The Mammaries of the Welfare State (3 page)

Never before either had he sat in front of anybody who’d snivelled in this manner two evenings running. And he hated food being wasted, particularly in a developing country. On Thursday, therefore, while waiting for his order, he reached over and began helping himself to her chowmein. Quite tasty. Her smallish eyes focused and flickered a bit. Almost mechanically, she pushed the pickled onions across to him.

‘No thanks, we’re to utter sweet breath tonight.’ He waved to Thais and, when he strutted over, asked him for cigarettes, Wills Filter Navy Cut.

He felt stuffed by the time he’d finished with her chowmein and his own chholey-bhaturey, keema dosa and alu-pooris arrived. ‘Developing country,’ he explained to her
as he attacked the keema dosa. She smoked a cigarette. ‘As in a marathon, one must pace oneself in life, with people, with food,’ he clarified to her as he pitched into the alu-pooris. ‘Anything is possible at the right speed.’

She rose unsteadily from the table. He beamed enquiringly at her. ‘Looking at you, I want to vomit,’ she mumbled in Hinglish and lurched off towards the stairs. As her first words, they didn’t augur well for their romance.

He was torn between her and his chholey-baturey, between sex and food, love of woman and love of country. Hating her for winning, for making him waste both money and nurture, he followed her.

The world’s largest slum had its virtues. One could, for example, puke anywhere and you couldn’t tell. When he emerged from Krishna, a voided Kamya had her arms wrapped around one of those wizened mongrel trees that abound in the city, that survive against awesome odds, that offer neither shade nor flowers or beauty, the trunks of which are too flinty for the nails of advertisers’ boards, dour, self-centred, enduring without growing.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked in Hinglish—’
Aap all right hain?
While waiting for her to unwrap herself, he realized that he liked the rhythms of Hinglish. It was a genuinely national language, as truly mirroring the minds of the people as Benglish, Tamilish, Maralish, Punjlish and Kannalish. He told himself that when he returned to his boarded-up veranda, he should note in his diary the following items as food for thought: i) Why can’t Hinglish be the Official Language of the Welfare State? and ii) Why don’t you translate into Hinglish or Benglish some of your favourite English poems?
Jhe Alphred Pruphrock-er Laabh Song?
And
Shalott Ki Lady?

‘I stay right here.’ He pointed vaguely in the direction of the Secretariat. ‘
Main right here stay
—’

‘
Main English follow karti hoon, thank you.’
She was tall. ‘
Hmmm, so aap right here stay karte hain.’
Her eyes had widened and brightened with interest.

At the gate of the Secretariat, he advised her. ‘If the guard asks, just say, Night Duty. If he acts tough and argues that women are exempt, scoff and enlighten him, New Policy, Women’s Quota.’

She liked the room. She drifted about in it, touched the kettle and his skipping rope on the wall, gazed out of the window at the night lights and asked how come. Feeling safe with her, he explained how he’d solved his housing problem. She was more impressed than amused. ‘
Ek dum top-class idea, Tiger,’
she lolled on his lumpy sofa, now covered with a brightly-patterned counterpane, ‘
Ek dum top-
. . .’ Her head slumped to one side as she fell asleep.

I should unhook her bra as a
beau geste.
Then, feeling old, lonely, morose, washed out, tired of his own jokes, he too bummed around the room, brewed himself some tea, flopped down behind his desk, now and then watched her breast rise and fall in sleep, and finally bedded down on the jute matting between his computer and his kitchenette. I should get married now to any one of those decent, horny Bengali dullards from Calcutta that Manik Kaka’s been dying to line up for me for the last eight years. Enough of this hepness of being single. After a while, one just felt sick of books and music and cinema and being boss of one’s time; one wished instead for human company and the warmth of another body in bed, for everyday domestic clutter and social completeness, for the outward tokens of an ordered life—a sofa set in the drawing room, a washing machine, a magnetic remembrancer on the fridge.

A little after six, he woke abruptly to find himself alone in the room. He waited for a minute or two. Then he crawled over to the sofa and nodded off again in the faint aroma of perfume.

The preceding Thursday. Daya’s flat had been a fifteen-minute walk away from the Secretariat. Upmarket, downtown,
one of the backlanes behind the new steel-and-glass Stock Exchange. The backlanes were quieter, greener, pseudo-colonial and comprised some of the world’s costliest real estate. One square foot of flat cost eighteen thousand rupees, i.e., more than twice Agastya’s monthly salary. It could cost more if, from it, one could glimpse a corresponding square foot of the sea. ‘Not worth it, honey,’ he cautioned himself as he crossed the street to avoid a knoll of garbage that stank— whew! like a government permission—and to which had been drawn a zoo of cattle, pigs, curs, cats, crows and rats.

Daya was on the third floor and her doorbell a sexy chime. She took some time to answer it. He heard her trill to somebody, presumably the dope-provider, ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree,’ before she opened the door. She looked like Ageing Raw Sex Incarnate. No spectacles. She’d touched up both eyes and hair. She wore an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot—a luxurious peacock-blue-and-amber salwaar kameez. She beamed at him and offered him her cheek (facial) for a peck. He was a bit taken aback at how happy he was to see her.

‘I’m so glad that you don’t have your blue jeans on, otherwise I’d’ve had to smother the entire flat in dust sheets . . . I didn’t notice how you’d fouled up my salwaar till I came home that evening . . . for a while, I couldn’t even figure out what’d happened . . . and then I imagined that you’d done it on purpose, for some perverted reason . . . was it your way of making a pass? . . . I even fancied that you might’ve been a sort of walking ad for a, you know, detergent or something . . . that’d’ve been clever . . . or an anti-depressant . . . Don’t spread the blues . . .’

A spacious, lamplit living room, French windows at the far end, a veranda beyond. Arty, uncomfortable furniture, bric-à-brac, tribal statuary, richly-coloured rugs on the floor that Agastya kept tripping over and apologising for; white bookshelves with sleek tomes on Modernism, Reductionism,
Margaret Mead, The Death of Tragedy, Russians in Exile, Rilke; a colour TV before a settee, on, on the settee a tall, darkish, handsome, hairy, bespectacled, generally groovy man with long, wavy salt-and-pepper hair who rose with a commanding smile to shake his hand.

‘Rajani Suroor.’

‘How do you do.’

The telecast was a recording of the inauguration of the Festival of Russia. Gymnastics, the human pyramid business. The camera closed in on one of the saps in the bottom row. It shouldn’t have, the bugger was
dying,
but in the cause of better relations between the two countries.

‘So you’re a dope-smoking civil servant. Do you bring to your work a new perspective?’ Groovy Suroor apparently knew a lot about the government. From his kurta pocket, he pulled out a metal cigarette case and a silvery Yin-Yang box and while rolling a joint, dropped names in a well-bred way. Agastya decided to ‘sir’ him while sharing the smoke, to try and discompose him. The camera had abandoned the Russians and zeroed in on the V∞IPs in the front rows, beanbags all in starched, billowy white, a white Gandhi topi atop each like a blob of icing crowning a cake, snugly shapeless in white armchairs and sofas. ‘Ah, our dear, dear Minister-to-be, the Jewel of the Deccan Mafia,’ murmured Groovy as the TV showed bald, bespectacled, obese Member of Parliament Bhanwar Virbhim of the heavy-lidded eyes licking the toenails of Jayati Aflatoon, the wife of a cousin of the Prime Minister.

‘That isn’t fair, Rajani,’ objected Daya, handing Agastya a glass of watermelon juice. ‘If you can’t stand even the possibility of his appointment, you should stop sucking up to authority. My favourite commandment from the
Reader’s Digest
goes: If you don’t like what you do for a living, quit. If you can’t quit, shut up.’

Then folk dancing, by what Agastya presumed were
Taras Bulba and Co. Just watching them tired one out, their never-ending extreme form of the Canadian 5BX, and grinning all the while too, or were those rictuses of agony? Next, Groovy Suroor, after a long drag on the joint: ‘For you, Daya, everything’s always been either black or white. In my world, the pros outweigh the cons, but that doesn’t mean that the cons don’t exist.’ He beamed avuncularly at Agastya. ‘Does this not-so-young man have any opinions on the service of the Welfare State?’

‘Yes. I feel weird. I ask myself all the time: How do you survive on your ridiculous salary? And
why
do you survive on your ridiculous salary? At the same time, I feel grossly overpaid for the work that I do. Not the quantity, which on certain days can be alarming, but the quality. In my eight years of service, I haven’t come across a single case in which everybody concerned didn’t try to milk dry the boobs of the Welfare State.’ The dope was first-rate. ‘But I suppose that’s what the boobs are there for.

‘In my earlier office, on the ground floor of the Commissionerate, alongside the stairs, stood a kiosk that we’d leased out about a decade ago, for a rupee a month, to a privileged underprivileged. He was Backward Caste, Depressed Class, Physically Handicapped—his right leg petered out at the knee—Mentally Zonked—his file had a photocopy of an illegible four-line note from some Assistant to the Head of the Department of Psychiatry of the Trimurti Aflatoon Welfare State Hospital—and Utterly Black and Angry. The clerk who used to deal with Handicap’s file would say that the Hospital note merely certified that he, Handicap, periodically needed to have his head examined.

‘The kiosk wasn’t that small—about eight-by-eight—and he’d set up a photocopying machine in it. A sound business prospect because the Commissionerate shares its compound
with the Sessions Court, the Registrar of Births and Deaths and the Deputy Tribal Commissioner. Handicap’s photocopying machine, of course, had been funded by three separate Welfare brainwaves: i) The Rural Poor Self-Employment Generation Scheme, ii) The Physically Handicapped Economic Self-Sufficiency Project, and iii) The Depressed Classes Financial Independence Plan. The three loans had to be repaid over twenty years—it came to a little over four hundred rupees a month.

‘A lot, isn’t it? Handicap certainly thought so—particularly after he stopped feeling grateful. To get hold of the loans in the first place, he’d forked out nearly five thousand rupees in bribes—under The Welfare State Public Servant Economic Regeneration Grant, or so he called it. Four years ago, when a new government took over, Handicap petitioned anew the Rehabilitation Minister. Under the Minister’s Discretionary Write-Off Quota for Semi-rural Economic Incentives Programme, Honourable exempted Handicap from the loans— after accepting a contribution of five thousand rupees, of course, to his wife’s Non-Governmental Organization for the Creation of Viable Employment Alternatives for Backward Caste Semi-rural Women.

‘Within days of my joining the office, Handicap applied anew for permission to instal in the kiosk a public phone with both National and International Dialling Facilities. He’d been beseeching us for a couple of years and we’d ping-ponged his request about—call for the comments of Telecom, the No Objection of the Municipal Corporation, ascertain the views of the Parent Department, that sort of thing. I don’t think that any of the clerks was specifically angling for a bribe; it was just that nobody knew how to deal with his application because it had no precedent.

‘I did a terrible thing. I decided the case. In his favour, but that was secondary. You must know how weird, how spooky it feels to actually—to use officialese—take a decision
in any government matter. Boy. You see, I’d begun swimming by then at the Municipal pool and that very morning, I distinctly remember, I’d finally figured out the leg movement of the breast stroke. Oh what a feeling. Life therefore was a long song—a bit like Julie Andrews screaming and haring around amongst green hills in
The Sound of Music
—by the time I showed up at my desk. I took decisions in several files that day. It was horrible.

‘Handicap sub-let the kiosk for two thousand rupees a month to a guy with no legs. Legless wangled the phone through some Scheme or the other. Sometime in the middle of last month, Handicap slipped in a proposal for starting up a Cooperative Society For The Physically Handicapped beneath the stairs; the kiosk will certainly have to be enlarged.’

‘May I ask what percentage of our civil service is corrupt? I mean, I know that my ex-husband was—is. But whether
every
public official is dishonest?’ Daya spoke loudly from the kitchen. ‘Or am I being too naïve?’

Swan Lake
on the telly. The ballet frock, decided Agastya, was the kinkiest, the horniest dress that he’d ever seen.
Swan Lake
would have been even better had the chicks not worn any panties—they could’ve had their frilly frocks start at the nipples and extend fanlike till the navel; from the navel till the knees could’ve stretched a fecund expanse of pussy, fat, lush, many-coloured. However on earth could Tchaikovsky and Bhanwar Virbhim connect? Fecund pussy was much more Bhanwar’s scene, and yet there he was, furrowed head propped up on forearm, an attentive and discerning member of audience. Unless he too was seeing pussy instead of pantie. ‘I’m dishonest, but not corrupt. I use my office phone to make personal calls—that’s, strictly speaking, being dishonest, but I haven’t yet had my palm greased. I have received a box of mithai at Diwali and a bottle of Scotch at Christmas, though.

‘I did try once to milk a lakh or two of rupees out of the Welfare State:—’ Agastya here turned to an intelligently-smiling Suroor—‘it was out of that dairy farm, the Department of Culture and Heritage. It had two mindblowing Twelfth Plan Schemes of doling out lakhs of rupees to any bearded pseud documentary film-maker to shoot Our Endangered Tribal Heritage and The Jewels of the North-East. A friend of mine and I’d mapped everything out—we’d lug a Handycam down to the dhabas by the river, behind the Tibetan Monastery on Mall Road in the University area, and film ourselves smoking dope with the pushers there. But at the last minute, our middle-class pusillanimity and squeamishness spiked our plans.