Scheduled Tribes Percent, Backward Classes Segment, Other Backward Classes Segment and Depressed Groups Reservation. They collected receipts, notifications, stamped documents, resolutions and photocopies of illegible forms as a kind of substitute for brick and cement; nobody had either land or houses for
them.
On the first floor, Reception was a noisy ceiling fan, a decolam-topped counter with an abandoned dinner thali on it, a flickering tubelight, a vacant armchair, and behind it on the floor a snoring maid in a blue sari. Agastya rapped on the counter, and ‘
Koi hai?
’
he hollered in his we’re-the-Steel-Frame-that’s-kept-the-country-together voice. The maid snorted and briefly opened one eye. She stopped snoring.
A taciturn bald clerk with crimson eyes had no room for Agastya. Agastya showed him a photocopy of his illegible room reservation form. The clerk belched explosively. With a ‘tch’ of exasperation, the maid got up, adjusted her sari and left. ‘Look here, I’ve been posted here as Deputy Secretary.’
(I’d rather sniff a eunuch’s pussy than bribe you, you shaved arsehole.)
‘Look here, I’m a girder of the Steel Frame, okay?’ After a twenty-minute discussion, a yawning lackey accompanied Agastya in the groaning lift to a room on the twelfth floor, from where, in the morning, through the birdshit, the crud and the whitewash droppings on the window panes, he could enjoy a spectacular view of both the garbage dump and the slum.
The room had two separate beds. The second bed had been unoccupied when he’d nodded off, thinking of Daya’s blue thighs and—regrettably—smirking. He awoke early and abruptly to discover two men in the second bed and two women and a third man on the floor, all asleep. While he blinked at them, the loo door opened and a fourth man came out with a bottle-green towel around his neck. He and Agastya stared at each other sullenly and silently. Agastya watched him cross over to the jute bag on the table, rummage in it and return to the loo with a shaving razor.
Once in the Secretariat, insecure, disoriented and unhappy, he wanted to meet the Housing Secretary to discuss his housing problem. He couldn’t because the Housing Secretary was too senior. He’d joined the Civil Service before Agastya had been fathered. On alternate weekdays, only Joint Secretaries and above could call on him, and only between three and five p.m., to plead for solutions to their housing problems. The others could go fuck a duck. Ditto for Joint Secretaries and above after they’d pleaded.
His PA told Agastya to go and call on Menon, the Deputy Secretary (Personnel Housing) instead. Menon wasn’t in his room; Agastya could finally meet him two days later. Eight
years ago, they’d been posted together in the district of Madna and had pleasantly disliked each other.
‘Hi, Menon! Long time no see, great to see you, have a nice day . . . look, are you in charge of the Raj Atithi Guest House? . . . I share my room with six strangers and I’m not used to it. When I return to my room in the evenings, one or two of them are sprawled out on my bed . . . Yes, they do get up when they see me . . . naturally, Steel Frame and all that . . . they’re quite inoffensive, actually, and the younger woman, when aroused, would, I’m certain, make the earth move . . . but, I say, the point surely is: what about the prestige and the perks of the Steel Frame? . . . because of that horde in my room, I haven’t been able to exercise in the morning ever since I’ve arrived . . . I’ve had to work out in my office room, and some bugger downstairs on the thirteenth floor came up to check on all that thumping and interrupted my spot run, so I had to stop, chat with him and start all over again after he’d left . . . shit, I’m sick of my life here . . . I don’t see why you fart around in a three-bedroom two-thousand-square-foot flat by the sea while I’ve to moulder in a cloak room with a gang that for all I know could be a nomadic criminal tribe . . . how long did
you
have to wait before you could allot yourself the flat you’re in?’
‘Three years,’ simpered Menon.
‘Oh.’ Long pause. ‘They’ve placed their gas cylinder and burner right next to my bed, eyeball to eyeball with my pillow, practically . . . the most sullen of the men apparently follows some special diet and can’t eat even carrots and tubers in general because they grow underground and don’t get any direct sun while growing and therefore are full of germs instead of being full of—well, goodness . . . I’ve begun to breakfast and dine with them . . . I decided that on the second day after my first meal in the Guest House Canteen . . . as the British would say, my word! . . . I went to complain about them to the Reception counter . . . their reservations
are just as valid as mine—more, actually, because their booking’s apparently for ever, whereas mine’s for a mere ten days . . . so what’s going to happen when my time runs out? is what I asked Reception . . . in reply, all of a sudden, it simpered so wickedly that my heart really bobbed up and down for seconds, I swear it . . . my room- and loo-sharers are guests of gun-loving Makhmal Bagai, Honourable scion of the ex-Chief Minister . . . they’re on their way to some place to do a job for him, probably beat up some innocents . . . what a wicked world . . . what’re their women for, then? I asked, and they gave me a Look . . . one cooks, the other’s for fun . . . some people truly travel in style . . . Look, every time I leave the Guest House in the morning, I don’t know how many strangers’ll be floating around in my room-loo when I return, and whether they’ll let me in . . .’
Menon asked him to fill up some, forms and, simpering, added that he’d see what he could do about his position on the waiting list, which was 1294. ‘Unless,’ he smirked, pushing across a second set of off-white, cyclostyled papers, ‘you want one of these more recent, sub-standard houses.’ Agastya picked the sheets up with reluctance.
4/Applications/SS/TAB/84-92
The Welfare State
Regional Commissionerate of Estates
Allotment Type
‘
A’(B)Dated:
Memorandum
Subject: Invitations for Applications for Unclassified Sub-Standard Houses of Type A
The undersigned is directed to state that the servants’ quarters and outhouses (of the erstwhile Imperial Barracks) that do not have any modern amenities and were originally intended to be demolished and that
would
have been brought down had it not been for the
stay order from the High Court that has been obtained in this regard by the Heritage Preservation Trust are therefore now available to those Category A government servants already enrolled on the Emergency Accommodation Shortlist. A list of available locations of these servants’ quarters and outhouses is at Annexure A.It may kindly be noted that only those officers who drew a pre-revised salary of Rs 950 per month or above on 1.1.87 and who entered service on or before 1.1.81 are eligible for the above accommodation. Grade III (pre-pre-revised) Short Service Staff are also deemed to be eligible in this regard. The application form is at Annexure B . . .
‘What does “do not have modern amenities” mean?’ Agastya wished to know before he decided. ‘No jacuzzi or no craparium?’
‘It probably means an early-morning squat on the beach, with salt water tickling your bum, alongside a hundred thousand of your fellow citizens from Bhayankar. It’s quite good fun, I’m told, after one loses one’s initial middle-class inhibitions—rather liberating, lots of fresh air early in the day, no stink. The waiting list for the sub-standard houses stands at 379.’
‘I can’t decide whether 380 is an auspicious number for me or not. Let me first explore other avenues and the apartment blocks on them.’
On the phone, Daya sounded happy to hear his voice. After the preliminaries, he got down to business. ‘Hi, Daya, do you smoke dope?’
