The Mammaries of the Welfare State (38 page)

Apart from Mrs Minu Tutreja of C-308, Dr Chakki also presented with his compliments four copies of his letter to Sukumaran Govardhan. That is to say, he pushed them into the letter-box of the guest house of the Regional Potato Research Organization that occupied all the four flats of the top floor of the east wing of the second apartment block. Its letter-box was affixed to the wall beside the stairs on the ground floor. The guesthouse itself was cut off from the rest of the building by an iron gate at the mouth of the corridor that led to its constituent flats.

Contemporary legend had it that Govardhan had a hundred and eight residences dispersed all over the country, that number being auspicious, and that he spent an average of three and a half days in each. No one—naturally—had actually seen him on the top storey of the Aflatoon Transit Hostel but then nobody had spotted him anywhere else in the country
either. If anyone had, he, after a few months, had changed his mind. However, the prostitutes who operated out of the guesthouse did confirm that once or twice a year, those of them on duty were asked to pack up and disappear and invariably, for those few days, a handful of new, very young girls were ferried in from some dot on the map.

Govardhan moved about and in and out of the Transit Hostel—claimed the buzz—generally at dusk, when the traffic chaos was maximum. To ease his passage, that he arranged for general power failures in the area was, as was noised about, perfectly possible.

He’d be rather disturbed, wouldn’t he, debated the residents of Prajapati Aflatoon amongst themselves, by these firefighting measures, these walls and pipes three feet from his bedroom window? By all reports, the flats of his guesthouse from within were quite posh and tastefully, intelligently and completely illegally inter-connected. After those decades of dealing in sandalwood and ivory, his developed aesthetic sense would surely revolt against government-inspired renovations to any building. Apart from the enhanced security threat, of course.

In the twenty-one months that the TFIN Complex took to recover from the father of all fires and the firefighting measures of the Public Works Department, the happenings of the Welfare State occurred elsewhere, in the sports stadiums, auditoriums and multi-media centres of the city, but not with the old zip and vigour. In that time, Bhuvan Aflatoon successfully fought off a threat to his Prime Ministership from an obscure ghost of the extended family, a virtually-illegitimate pretender of a third cousin who headed a splinter in the party, was a thorn in its flesh (and a bloody prick to boot) and whom Bhuvan Bhai packed off to the North-East Council as its Executive Governor. He wasn’t as
pleased, however, with the astonishing failure of his think tank, in that year and three-quarters, to come up with a suitable, melodious, pronounceable, Sanskrit name for TFIN Complex. He had received suggestions, certainly—
Srishti, SamvadBhavan, Varta, Sanchar
—but they’d all sounded unreal and alien, partly because he could barely understand Hindi, leave alone Sanskrit—though doubtless he could hardly have his ignorance of both the official language and its mother bruited about. Till the time that one of the light bulbs clicked on an acceptable name, proposed Rajani Suroor to Bhuvan Bhai, would the PM like to refer to TFIN Complex as P-C-Om? Privately, of course.

In those twenty-one months, one Aflatoon Centenary, a quiet affair in memory of Trimurti, blended into another, altogether more glorious and politically more explosive, that of Gajapati, statesman extraordinaire (to quote the blurb, crafted by him and attributed to his amanuensis, on each of the back covers of his six-volume memoirs), thinker, writer, sage, savant, philanthrope, cricket enthusiast and founding father of the Welfare State—and unfortunately for Bhuvan Aflatoon, only a distant grand-uncle of his. Try as he might, because of a handful of Aflatoons in between, Bhuvan Bhai couldn’t quite get the effulgence that the centenary celebrations reflected off the immense bald dome of Gajapati to shine on him. Jayati of course hadn’t been born an Aflatoon but she’d become one when she’d married Gajapati’s younger grandson, one of the continent’s great jerks, a polo player and a lover of horses with the mind of a thoroughbred, haughty, pure and simple. But she herself was Raw Sex Incarnate and Bhuvan felt warm and laughed a lot whenever he was with her. When she’d suggested, smiling into his eyes, that she slip into the saddle at the Centenary, he’d welcomed her with open arms, silently pointing out to himself that he’d credited her with more intelligence. As a strategy for an entry into politics, Culture sucked, and while sucking, emitted
wrong signals, because only the closet bisexuals dipped into Culture, didn’t they, because Home Affairs was far too sweaty and macho, and all the rest of the junk—Rural Development, Energy, Planning, Industry, Water Resources—simply too dry and unsexy. Well, Jayati’d fit in because the inner circle’d whispered a couple of times that she, to use the phrase that they used to giggle over in school, swung both ways and that moreover, her appetite was that of a corrupt civil servant of the Welfare State, quite bottomless. But man, what a bottom.

To inaugurate the renovated TFIN Complex, a befitting event, it was felt, would be the first full-blown meeting of the Gajapati Aflatoon Centenary Celebrations Committee. To fix a date, the Secretariat of the Committee put up a file through the proper channels—to the HUBRIS Minister, Bhanwar Virbhim, who consulted his astrologer. The eighteenth of November, decreed Baba Mastram.
May kindly see and approve,
pleaded the Minister in a note to Madam Jayati, who did but added,
May we discuss the agenda? I wanted to do something special for poor Rajani Suroor.

With reason. Much had happened to him—apart from the slide into coma—in the months between the two centenaries. He’d grown in official size, as had his orbit of influence, in keeping, as it were, with the comparative stature of the two Aflatoons in question. He’d also moved laterally from Bhuvan’s court to Jayati’s, displeasing Bhuvan not just a bit. Old bedfellows and dormitory-mates that they were, he of course didn’t stop frequenting the PM’s office; he simply began showing up just as often at the headquarters of the Gajapati Aflatoon Centenary Committee, exploiting to the hilt his official post of Advisor there. A busy man, using, with the industriousness of a bee, his clout to push his own theatre group into every nook, and cranny of government. His street
plays were thus used by Welfare to propagate its new Integrated Female Child Nourishment Project, by Public Health for its Early Plague Detection Strategy, and by Rural Development for its revolutionary Revised Bank Soft Loan Programme. Vyatha, needless to say, performed for a pittance—and rather well. In return for board, lodging, transport and a handful of rupees, its enthusiastic amateur actors successfully concentrated their energies on spreading the messages of the Welfare State. Everyone was surprisingly happy with the arrangement—the Ministries because Vyatha, when compared to radio and TV, to which it was an inconspicuous adjunct, was a damn sight cheaper and far more effective, Suroor because his group gained some terrific goodwill and publicity, and the actors because they travelled to, and performed in, outlandish places.

Like Madna, for example. Being quite a performer himself, Suroor journeyed with Vyatha as often as he could. Street plays helped him to unwind and rejuvenate himself. Of course, after he was knocked about on the head by Makhmal Bagai’s hoodlums some eleven months ago, the pace of his life had really slowed down—in fact, virtually stopped. Only his heartbeat and a couple of electronic graphs on spasmodically-functional video screens kept him away from absolute zero. For the entire period, he’d been comatose in Madna and not because of the town. His body had been politicized, for Bhanwar Virbhim, on Baba Mastram and Bhupen Raghupati’s counsel, refused to have him shifted out. It was Madna that’d crushed the skull of the esteemed Advisor, declaimed Bhanwar Saab at public forums and whined he before Jayati and the PM, and it should be Madna where he—the esteemed but comatose one—must recover (or rot). For political and personal reasons, Bhuvan Aflatoon agreed to let the brightest of his light bulbs rest in peace in that town. Serve the quisling right, thought he in his black moments, but whenever his heart melted and he missed his groovy,
long-haired dorm-mate, he’d helicopter the best specialists out to the middle of nowhere to check on the goodly frame of Rajani Suroor.

After each visit, the specialists submitted to the PM’s office an impressive series of documents, reports, assessments, charts, prescriptions and diagnoses and to their own-organizations their more modest hotel bills of the Madna International. He’s steadily improving, sir, they concluded, jargon edited to suit addressee, the bumps on his head’ve healed completely, the spinal column now looks terrific, the collar bone, ribs and shoulder are almost as good as new, the last cat scan and cerebral angiography show nothing abnormal, his hypostatic pneumonia’s responded very well to our antibiotics and is now a thing of the past, he has the heart and blood pressure—if you permit—of a healthy, happy fifteen-year-old dreaming of a good game of football. All he now needs to do is to wake up. A mystery of science, really, why he doesn’t.

‘Perhaps he’s fed up,’ mused Bhuvan Aflatoon, ‘and needs the rest.’

Along with Rajani Suroor, the portion of the Madna Civil Hospital that he inhabited, and certain parts of the town, improved too—marginally, fitfully, it is true, but improved, nevertheless. A special cubicle, for one thing, was erected for him in the corner of General Ward Two that stood furthest from the loo. Off-white distemper on its walls, disinfectant, white tiles, new wiring, tubelights that worked, scrubbed floors that’d changed colour like the sun breaking through, electricity available almost—certainly, officially—round the clock, not that he was ever dragged out of his coma by a fan that stopped whirring. Someone declogged the drains, the rat population diminished, the stink lessened. The monstrous garbage dump at the hospital gates was shifted to the lane behind the municipal school, thus, within a week, since old habits die hard, creating two dumps in place of one. Naturally,
because of the number of V
^∞
IPs who streamed in and out of Madna to look in on Rajani, the two routes from the helipad and the railway station to his bed were mapped out and cleaned up, up to a point. The bedpans were removed from the corridor, but the authorities could do nothing permanent about the paan-spittle stains on the walls or the hawkers and the cattle in the lanes. Life must go on, they would have argued, no matter who slips into coma.

He was sorely missed, initially. With time, however, because he neither died nor awoke, he became just a bit boring, a fixture of the town, like the new, unfinished boundary wall of the Collectorate. At the same time, the months in a sense augmented his stature—mainly, no doubt, because of the number of his visitors, V∞IP pilgrims at a shrine, and made him, by a mythopoeic process, almost a figure in some hoary tale, dormant till the magic moment broke, perhaps with a kiss or—mindful of the sexual traditions of the country—even a touch, the spell that bound him.

No one, it should be clarified, kissed any part of his body even once in those eleven months. For one, he looked too grey. Besides, he had all those tubes, wires, pipes and bottles attached to him. Jayati and Daya might have, had they visited him inconspicuously, without a cortege. Jayati missed him even professionally. He’d been full of ideas. He’d known the system, where the money was, how to steal—clearly a personality who was going places even after he’d arrived.

‘Tell me, Jayati—’ to him, she was Madam only in public—‘Gajapati Aflatoon officially was a great lover of Hindi, wasn’t he? A motive force behind the Our-Own- Official-Language Policy, etc? It’s a facet of the Great Man that the Centenary Committee could underline, highlight, whatever, because you could then lay your hands on some of the budget of the Official Language Caucus. Even five per cent would fetch you some crores . . . yes, thanks, it
is
quite a brainwave, isn’t it? . . . we wouldn’t have to do very much,
I imagine, just copy what each Department does for Hindi every year. Organize a Hindi Week, in fact . . . usually in winter, out in the sun, with a public address system, really quite festive, with vendors of oranges, peanuts and aphrodisiacs mingling with the Section Officers and Senior Assistants . . . all non-Hindi-walas in the central Ministries are invited-coerced to participate in a Hindi essay competition and the winner reads out his entry before his colleagues. Terrific entertainment . . . Under Secretaries rolling in the aisles, clutching their stomachs . . .

The germ of the idea of exploiting the funds of the Official Languages Wing of the parent Department of the Committee for other, officially-acceptable purposes had infiltrated Suroor rather early in his tenure as Advisor to the Committee. In his third week in his office, he’d been trying to figure out anew the monstrous organizational chart under the glass top of his desk and’d stopped once again at the smiling face of the Director (Official Languages), a pleasant, slippery man who, Suroor knew, reported to him but whose precise day-to-day tasks and responsibilities remained enveloped in a cloud of unknowing. The chart stated that the Director was being paid to implement in the Committee the official language policy of the Welfare State.

‘Yes, but what does that mean, exactly?’ asked Suroor of his favourite Under Secretary, Shri Dhrubo Jyoti Ghosh Dastidar, who had nothing to do with the subject. ‘This Director guy gets up in the morning, drinks two cups of tea, reads the newspapers, maybe uses the office car to slip off to the local temple to pray for his daughter’s success in her school exams, returns for breakfast, gobbles up his alu parathas, mango pickle and dahi, and with a mind as clean and quiet as a blackboard on the first morning of the new school term, turns up at nine forty-five at Aflatoon Bhavan to start his day—and then what? He sits at his desk, puts his lunch box on the side shelf, summons his PA to prioritize his personal
work—and then? What does he do?’