The Mammaries of the Welfare State (21 page)

The list of questions was never-ending; further, they
changed with every meeting. Those answered and settled beyond doubt on Monday became irrelevant on Wednesday. Is the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary a vegetarian? was Monday’s question. He isn’t coming, was Wednesday’s information, but his Principal Personal Assistant is. Well, what’s his name? Not much is known of this one but he keeps a vow of silence on Thursdays.

Different sections of the vast police network of the Welfare State—Intelligence, Security, Anti-terrorism, Vigilance, the regional police—knew some of the answers to some of the questions but they weren’t telling. For one, they couldn’t—no one could—be absolutely certain of their information. For another, to reveal it was an unnecessary security risk, that is to say, knowledge is power. I do my job, if others had done theirs, the country wouldn’t have gone to the dogs.

When they did communicate what they knew, it was either because the news was stale and safe or it had already been passed on by somebody else. The transmission was almost always oral—by wireless or telephone; firstly, because writing stuff down took time; secondly, because notes and faxes became records, the undeniable, ineradicable evidence of an event, and therefore avoidable. The receivers sometimes wrote the information down and telegrammed or faxed it back for confirmation, which hardly ever arrived, usually because by then the facts had changed. On the rare occasions when minute-to-minute programmes weren’t turned around at the last minute and Headquarters could boast of a responsible and dutiful set of officers, the written confirmations trickled in, in twos and threes, a week or so after the event.

Between Bhootnath Gaitonde and the two-in-one meeting, the Collector of Madna tried to meet all his hundred waiting petitioners in under half-an-hour. His best timing till then
had been twenty-eight minutes for one hundred and thirteen of them. He was however tripped up completely by the forty-third, a spirited eighty-year-old woman who claimed to be a Veteran Freedom Fighter. Her bewildered rage didn’t look as though it could be assuaged by thirty undivided seconds of the Collector’s time. Sighing, Agastya settled down to focus on her complaint. The letter to Daya would have to wait a while. Chidambaram glided in with some sheets of whitish paper and the local newspapers. Without interrupting his ‘Oh dear’-ing and ‘Let me see’-ing, Agastya ran his eye over the headlines. He was comically outraged by one leading news item. He summoned Chidambaram.

‘The
Dainik
has this time confused leptospirosis and the plague. I mean, where do these people live? I want you to ask the PRO to arrange to send an intelligible rejoinder . . . perhaps even organize a press conference . . . the subject can be . . . The Rats of Madna: A Comparative Survey . . . that should cover just about everybody . . .’

Places weren’t marked for the officials in the meeting hall of the Commissionerate but nevertheless, they all sat in strict pecking order to the left of the Commissioner around an enormous round table, facing the members of Parliament and Legislative Assembly and other worthies. On Agastya’s right sat Madna’s Superintendent of Police, Panna Lal Makkad. Atop the files that Agastya had carted along for psychological support lay the sheets of whitish paper that he hoped by the end of the meeting would become his letter to Daya.

Makkad was gruff and glum, with hooded eyes, and a toothpick and fist in his mouth. Post-lunch was clearly not his time of day for special meetings. While the Chairman of the District Council declaimed on the need to have the Prime Minister commemorate his historical visit by inaugurating the unfinished new premises of the Madna Janata College, the necessity therefore of completing construction in six days and
the general criminal laziness of the district civil engineering staff, Makkad belched and yawned at regular intervals before falling into a light doze with his eyes wide open. At four- thirty, after the non-official special invitees had taken a quarter of an hour to physically quit the hall, and the Collector had jotted down a few points with which to reassure—if not lull—the assembly into believing that all for the PM’s visit was well, Makkad leaned across and breathed into Agastya’s ear, ‘He isn’t coming, you know. Don’t tell anyone because you aren’t supposed to know officially till next Monday.’

The Collector controlled an urge to clamber on to the table and do a striptease. He instead observed the armed forces, clearly miffed at the civilian notion of their place in the hierarchy, gather up their things and reposition themselves in correct descending order alongside the Commissioner’s right elbow.

‘His piles acting up?’

‘Sort of, what with all the drama that’s going on. His advisors fear his being upstaged by Sukumaran Govardhan. Who, it is true,
has
sent out feelers for a trade-off. An unconditional surrender for a general pardon; then run for Parliament, and with his crores, back the right horse for PM.’

Fact tarted up as fiction, garnished as fantasy, but nonetheless fundamentally fact. Agastya began to love the meeting. He valued them in particular when they—almost officially—became pointless. ‘Has he decided whom to surrender to?’

‘He naturally wants it to be the PM. Live TV coverage while he ceremonially hands over a couple of flame throwers. The PM’s Secretariat has snapped its fingers at the idea. A criminal can’t simply start from the top. He must wait a bit to get there.’

‘So the buzz is true—he and Bhanwar Virbhim and the rest of Jayati Aflatoon’s caucus to orchestrate a palace coup, following proper democratic procedure, of course.’

The Superintendent merely smiled in reply and while continuing to gaze beatifically at the armed forces, settled down to snatch a quick supplementary nap.

T
o rendezvous with Daya at the earliest, and at the expense of the Welfare State, far away in anonymity, peace and quiet, the Collector of Madna suggested on the phone to the Under Secretary for Demotic Drama at Aflatoon Bhavan that he be summoned to the capital fourteen hundred kilometres away to report, in person, to the Centre on exactly what happened in broad daylight to Rajani Suroor.

‘Sure, good idea’, agreed Dhrubo. ‘Bring that pest from the hospital, Alagh, along. Make it a delegation.’

He looked less like a pest and more like the dragon of the comic-strips, Dr Alagh the Civil Surgeon of Madna did. He had hooded, sleepy eyes and a long nose, almost as wide as his mouth, with inordinately-flared nostrils. His lips were pale and thin, but his mouth enormous; when he smiled, his face became quite pear-like. The gaps in his teeth could comfortably allow the exhalation of fire; perhaps they—the gaps—had been created by his breathing under stress. Certainly, both his moustache and goatee had an uncertain, wispy, singed look. Appropriately, his remaining teeth were dark brown from smoking.

Except for a patch of forest above his left ear, he was bald. He wore that patch long, oiled it, dragged it up and across his dome down to his right ear where, mission accomplished, he abandoned it; tendrils of hair wandered all over his scalp, determinedly searching, like vines, for support.

He was short and podgy, perennially shabby, generally in sandals and off-white trousers and bush-shirt. For the meeting
at the Centre, he carried a leather briefcase with his wallet, a small towel, his cigarettes, some Nivea cream for his chapped lips and a few books in it. They made him feel intellectual and creative, like a college student with a future.

They weren’t of much help, though, in the jungle of Aflatoon Bhavan. A cop stopped him and Agastya at the doors and asked them in Haryanvi-Punjabi, in a lazy, friendly way, ‘And you, Hero Masters, where d’you think you’re off to?’

Alagh Saab (as he liked to be called) began to stutter in Hindi, ‘We wanted to—Culture . . . a report . . . Under Secretary . . . appointment . . .’ He glanced at Agastya for guidance but the latter didn’t much wish to converse with a cop. Besides, he—Agastya—was comfortable only in Bengali, Hindi and English. Haryanvi frightened, and Punjabi appalled, him. He was also depressed at being one of the only pair to be stopped in the leisurely after-lunch influx into the building.

The cop wriggled his eyebrows at them. ‘What’s in that bag? A bomb? An AK-47?’ He commandingly stretched his hand out for the briefcase. Mesmerised both by the power of the law and the Haryanviness of the policeman’s personality, Dr Alagh numbly handed it over. A Surd breezed by with a cheerful invitation for the cop, ‘Coming up to the Coffee House? For something piping hot before we fuck your mother?’ A large group of folk singers that had just been cleared by Reception guffawed.

The cop’s paw emerged from the briefcase with T.S. Eliot’s
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
and the Nivea cream. ‘What’s this for?’ he demanded, pushing the Nivea under Dr Alagh’s nose, but he didn’t really want an answer. He was about to rummage deeper when he—‘Aha!’—caught sight of the leather strap of a simple automatic camera around Agastya’s neck. He looked sternly from one to the other. ‘Spies, perhaps! Photography is strictly banned in Aflatoon Bhavan—you’ll of course tell me that you didn’t know that.’

‘It isn’t a bomb, for Heaven’s sake. It’s silly to ban
photography in the office when you have at least five hundred photocopying machines in each Department.’

‘Deposit this camera at Reception and get a pass from them for whoever you want to meet.’

‘Look—we
have
been to Reception! We have an appointment at 2.30 with the Under Secretary for Demotic and Indigenous Drama. We
tried
his intercom from Reception but there wasn’t any reply because he
never
answers his internal phones. There’s nobody in Aflatoon Bhavan, he’s often declared, whom he’d care to receive a call from. The man at Reception understood but couldn’t issue us a pass because as per rule, he has to first confirm the appointment on the intercom with the officer to be visited. He suggested that we should explain the background to you and that you’d be sure to follow and let us through . . . are you wondering whether the Under Secretary for Demotic Drama answers his
external
phone?
He
doesn’t, but mercifully his PA does—that’s how—’

‘HUBRIS DESCENDING!’ All of a sudden, from the speaker above the cop’s head, a deafening, panicky whisper, as though from an archangel under stress. ‘Attention, Main Gate, Reception and Parking . . . HUBRIS descending . . . Attention . . .’ The electrified cop straightened his beret, pulled his stomach in and roaring his intimidation at the throng around him, began to march towards the elevators twenty paces away, vigorously shoving to left and right all the potential assassins who awaited the Minister’s descent. Agastya and Dr Alagh, who happened to be on the right, with one shove were propelled considerably closer to the stairs. Returning the camera to its case, Agastya watched for a couple of seconds the faces of the others gaping at the elevator while they waited for it to open to debouch Bhanwar Virbhim and his cortege; then he and Dr Alagh began to mount.

To restore his nerves, he needed to piss, smoke and drink
some tea. In the corridor on the fourth floor, to locate the loo, he followed the overpowering stink of urine. En route, he was distracted by a sign that read in both Hindi and English,
Toilets This Way,
but which pointed the way he’d come. In two minds, he about-turned and hesitantly retraced his steps till the stairs, where he stopped. The pong of urine to him now was as confusing as the Toilets signs because every now and then, in his bewildered passage down the corridor, it had mingled with the smell of hot, thick, sweet, milky tea.

The corridors of Aflatoon Bhavan had once been a handsome five metres in width, but over the years, the cupboards, desks, chairs, electric fans, coolers, shelves, sofas, stools, teapoys, clocks, folders and files had edged out of the twelve-hundred-plus rooms and sidled along down the passages in search of
lebensraum.
Virtually every inch of common zone in the building—foyer, corridor, lobby—was now piled high with junk; only those spaces declared by the Black Guard commandoes to be sensitive from a security angle—that is to say, those areas that would catch the Minister’s eye in his shuttling from motorcade to elevator to office, escaped the rubbish, the lumber. That still left quite a few kilometres of corridor. The fire-escapes, storerooms, garages and the dead-ends of passages all resembled the aftermath of an earthquake, a riot or a bombing—discarded, broken furniture and mountains of files, documents, booklets, official publications, piled all anyhow, one atop another, restrained from blocking off the heavens only by the ceiling. At regular intervals in the corridors, painted signs on the walls exhorted denizens and visitors, in two languages, to Keep Quiet, Refrain From Spitting and Smoking and to Maintain—separately—Peace and Communal Harmony, Cleanliness, Dignity of Office and Due Decorum. Paan stains, that covered the discarded furniture and files like enormous drops of red rain, had on
occasion soared up to splotch some of the signs.

‘Where’d you think the toilet can be, Sen saab?’

‘Westward ho. Can’t you smell it?’

Shrill giggle. ‘Yes and no. At times, it smells like tea.’

Same thing, though, pondered Agastya the thinker. On each floor, the Gents was two doors away from a Department Canteen. The two stinks were in one sense Welfare measures, generated so that even the blind could find their way to both refresh and relieve themselves. The not-so-blind too, perhaps, because those
Toilets This Way
signs had been quite misleading, hadn’t they? They’d’ve staggered on and on down these corridors in the wrong direction till their bladders would’ve burst. Of course, they could always have squirmed into any of those crevices between desk and almirah. One could think of them as resthouses for travellers on the Road of Life. The Toilets signs therefore were reminders of All That Misguide. They were also subtle and potent advertisements of the Department of Education—seventh-to-eleventh floor—for its Literacy Commission. The workers who actually measured, hammered and put these signs up—how many of them, d’you think, asked Agastya of himself, could read them?

Uh . . ., he replied.

Exactly. They—and their brothers—also erect our road signs. That is why, if you want to go, for example, from Aflatoon Bhavan to, say, the Pashupati Aflatoon Public Gardens—to restrict the example to the family, as it were—and you scrupulously follow the signs that you can decipher from your driving seat, it should take you about a year, plus-minus two months. We won’t make it, you know, as a nation until—to take only one instance—the people who put up our road signs and the people who need to use them, to decipher them from their cars, are the same.

How interesting . . . why doesn’t someone get rid of all this junk? One could sell it for lakhs of rupees to the kabadiwala. Surely the Welfare State would welcome the revenue.

No, too dangerous. Too many decisions. Which kabadiwala was one going to call? The man on the bicycle ringing his bell beneath one’s bathroom window while one shaves in the morning—‘Hello, come over to my office tomorrow morning at eleven with all your friends and buy off me three hundred truckloads of junk’? How would one prove to Audit that he didn’t bribe one for being so kind? Even a one-per cent cut on the sale of all the clutter of Aflatoon Bhavan would be more than a salary for the whole year. No. One would follow procedure. There exist rules even for the proper disposal of office junk. One calls for a minimum of three quotations from interested parties. If the value of the rubbish is estimated to be above a certain amount, one advertises in the newspapers. Which newspapers?
All
the major newspapers of all the SAARC countries? Perhaps, since the kabadiwala is quite a SAARC institution. Then, mindful of the Official Language Policy, one routes the Junk Disposal File through the Director, Official Languages. The quotations then are examined and processed at the appropriate level.

Further, what is junk? Speaking of levels, which one would best define it? There, on Agastya’s left, those lemon- green booklets dispersed all over those desks and sprouting out of that cupboard—three thousand of them were published some four years ago. Two thousand seven hundred remain. They are the Minister’s Welcome Address on the Occasion of the Inauguration of the Plenary Session of the Trimurti Aflatoon Birth Centenary Celebrations Committee. What was one to think—were those booklets junk?

Under Secretary (Ways and Means and Administrative Reform) had certainly thought so and—to use officialese—Initiated A File on the subject.
Permission is sought to call for quotations from interested dealers in scrap.
Oh dear—one would’ve imagined that the nation’d gone to war. But Ways and Means had fought back like a hero—Kit Carson, absolutely.

The proposal is not meant in any way to insult the august office of the Minister. It is only intended to allow Aflatoon Bhavan to breathe a bit. Improvement of the Work Environment. It is alternatively submitted that the booklets be circulated amongst our Higher Secondary Central Schools as proposed models of English prose for those students of Standard Eleven who offer English as their Optional Third Language. Of course, if approved, more copies would have to be printed. The views of Director, Official Languages may kindly be solicited in this regard. However, it should be pointed out here that copies of the official Hindi translation of the Welcome Address, regrettably, are not immediately traceable in Aflatoon Bhavan. If required, a second official Hindi translation may be commissioned after a decision has been taken at the Highest Level. Naturally, a parallel enquiry would have to be initiated into the absence or disappearance of the Hindi texts.

Not surprisingly, the file was still drifting about in one of the abysses of Education—after all, what was four years in the life of a Welfare State file? Not even a heartbeat. Meanwhile, there mouldered those masterpieces of oratory. Passersby had often been offered copies. Of course, before one actually disposed off all those booklets and files, one’d have to consider the invaluable insulation that they provided to the entire building in winter. An indisputable fact, when one recalled how many clerks had snugly slept for months ensconced among them.

The Gents’ Toilet was large, greyish, brightly-lit, wet and crowded. Dr Alagh stepped up, gritted his teeth, fumbled with his fly, managed to undo its buttons in time and as he let go, sighed with relief and shut his eyes. A couple of
seconds later—in midstream, as it were—he squeaked in disgust as he felt something warm and—well, urine-like—spray his left foot. He opened his eyes. In a nanosecond, he yelped in horror as he realized that the piss wasn’t his. He jerked his leg away, glared at the profile of the pisser on his left and hoped that the dirty look would suffice because he didn’t quite know what to say. What
could
he say? Mind your spray? Look before you spatter? Yet, equally clearly, his glare had no effect because his neighbour—small, moustached, with a lined, desiccated face—was pissing with his eyes closed, leaning against the marble partition that separated him from Dr Alagh. Who hurriedly stepped down to avoid being further irrigated.

But who continued, however, while rebuttoning himself and rolling up till the knee his left trouser leg, to glower at the bum and back of the off-target pisser. Which is when he noticed that the pisser’s right arm tailed off at the elbow. He held the edge of his kurta in his mouth and the strings of both his pyjamas and his undies in his left hand, thus leaving himself no means by which he could catch his penis to guide its stream. Dr Alagh stopped glowering.

Revolted, confused, abashed and curious, he watched the pisser skilfully knot up with one hand and amble off towards the sinks. Where he stopped to shake hands with a friend. Who had to let go of his crutch to extend his hand. They chatted. At that moment, the cleaner who was swabbing the floor neared them and—in warning, perhaps—clicked his tongue a couple of times. The pisser leaned sideways, shook hands with the cleaner and said something. The cleaner responded in sign language. One of the doors of the WCs creaked open and out stepped a man in sun glasses, with a walking stick. He tapped his way towards the door. Two places away from Dr Alagh’s at the urinal, a short, podgy man with the lost, open face of a victim of Down’s Syndrome, half-turned to holler a greeting at the blind man, who
responded cheerfully. Near the window, a teenager with a left leg badly deformed by polio, was feeding what looked like chapatis to a large monkey that squatted on the sill on what appeared to be a bundle of files.