The Mammaries of the Welfare State (24 page)

It may be noted here
(to quote from the Foreword of the report)
that the requirement of shelf space of ALL the Departments of the nineteen REGIONAL governments of the Federal State was felt to be beyond the purview of this Committee; also, that it focussed
only on the Centre’s PERMANENT records, assuming
—
optimistically, it must be admitted
—
that it, the Centre, had organized well its system of weeding out its Himalayan quantities of paper, of separating its permanent files from its ephemeral transactions, its land records from its applications for Casual Leave.

The record is silent on precisely what the Welfare State did with the Hakim Tara Chand Committee Report. In the Bhanwar Virbhim regime, however, a proposal under consideration moots the setting up of the Taj Babbar Committee to study anew the vexed question of the updating of the recommendations of the, 1950 Committee. Professor Taj Babbar, as is well known, is a prominent educationist and the ex-Principal of Madna’s Janata College.

Nothing, therefore, is intentionally jettisoned—one never knows when one will need what, and later, one doesn’t want to be blamed, as they say, for acts of omission and commission.
But
it’s
altogether
a different matter—and it can’t be helped, you know—if some of that record simply slides, wilts, gives up, falls by the wayside, drops dead.

As for the living, Agastya couldn’t spot very many human figures; it was that uncertain, somnolent time of the afternoon. Occasionally, a head leaned out to spit paan into the air; at another window, a figure gargled and washed up after yet another late lunch.

‘Should I answer the phone?’

With his mouth full, the man raised his eyebrows and his shoulders, and even curled his lips a fraction.

‘Which phone is it?’

‘All of them. They’re all extensions.’

‘Why don’t
you
pick it up? It might be important, or even for you.’

‘I’ve said hello to you already,’ said the man coldly, ‘it’s enough for the afternoon.’

Agastya descended from his seat, walked over to a desk
nearer the door and lifted the receiver. Just then, the man advised him, ‘If whoever it is first wants to know, without preamble or introduction, where
you’re
speaking from, you must retort, “From my mouth. Where are
you
speaking from?” That’ll teach them. I always do that. It hasn’t taught them anything, but it does give the conversation a flavour.’

‘Hello . . . from my mouth. Where’re
you
speaking from? . . . no, nothing, nothing at all, I said, whom d’you wish to speak to? . . . yes, this is Aflatoon Bhavan, Department of Culture, Heri—’

‘This is Atomic Energy, not Culture,’ objected the man politely, clearing up after lunch, sweeping crumbs and leftovers directly onto the heater, from which merrily flew the sparks, like Tinker Bell, onto the floor and the occasional, vicinal mound of files.

‘Really? . . . But how odd that Under Secretary, Vanishing Musical Traditions should be just about three doors away . . . the man on the phone wants to know whether the office is open on Monday.’

‘A good question, tell him that.’ The man now stood at attention, ramrod straight beside the desk, chin up, shoulders back, chest out, stomach in, knees locked, gazing into the middle distance. He inhaled deeply and as he spoke, began to swivel his neck, with agonizing slowness, from extreme left to extreme right and back. ‘We’re all tense this afternoon. You see, including the weekend, there are six official holidays next week. Monday’s the only working day. Tuesday is a new holiday—the Bajendrabadkar Centenary as a sop to the Marxists. Wednesday of course is Christmas, Thursday is the martyrdom of Guru Shankar Shambhu, therefore a Restricted Holiday—the twenty-third of the year—very tricky that, what in government circles is referred to as the RH factor, and Friday’s the Declared General Strike, the Viraat Bandh of the opposition—so nobody’ll waste time trying to reach office. It’s interesting that we’ve never had week-long official breaks in December before. April, August and October have
traditionally been the better months from that point of view. It’s a development that I’m sure all of us will welcome.

‘But we learnt this morning that Mother Almeida’s more ill than ever before—which is saying quite a lot, considering that her heart stopped beating last month and her lungs gave up pumping last Saturday. She’s ninety-five or thereabouts. When she departs, that’s a holiday, for sure—maybe even two, who knows?—but we’re all pretty tense, you see, because if she’d said, Good Night, World, this morning, then Home Affairs would have declared the holiday today itself, which would have disappointed us acutely, because we’d all have been in office anyway—after eleven, at any rate. I’ve never taken a single day’s leave in my twenty-nine years of service. One doesn’t need to, I say. Once I finish my exercises and reach office, it isn’t so bad . . . some of my women colleagues went out to the lawns with their knitting and everything earlier than usual this afternoon. While in the sun, before they start their peanuts and oranges, they intend to hold a Special Prayer Meeting for the health of Mother Almeida. All are cordially invited. Ideally, they’d like her to leave us on Sunday afternoon. Otherwise, please, please, God, let the gentle soul live all of next week . . . tell him not to be so lazy and to phone Home Affairs if he’s so keen to find out about Monday.’

‘He wants to know whom he’s speaking to.’

‘Well, give him your name.’

Nervous, in two minds, without saying anything, Agastya put the phone down. It immediately began ringing again. Ignoring it, he watched his host carry a plastic water bottle to the window, rinse his hands, gargle and spit out into the void three mouthfuls of water, return to the desk, pack up his lunch box in a plastic bag, in passing drop a cupful of water to douse a spark atop a mound of files that had been smouldering menacingly, flick invisible specks of dust off his suit, and with a last, sad glance at Agastya, toting the plastic bag and the water bottle, make his way to the door.

It unnerved Agastya to realize that he was going to be left alone in the room. ‘Oh, I ought to be leaving too. Many thanks for the light for the cigarette . . . Aren’t you going to switch off your heater?’

‘It isn’t mine, you know. I always leave things the way I found them. It is a sound principle in government. Doesn’t ruffle any feathers. You rise faster.’

‘Yes. Should I switch it off then?’

‘After
I leave, please, if you don’t mind. If you receive a shock or something, I don’t wish to be late at my desk, you follow.’

‘Naturally.’

‘We usually wait for the power cuts to effect our economies in consumption . . . I should get back to my desk before the lights go off. I’ve quite a way to go, you know. Irrigation, A Wing, eighth floor . . . Water Resources Management . . . Wastelands Development Corporation . . . leave the heater on, actually. If the power doesn’t fail us, my wife’ll be pleased to return to a warm seat. Okay, goodbye.’

In the corridor, the mewl of a siren, terrifyingly loud, almost made Agastya forget where he had to go. As usual, nobody around him seemed to be affected by—or indeed, even hear—the din. Its hideousness—the wail of a thousand police cars—drew him forward like a magnet to its source, one of the two elevators in the west lobby.
Out of Order,
flashed the red sign above its doors, on-and-off, on-and-off, perfectly synchronous with the modulations of the siren.

‘It sounds like a fire alarm,’ muttered Agastya to himself.

‘Payṇcho, it
is
a fire alarm,’ declared—almost shouted—a voice at his shoulder.

He was surprised to see Dhrubo. ‘But it is attached to the elevators and has been primed to go off only when they malfunction. It is the first mystifying principle of firefighting on a war footing.’

‘Yes,’ hissed Agastya. The ear-splitting noise had sent his blood pressure spiralling and his heart off pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat,
like a long ping-pong rally. ‘Do you know where I can find Dr Jain, Under Secretary, Freedom Fighters (Pre-Independence)?’

‘Of course. I’m going to him myself. We enjoy a special relationship because his present PA is my ex.’ They began to climb the stairs.

Dr Jain’s present PA and Dhrubo’s ex, coincidentally also a Jain, was in Dhrubo’s opinion, a first-rate PA. He understood things in a flash. Early in their acquaintance, Dhrubo had asked him one of his fundamental questions:
Are you being paid by the Welfare State to reach office on time in the mornings or not?
Ever after, they had vied with each other to be more or less punctual. Office started at nine, they were both in, every other day, by half-past, thanks to Dhrubo’s bicycle and Shri P.A. Jain’s Chartered Bus. He disapproved of Dhrubo’s bike, incidentally, and felt that his boss should drive a car, or better still, wangle an official car like some of the other Under Secretaries did. He’d been particularly outraged by Dhrubo’s asking for a loan from the Department to buy his bicycle—it reflected badly on his PA, Jain’d muttered.

From nine thirty to ten thirty—till the peon came—free and undisturbed, they planned their day. 1) Send the peon with the bicycle to the repairwala at the gate of Aflatoon Bhavan to pump air into its tyres and check for hidden leaks, 2) phone and phone till one’s fingers become stubs and till one gets on the line the Secretary to the Principal of the Hiralal Aflatoon High School and Centre for Non-Formal Literacy and beg her to reveal whether they’ve admitted one’s niece, 3) send the peon to the Department’s Welfare store to buy hairoil, washing powder, dried mango, mosquito repellent cream, two kilos of rice and three cakes of Lifebuoy soap, 4) contact Sodhi in the Commissionerate of Estates to find out whether he knows somebody in the Municipal Corporation who can fix one’s property tax, 5) ask the peon
to cover with brown paper one’s niece’s new school textbooks, 6) try and extract from the Film Festival Secretariat two extra free passes for the forthcoming Latin American Cinema Retrospective, 7) send the peon on the bicycle to the office of the Principal of the Hiralal Aflatoon High School with the letter of recommendation from the Minister’s office that one has faked . . . and thus the day of the civil servant passes. By the time one has finished with one’s PA, one is quite exhausted.

The other Jain, the doctor who looks after freedom fighters, is the Department’s homoeopath—very experienced and wise, by all accounts. Staff and officers come from far and near, from all over the building, to consult him. He’s extremely reasonable and freely prescribes by proxy. For example, his own PA would accost him at his desk with:

‘Jain saab, my neighbour’s son suddenly became deaf this morning.’

‘I see. Algebra exam?’

‘We don’t think so. TV hasn’t attracted him all morning.’

‘How old is he?’

‘I don’t know. He looks twelve.’

‘Any family history of any irregularity?’

‘I don’t know. His mother has the hots for me, but perhaps that isn’t related.’

‘Difficult to say. Give him these two powders . . .’

Dr Jain liked looking after freedom fighers because they gave him lots of free time for his homoeopathy. He was a good soul—he was quite upset when Dhrubo’s second promotion was withheld. It reflected badly on the service, he muttered. And sharp—and mindful of his colleague’s good name; it was he who had suggested that in winter Shri Dastidar could bring two jackets to office, one for his goodly frame and the other to be draped for the day on the back of his chair, to reassure all those who came calling for a response from his seat. It was the easiest way to slip into Aflatoon Bhavan, incidentally. The next time the cop at the gate
stopped one, one could just point heavenwards and mumble, ‘Consult Jain Saab.’ He practised his homoeopathy gratis, of course, for the love of the craft.

‘What’s with the camera around your neck?’ asked Dhrubo of Agastya between the eighth and ninth floors.

‘Ah. I plan a photo-exhibition on the Innards of the Welfare State, for which I was hoping to touch you for a grant.’

‘Any time for old time’s sake, save during my tai-chi. We are at the moment tied up with the celebrations of the thirtieth anniversary of the nation’s Finest Hour in Athletics—you know, when Silkha Singh came in fifth in the heats at the Rome Olympics. Perhaps next week?’ On the landing of the tenth floor, Dhrubo continued, ‘May I ask why you need to consult Dr Jain? Or is it a delicate matter?’

‘Well—for Dr Alagh’s piles. You see, in the last harrowing fortnight in Madna, miraculously, his haemorrhoids have improved—virtually disappeared, actually. Somebody in Vyatha, that theatre troupe, told him that one little-known symptom of the plague is its beneficial—but temporary—effect on piles.’

‘I’m not sure,’ responded Shri Ghosh Dastidar the tai-chi performer, breathing easily as he took the stairs two at a time, ‘whether my office-chair isn’t a piles giver. You’re familiar with the principle?’ He waited on the eleventh floor for Agastya to catch up. ‘I’ve submitted a proposal to the Anthropological Survey for funds to study the alarming phenomenon of the sizable number of civil servants who have piles. Piles and piles—if you’ll permit—of clerks, Section Officers and above, sitting in the same chairs for seven hours a day, munching plates of pakodas and gulping down twenty cups of tea in the course of their labours. Surely the force of gravity—I argue in my proposal—will find it easier to tug down a colon when it can focus for such a considerable length of time on its target. In an Appendix to my project outline,
I’ve set down an interesting corollary to my main argument, namely, the fascinating relationship between a senior civil servant’s piles and his Personal Assistant.

‘I’ve cited the example of the Liaison Commissioner Dr Bhatnagar and his PA Satish Kalra. Do you know Dr Bhatnagar? Know of him? A legend of a man, a gem, one of our very best. Destined for the UN, absolutely. The longer Dr Bhatnagar is held back from what he feels is his forte, i.e., a key posting in one of our Economic Ministries, the worse his piles becomes, naturally. Equally naturally, being so senior, he can’t possibly speak directly to his doctor, who is after all merely a General Practitioner attached to the office, and therefore a sort of freelancer on the payroll of the Welfare State, a part-time junior of his, in effect. Loss of caste, absolutely, to speak to him face to face, or even on the phone. A Doctor of Ideas cannot stoop to listen to the counsel of a Doctor of Medicine, even when it’s for the pain in his own arse. So he waits for his PA to phone him in the morning and whimpers and moans to him the intimate physical details of his agony. The PA then phones the Doctor of Medicine and summarizes those details for him—to wit—“The pain in my arse has a pain in his arse.” He next listens to the doctor’s prescription, then phones Bhatnagar Saab and relays to him a careless precis of it—for example—“You’ve to apply Trusted Hadensa, sir, to the affected part, rest in bed all day, no disturbance, no phones, and call him—I mean, I’ve to call him—in the morning, sir”—and immediately after switches off while the Doctor of Ideas bawls out both the PA and the GP for failing to sympathize with and understand his arsehole. To improve that understanding, Kalra the PA spends the entire day alternately phoning the two doctors . . . In passing, I’ve suggested to the Anthropological Survey to grant me funds to study the economics of that day of the PA, and of his relationship with his boss’s bum. You really ought to meet it, and feature it in your photo-exhibition.’