The Mammaries of the Welfare State (28 page)

And the figures that one hears are truly mindboggling! A lakh of rupees for each No Objection Certificate to pull down and rebuild a one-thousand-square-foot apartment! The rates have apparently been quite mathematically worked out and—some say—are indeed quite reasonable.

Chanakya Lala often reminds Dr Kapila of Kaa the snake in his daughter’s old Walt Disney video of
The Jungle Book.
Lala is tall, slim, bespectacled, with a womanish sway to his hips in his walk. He stinks of perfume; in fact, in a drawer in his office, he keeps a bottle from which he regularly bathes himself. It is his way of preparing for meetings. That scent of his—airy, pine-forest-like—Dr Kapila has come to consider
one of the odours of corruption. Lala wears his gold watch on his right wrist, which Dr Kapila finds truly disgusting. He is unfailingly well-dressed and well-mannered, Suck Above, Suck Below. He invariably shares his booty with the dacoits who are his political masters and with whichever of his official superiors is willing. He has enterprise and has managed over the years to milk the most diverse Departments—Urban Housing, Rural Rationing, Education, Food and Drugs, Excise, Animal Husbandry. You see, no matter where you are, there always will be a law which you’ll interpret, one way or the other, in favour of one party. Why do it for free? Especially when your own salary’s so ridiculous that you
are
practically working for free. After all, don’t you owe a decent life to your children?

The above specious arguments would never’ve occurred to me, is what Dr Kapila tells himself. However did they occur to Slither? When Dr Kapila’d been Lala’s age, every morning, he’d—in a manner of speaking—get off his mother’s lap, touch her feet, seek her blessings, grab his tiffin box from his wife’s hand and go off to sweat in the car on his way to work. Was Lala then a sign of the changing times? How did he get rid of his mother and replace her with a wily dealer in foreign exchange? Or could the changing times themselves be attributed to the moral decline of the Aflatoons? The rot starts at the top? The apocalypse round the corner, time’s running out for the nation—and just look at the Joneses!

Lala of course was in the big league; the amounts that he supposedly gobbled up in bribes were hardly the norm. Of course, Dr Kapila had steadfastly held that those who could prove his deductions wrong were most welcome to step forward. In fact, by doing so, they would solve some of the riddles and dispel a little the fog that envelopes the economics of the Welfare State. Were he to be interrogated on the subject, he’d confess that soon after taking over as Regional Finance Secretary, he’d been so intrigued by the economics of white-collar venality that he’d felt that he must pose some
questions to the experts in the field. He’d thus sent anonymous questionnaires on scented paper both to Chanakya Lala and to Bhupen Raghupati. He’d been partly inspired by some curious sheets of off-white paper that he’d received now and then in his office post, unsigned—indeed, blank, save for some large, yellowish stains on them, thick, like dried cream. Though he hadn’t signed the covering letter, he’d made it clear that the filled-in questionnaires should be posted to the office of the Regional Finance Secretary and that the information disclosed therein would of course remain totally confidential. He was disappointed that neither ever replied. He found that typically self-centred and cowardly of them. They needn’t have
signed
the filled-in sheets. Surreptitiously, they squeeze and suck at the dugs like crazy, but scurry away like rats when they feel the mammoth, sluggish body stir.

Dr Kapila’d been quite pleased with the acuity of his questions. Though unanswered, they summed up the disquiet of any thinking Economics man in the country.

i) Apparently, the total amount that the State loses a year in bribes is a little over ten thousand crore rupees. However did the statisticians arrive at such a figure? Have you answered such questionnaires before? If so, how come I don’t know? Who’d sent them? Have you kept a copy?

ii) When did you start being corrupt? Was your father corrupt? Your mother? Was she a Customs official, by any chance? Did you ever steal money from your servant?

iii) Do you prefer bribes in cash or in kind? Diwali gifts of laser-disc videos? Johnnie Walker Blue? Paid holidays in Goa? With pussy?

iv) Is it true that Mrs Raghupati began life as a profitable foreign exchange racketeer? Capital gains tax, securities, trade cartels, import/export regulations,
over-invoicing, duty evasion, bank charges, gold smuggling, tax havens, chronic balance of payments crisis
—
that she understands and freely uses such phrases daily? Is it a fact that she abandoned her Economics degree in her second year in college to try her luck at the Miss India Beauty Contest?

v) Don’t you find it morally baffling that criminals like you are nowadays
—
sort of, well
—
admired?

Dr Kapila himself did. At the Golf Club, twenty years ago, he imagined that someone like Lala’d’ve been shunned—like the pariah in the play school who’s done potty in his pants—but in the present Dark Age, it depressed him to see that when a Lala type stepped out of his after-office-hours, chauffeur-driven, personal Cielo, and womanishly swayed into the foyer of the Club, cootchie-cooing to his kids on his mobile phone because he’d simply no time for them in the evenings at home, heads of other Lala types turned; they waved from across the hall and loudly, in Hinglish, invited him over for a drink.

Changing times, no doubt—and hence morally baffling. One couldn’t easily distinguish anymore between the Club type and the Lala type. They both wore Arrow shirts and perfumed themselves, as though their deodorizers were extinguishers for their armpits on fire.

vi) Please confirm that what follows is your modus operandi. In any given set-up, you will first identify the principal source of power. Once identified, you’ll push, with single-minded sycophantic intensity, to get close. When within sucking distance, you’ll genuflect. Then, your relationship having stabilized, you’ll magnanimously share your booty and your soul with him.

Dr Kapila knew of bureaucrats who, whenever they met the present Head of the political party in power—which was about twice a week—in greeting, touched his feet with their
hands, and on holidays and festivals, with their foreheads—and when they feared his displeasure, with their lips. When Dr Kapila sat across from such colleagues at meetings or stood beside them in the Officers’ Only urinal gazing pointedly ahead at the tiles before their noses, he’d often wanted to ask them how it actually felt, physically, to kiss someone else’s feet. The owner of which—the Soul of the Masses, the Beacon of the Downtrodden, the Great Light himself—had reputedly told his inner circle about the more sycophantic civil servant: ‘If I ask them to eat my shit, they’ll gobble it up with salt, pepper, chilli powder and gratitude.’

vii) However can you do it? How can you face an applicant across your office table and how can your lips and tongue frame words like: ‘Perhaps we can meet in the evening to discuss your case’
—
or whichever words wicked people use in such circumstances. How come my middle-classness makes me uncomfortable and suspicious in front of any applicant in a safari suit and mobile phone and your middle-classness makes you want to befriend him?

viii) It has been suggested that you accept bribes only from persons officially richer than you. Given your salary, that means a lot of people, doesn’t it? Do you therefore consider yourself a socialist? Do you dread the forthcoming Pay Commission Recommendations because they’ll upset your calculations?

ix) May I include here an anecdote for you to mull over? It concerns a certain Agastya Sen who, three years ago, was an Under Secretary
—
and my subordinate’s subordinate
—
in the Department of Labour.

He dealt with Gulf Traffic—namely, he processed the papers of the thousands of skilled and semi-skilled workers—electricians, plumbers, carpenters, masons, fitters, welders,
tailors, gardeners, barbers, garage mechanics, undertakers—who were lured by crafty middlemen every month to the Persian Gulf with the promise of a better—if not life, then at least pay. His task was Herculean—to eliminate, as far as possible, the craftiness of each deal, to establish its bona fides, to try and ensure that the worker, in each of thousands of cases, wasn’t being ensnared, for example, into a kind of slavery, or some flesh racket, or into becoming a courier for the drug trade. The pressures of the job, as Sen discovered on Day One, were enormously harrowing—an unending stream of oily, bright-eyed visitors whose every syllable seemed to insinuate at a bribe, phone calls from the most unexpected higher-ups about how to decide certain cases; from three in the afternoon onwards, another endless line of bouquets, boxes of sweets, baskets of dry fruit—as though he’d just got married or promoted, or the country’d won a crucial one-day cricket match. Upset, feeling as though he was about to drown, he began to refuse all the gifts, even the flowers. His obstinacy made his visitors look at him sadly and long.

By the end of Week One, honest, upright, upper-middle-class Sen learnt that he simply couldn’t trust his superiors and Dr Kapila’s immediate subordinates; by the middle of Week Two, his personal staff either. Close to cracking up, he nipped off to Personnel to ask to be transferred. Oh no, hang in there, admonished Personnel, after its usual fashion and because it couldn’t be bothered. You’ve been sent there to clean up the muck. You’re doing a great job, we hear. Keep it up.

Sen stayed those days in one of the holes in the Prajapati Aflatoon Welfare State Public Servants’ Housing Complex Transit Hostel near the Pashupati Aflatoon Public Gardens. Those familiar with the Transit Hostel and its ghastly layout know that outside each flat, alongside the doorbell, is a handy letter box in which the residents receive their daily milk, newspapers and their occasional mail. Three Sundays after
Sen had joined the Department of Labour, at eight-thirty in the morning, along with two packets of full-cream milk,
The Statesman
and
The State of the Times
,
he found in the letter box of his flat a blue plastic packet that contained twenty one-hundred-rupee notes.

He was infuriated at having his Sunday morning disturbed by a petty feeler of a bribe. With its presence, the money clouded his morning tea and his 5BX exercise session. He needed to get rid of it before it ruined his entire day. At eleven, cursing his potential bribers, he put on his crash helmet and with the plastic packet in his knapsack, rode off on his bicycle.

Beneath the new Trimurti Aflatoon Centenary Celebrations Flyover lived Sen’s favourite beggar family, a one-legged father, two nubile daughters and half-a-dozen younger siblings. He thrust the packet into the hands of one of the daughters and, overcome with emotion, sped off without waiting to see her reaction.

He hadn’t travelled more than thirty metres from the spot when a sudden, frenzied and sustained yelling made him brake, stop and look back. A motorcycle—with two men on it, both in dark glasses, and with the pillion rider tucking something into his shirt front—flashed past him. The entire beggar family was out on the street, bawling, waving their arms, bringing traffic to a screeching halt, gesticulating frantically in the direction of the motorcycle, shouting at one another and at startled pedestrians, darting forward for a couple of steps, then stopping short as though they’d changed their minds, then springing forward again.

With a shrill ring of protest from his bell, Sen took off after the villains. He hated motorcycles because they thought that they were sexy. He much preferred the knee-pumping openness of his Atlas bicycle. The booty-snatchers were nowhere in sight. At the first traffic light, he barked at the auto-rickshaw driver idling beside him, ‘Which way did they go!’

‘Who?’ asked the auto-wala, not unreasonably. Offended by Sen’s urgency, he dug deep into his nose and emerged with a comet—to wit, a hard head of snot with a long, liquidy tail—which he examined for a moment before flicking at Sen for his inspection. But in God’s scheme, all acts have a purpose, because in jerking his head away from the comet, Sen spotted the duo on the motorcycle on the other side of the street, shooting away from him, back the way he’d come and up the flyover. ‘Stop the thieves!’ he snapped at a neighbouring cyclist and jumping the red light, U-turned and zipped off after them, with a policeman’s enraged whistle screeching in his wake.

Sen was an instinctive economist—one of the nation’s finest, was Dr Kapila’s firm opinion. Even on that bicycle, darting crazily through that indisciplined Sunday-morning traffic, he was breaking down and docketing away for further analysis some of the less obvious but nevertheless fascinating aspects of the activities of the past few hours—the Welfare State subsidies on petrol, for instance. Of what use were they? Why was the taxpayer paying for the energy source of the motorcycles of the hoodlums of the land? And unemployment, a knotted, vexed question. Had his quarry of the moment, those damned robbers of the poor, ever enrolled at an Employment Exchange or answered the advertisements of the Staff Selection Commission? Had they ever joined the service of the Welfare State, for example, in the Department of Rural Development and had they been clerks disbursing the funds of the Consolidated Agricultural Regeneration Programme, would they have robbed the poor more, or less? On the motorcycle, moreover, the scoundrels had—strictly speaking—merely snatched back their
own
money—or rather, their boss’s—and had in fact been hard at work, carrying out instructions for which they’d be paid a fee, or even a monthly salary; as delivery boys or Courier Supervisors, they probably had legitimate roles in some illegitimate organization, in the books of which their wages were all properly accounted for.
Their zipping about on a motorcycle therefore was licit economic activity, whereas as clerks, while siphoning off funds in Rural Development, they’d actually be converting white legal money into black, thereby adding their bit to rock the touch-n-tumble balance of the State economy. To say nothing of their dubious contribution in their paperwork towards achieving the objectives of the Consolidated Agricultural Regeneration Programme. All in all, therefore, as an economist, a thinking man, keeping the welfare of the state in mind,
ought
he to chase the motorcyclists?