The Mammaries of the Welfare State (46 page)

The rhetorical questions continued for the rest of the paragraph. Dr Chakki’s scripts were best read out by Dr Chakki himself. He thought so too but since Suroor hadn’t responded to them with the alacrity that was their due, he had concluded that perhaps they needed to be delivered in a voice more melodious. Miss Lina Natesan’s had suggested itself when she had phoned him at the hotel the previous week.

‘Can you, Dr Chakki, arrange for someone to receive me at Madna station when I arrive there next Tuesday? My trip is official, so I deem myself entitled to a reception committee. I have repeatedly faxed, telegrammed and phoned the Municipality but have received no firm reply.’

‘It will be a pleasure, Miss Natesan. We will recreate in Madna a little of the good times that we enjoyed inside Aflatoon Bhavan and outside the milk booth of the transit hostel. Particularly since Mr Agastya Sen will be here too, fresh from Europe and en route to Jompanna to take up his post as Officer on Special Duty for the negotiations with NeSLaY. May I ask what brings you down here?’

The plague, was her answer. She reminded Dr Chakki that it had always been with them. It had broken out in the national newspapers more than a year ago only because none of them, in the silly season, had been able to bear the agony of waiting for Jayati Aflatoon to grant audience to Bhanwar Virbhim. It had now receded in the main to where it had always thrived, the alleys and drains of places like Madna. It also survived, for a season and gathering dust, in Miss Natesan’s thirty-page memorandum on the table of the-then HUBRIS Secretary, Dr Harihara Kapila. He had skimmed through it till
Housing Problem
and then given up. However, before he quit his post to climb the ladder, he marked her complaint down to a subordinate with the remark:

May please forward to the Disaster Management Cell in Home Affairs for advice on her and her colleagues. Meanwhile, if she can’t be accommodated in one of our training courses abroad, pack her off to Madna.

A.C. Raichur was well enough by Tuesday morning to be ferried off to the railway station with a description of Lina Natesan and a board with her name on it. Just as well, for
even those who knew her well would have failed to recognise her when she stepped off the train. In her externals, she had changed but marginally. It is true that her spectacles had been replaced by soft contact lenses that lent a sparkle to her eyes, and her hip-length hair had been pruned to a mannish helmet, but the georgette saris remained the same. It was her demeanour, her deportment, that had been utterly transformed. Inner fire on a war footing, no doubt. Her victory in the court case, her success in Paris, and her recent appointment as General secretary of Tetra Pack had all contributed to give her a sense of purpose and a springy step.

After a few hours of dialogue on the phone, Tetra Pack was the name for their new party that Dhrubo and Agastya had finally come up with. Tetra of course for tetracycline, for the party that would rid the country of the plague.

In the auto rickshaw, the new Miss Natesan’s preferred mode of transport, en route to the hospital, she recruited, in her unique mellifluous Hinglish, an awed A.C. Raichur.

‘We have to think small. Big is clumsy and slow to move. Once it moves, Big is uncontrollable because of its size. Look at our policemen in a riot, for example, monsters gone berserk. Big is filthy, inefficient, wasteful and
causes
calamities. The hills of garbage in this town that the Municipality leaves unattended is one contributing factor of the plague, isn’t it? Remember that over the decades, every single institution, organization, building, agency and establishment that has been taken over by the government has been unsystematically ruined. The State needs immediately to shed weight, you know. It can retain defence, foreign policy, finance, justice and a couple of others but no more, I say.’

She spoke non-stop. The auto-rickshaw reached the hospital, they alit, walked through the corridors, entered Ward Two, greeted Dr Chakki and the simpering Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha, did a round of the beds and she was still speaking. She had a hand on the door knob of Rajani Suroor’s
room when all of a sudden, her voice began to boom.

It took Dr Chakki a second to realize that inexplicably, the lone air-conditioner in the cubicle had gone off. He was vexed. It’d never happened before, at least not officially.

Agastya, who was at that time inside the cabin, was not however at fault. He had just that moment managed to prise open the stiff fingers of Suroor’s left hand and place in his swollen, livid palm a Yin Yang box full of dope. He then remoulded the fingers tight over the box. ‘You look as though you need it, friend.’

Miss Natesan turned the knob and opened the door a fraction when they all distinctly heard from somewhere inside Rajani Suroor a groan. It was a slow, loud and deep rumble of disgust, exactly the sound that one hears from someone who is wrenched out of sleep by the heat. To Agastya, it sounded dreadfully like a long-drawn-out
Pa-yn-cho-om.
They were a set of syllables appropriate for the occasion, he felt, a couple to bid adieu to the dead and with the balance, to greet the world of the living.

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First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 2000
Published in Penguin Books 2001

Copyright © Upamanyu Chatterjee 2000

The quotation from Kautilya’s
Arthashastra
on Housing Problem is from the Penguin translation by L.N. Rangarajan.

The extracts on Hubris Ascending from the essay ‘The Magic of the Aflatoons’ are in part inspired by an editorial in the
Sunday Statesman
of 8 March 1992 entitled ‘The New Class’.

The quotations from Plato’s
The Republic
on Wake-Up Call are from the Penguin translation by Desmond Lee.

Cover photograph by Ashish Chawla

Cover designed by Bena Sareen

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