The Mammaries of the Welfare State (36 page)

‘Honourable Mr Speaker, sir, with your permission . . . this truly is a season for celebration. Centenaries, anniversaries, birthdays—may I remind the chair at this juncture that mine falls on January 14? Not that far away, particularly when compared to my centenary . . . this document in my hand is an advance copy of a pamphlet that is to be circulated for publication in the major regional newspapers and journals in my dear constituency of Madna. It purports to be the Official Programme of Action for the Fourth of November, the Official Birthday—like many of us in this House, she too has two, one official and another, usually preceding the official by a few years, actual, birthday—of the Mother Goddess of the Future. I skip over the other hysterical appellations bestowed on Madam Aflatoon—particularly since my colleagues in the Treasury benches would’ve coined some of them and do certainly use all of them in their daily morning prayers—and come to what precisely is going to happen on that glorious day.

‘One: The Regional Forest and Transport Minister has announced that the Forest Department will dig fifty J-shaped tanks in various forest lands for wild animals to quench their thirst at. If the tanks by any chance prove to be death traps for some of the larger animals—elephants, for example, his Department, the Minister elaborated, will request the Department of Environment to arrange for fifty mobile veterinary units to visit the tank sites every day.

‘Two: The Minister for Urban Transport has proclaimed that fifty women—presumably J-shaped—will be licensed to operate motorcycles as taxis in the regional capital. Men can ride pillion, he stated, on payment of a fixed fare. Any eveteasing will be most severely frowned upon . . . Three:
The high-yielding tamarind trees that the Sapling Research Institute has developed and that produce over two thousand kilogrammes of tamarind per acre, the Agriculture Minister declared, will be rechristened Jayatirind and planted in fifty acres of land in different districts in the region.

‘Honourable Mr Speaker, sir, Four: Each of seven unnamed Ministers has promised to publicly eat fifty clay pots filled with mud. One of them, incidentally—the Ministers, that is—has been found to be HIV positive. It is not yet known whether their act of penance on a day of universal festivity will please Madam Aflatoon—or indeed whether it is a true expression of contrition and not simply an irresistible addiction to mud. The official version states that they are sorry—and want to show it—for having earlier celebrated the
actual
birthday of the Protective Angel by rolling down all the six kilometres of Cathedral Road, right up to the Gokul Nath Temple, where they’d had their ears pierced and had prayed for the speedy entry into active politics of the Birthday Girl.

‘Five: Ms Kathipalari, a chairperson of a Regional State Corporation, has promised that she will lead a—and I quote—“bevy of naked virgins decently covered with neem leaves”—to the Har Har Mahadeo Temple at the crack of dawn of the fourth of November to invoke the heavens into—and I quote again—”making Madam the permanent Prime Minister of the Welfare State” . . . May we take the last to mean that the palace intrigue amongst the Aflatoons is at last official? . . . Six:—aaaargh!’ He had stopped then, using as a pretext the second paperweight that’d struck his shoulder. Clutching it, groaning softly, he had collapsed onto a bench, happy with his performance, quite certain that it would have equally pleased the lobbyists behind it.

Agastya of course wanted coffee and Dr Kapila nothing; while they waited for it, he asked Agastya whether he and
Sunita had met recently. Just checking out the police report.

‘No, I don’t travel that often. Besides, the Gujarati venture capitalist and all that. I’m of course flattered that Sunita remembers me and has told you that she wouldn’t mind meeting me again, but I wouldn’t raise my hopes, sir, if I were you. She probably means that it’d be nice to chat over a drink.’

‘You drink far too much, if I may say so.’

‘Yes, sir. D’you think that it—the booze, I mean—reflects the quality of my life, its quiet desperation, so to speak?’

He hadn’t ever regularly drunk in office hours before. He had picked up the habit from Kalra and Footstench who boozed in their office rooms because otherwise dealing with Dr Bhatnagar would have cracked them up. Agastya discovered that they were right; when drunk or stoned, looking and listening to Doctor Saab and his family actually became quite fun. When sober, however, he’d feel depressed at the thought that Dr Bhatnagar, simply by
being
who he was,
qua
Dr Bhatnagar, had ruined and continued to ruin the health of all his office staff. Agastya had even wanted at times to write anonymously to the National Human Rights Commission.

Kalra kept the best booze behind his chair, locked in the official Godrej steel almirah along with the fancy photocopier paper, the extra packets of felt pens, tiny emergency polythene bags of breath-freshening cardamoms and cloves, and spare copies of Dr Bhatnagar’s electronically-typed curriculum vitae. Agastya had christened the Godrej almirah the office Efficiency Bar. He had also helped Dr Bhatnagar’s cv reach its present form.

‘Agastya, in the past few months, you’ve begun to know me as a man of many interests, not the typical stuffy bureaucrat at all. Tell me, for my bio, under
Hobbies/Recreation/Interests,
how would
you
do justice to my—I’ll be frank—myriad-faceted mind? . . . no, no, not immediately . . . here, take a copy of the bio away, reflect on it at home and give me a feedback by Thursday afternoon. Can’t be rushed, you know.’

Agastya’d finally come up with:
Reading, Writing, Golf, Walking, intelligent, stimulating Conversation, followed by long periods of reflective Silence.
After
Reading, Writing,
he’d had an urge to add
Arithmetic,
but had sternly controlled himself. Impressed but reluctant to show it, Sherni Auntie had okayed it the same evening.

In the career of the mandarin of the Welfare State, the Efficiency Bar bobbed up at some stage or the other. It had to be negotiated if he wanted an increment in his salary, a promotion—to get on, in short, To decide the matter, Administration usually checked, among other things, his annual confidential reports of the last five years. If the verdict’d been
Good
or above in all five, the mandarin’d cross the bar.

So far so good, except that in the language of confidential reports,
Good
meant
Ordinary/Average/No Great Shakes/Nothing to Write Home About/Hardly Efficient/Barely Passable.
There were usually five categories in which bureaucrats could place their subordinates, namely, in ascending order:
Bad, Average, Good, Very Good
and
Outstanding.
After fifteen years of written debate and counter-comment, Personnel, wishing to be positive, had changed
Bad
to
Poor
and
Very Good
to
Excellent.
Only the brave and demoniacally industrious civil servant, the sort who waded through files even on Sunday afternoons and didn’t notice that his children snapped at him—only he ever used the categories
Poor
and
Average
to rate a subordinate, because when he did, Personnel freaked out and, having at last some work in hand, increased fourfold the sod’s paperwork. It deluged him with demi-official letters and printed annexures labelled
Secret.
Had he intended his grading to be retributive or corrective? Did he have any objection to the assessee being informed of his superior’s estimate of him? Could it be presumed that for the assessee to be rated so, there must have been, in the course of the year, many occasions when he must have failed to deliver? On those
occasions, had the demoniacally industrious superior officially informed his subordinate of his disappointment with him? Had the superior kept an official record, minutes of some kind, of all these occasions? If not, had he, the superior, any document or written proof of the year that his assessment was neither caprice nor malice? Personnel had to keep the welfare of its assessed personnel in mind, hadn’t it?

To avoid being trapped into an eternal correspondence with Personnel, most civil servants therefore used the standard, unwritten, euphemistic code in writing the confidential reports of their subordinates, by which the slippery performer was judged to be
Good
and the disastrous
Average.
Everybody who spoke the language knew the code, of course, so that when names were being circulated for certain posts, one could insist on—if one wanted to, that is to say, depending on whom one wanted to pick—candidates with five
Outstandings
or above in the last five years. The grade above
Outstanding
did exist to fit into the language of the code those who were, simply, outstanding but who obviously couldn’t be described so because—it may be recalled—in the language of the code,
Outstanding
simply meant
Good.
How best to describe the
truly
outstanding civil servant was left to the creative abilities of the Reporting Officer who, to make matters clear, usually began with:
The assessee is more than outstanding,
and then let himself soar,
She is as stainless as steel . . . a veritable lion of the jungle . . . Yours Truly found her more utterly reliable than the Undersigned . . .

The code also operated to sniff out the odours of corruption. In the confidential report, one couldn’t of course record:
The assessee-bugger’s been raking it in for years, so what’s new?
because then Personnel would make one regret it—at least till one’s first crippling heart attack; instead, for the madly venal, like Chanakya Lala for example, those whose improbity had achieved the status of myth, so that one could construct proverbs and maxims around them—in the reports of civil servants like those, in the column marked
Integrity
(Use a Separate Sheet if Necessary),
one was advised to write:
Nothing Adverse on Record,
which, for those who knew the language, meant,
Boy-o-Boy!
For all those bureaucrats about whose honesty one just wasn’t sure, one wrote:
Above Reproach as per all reports.
Tradition hadn’t bothered to dream up phrases for any other category.

Since the code was unwritten, it could at a pinch be ignored as though it didn’t exist, which it didn’t, officially speaking, being unwritten. Thus in the ease of Dr Bhatnagar, for example, his lobby would interpret his five
Goods
in a row to mean, clearly, that here was a candidate who was rock steady, persevering, not flashy, salt of the earth, absolutely. When valued along with his sound grasp of management techniques and his multidimensional range of Hobbies/ Recreation/Interests, his lavish dinners and his generosity with his office organization, staff and services with anyone who mattered—when thus viewed as part of a larger arsehole, his confidential reports made Dr Bhatnagar a sure winner, a pole vaulter above any efficiency bar.

Like other characters of his type, he pounced like a gecko on a moth on any office case that Madam Tina had successfully brought to a close and that was therefore ripe and ready to redound to his credit. She reported directly to him four to five times a week, alone, behind closed doors, in sessions of half an hour each. Agastya didn’t think that he pawed her. Kalra confirmed his opinion. ‘Too scared, with Sherni just a hotline call away. Can’t get it up but he leaks into his pants when he sees Tina and that’s enough excitement for the day.’

Dr Bhatnagar liked to listen to good news from Madam Tina, the success stories that could be transformed into a set of coruscating faxes. He left the crap and the bad news for Agastya, naturally, he himself being so senior and all that. Thus, to him she would report, for example, that the Regional
Industries Secretary’s Laminated Security Pass for All Central Ministries had been signed just that afternoon and had been collected by her within minutes of its being issued, and that the Foreign Exchange Clearance for the Regional Tourism Minister’s trip to the Reunion Islands had been sent by the Ministry of Finance to External Affairs that very morning and that yes, she had procured a photocopy of that confidential letter. For Dr Bhatnagar’s office, the most valuable news, naturally, concerned not the doings of the regional government in general but the personal fortunes of its more important individuals.

From the very first day, the office had made it clear to Agastya that Madam Tina was a whore. ‘You should be informed, sir,’ Kalra had firmly announced the moment the door had shut behind her, ‘that she’s a P-R-O.’

‘Ah, I see, like our colleague with the foot stench, the same Department—though his toejam, I imagine, couldn’t be doing very much for our image.’

‘No sir, he’s our PRO, our Public Relations Officer, but Madam Tina is our prostitute. We have only one. It’s a small office.’

‘What’s her payscale?’

‘That of a Senior Office Superintendent. She’s received two out-of-turn promotions in the last three years. The rest of the office hates her. You’ll receive many phone calls for her at your number. As Deputy, you should put a stop to it. A question of the dignity of office.’

Sure enough, that first afternoon, Agastya had received a phone call for Tina, except that the caller had called her Mona. A harsh and very horny male voice, as though he had his erect cock in his other hand.

‘I’m deeply sorry to have to tell you,’ Agastya, welcoming a familiar feeling, had intoned, ‘that Madam Mona left us this morning . . . no no, for her heavenly abode . . . a sudden heart attack in the room of a Member of the Regional Assembly. She’d gone there for some urgent dictation . . . I’m her ex-
boss speaking. We’ve just returned from the cremation . . . the office is closed for the rest of the day as a mark of respect . . . yes, so sorry . . . as a keepsake, would you like a speck or two of her ashes? . . .’

Innocent that he was, he’d never actually met a prostitute in flesh and blood before. Of course, he wasn’t quite sure about Madam Tina, and the two or three times that they met per week, he certainly didn’t expect her to show him some cleavage or let her hair down with a sigh or rub her bum against him or something; in fact, he didn’t much mind when she cancelled their meetings because of ‘urgent work that she had to chase up’. For one, the files that she brought to discuss with him concerned the headaches stuck in Defence or Industries or the Cabinet Secretariat, certainly not the problems towards solving which he could contribute anything significant. For another, she was cute, well-mannered—she never failed to call him ‘sir’ with every sentence—she smiled easily, making one want to say stupid things all the time just to see her teeth, she was anything but dumb—in fact, twelve times more efficient than everybody else in the office barring Kalra, and one afternoon, daydreaming behind his desk, Agastya had suddenly realized, while imagining Madam Tina in the nude, astride him, smiling above her shaved pussy and her small brown breasts and still calling him ‘sir’, that he was getting older and lonelier by the minute, and that maybe he should follow his father’s advice and marry before it was too late, because now he knew what too late could mean—a pass at a possible prostitute, for example, made in the heat of the moment and the privacy of his room, would make things too late, wouldn’t it, because slipping was so easy and welcoming, and once one had slid, it was too late to retrieve one’s place—not because one couldn’t but more because one simply wouldn’t want to.