The Mammaries of the Welfare State (7 page)

Not everyone from the capital who happened to be in Madna that week had been brought there by the plague. Naturally not, the officially-unconfirmed outbreak of the epidemic being neither new nor anything more than a sideshow in the complex life of the nation. Rajani Suroor, for instance, last seen seated and smirking before a balefully-aroused Chief Revenue Divisional Commissioner, was visiting for purely cultural reasons (almost-purely; since everything is partly politics).

He, to quote part of his visiting card, is a theatre activist. He discloses easily in conversation that he is wholly committed to Total-, New Broom-, Intimate-, Alternative-, Street-,
Militant-, Contramural-and Inadmissible Theatre. His troupe is called
Vyatha,
or Pain. His detractors call it
Gand Mein,
or In the Arse.
Vyatha
procures, under the programme ‘
6493: Promotion and Diffusion of Demotic and Indigenous Drama and Other Such Forms of Self-Expression’,
handsome quarterly grants from the Ministry of Culture, Heritage, Education and Welfare. When Bhuvan, the nth prominent Aflatoon, became Prime Minister, he changed its name to the Ministry for Heritage, Upbringing and Resource Investment—HUBRIS, in brief. At a subsequent Press conference, he asserted that the new name was more affirmative, focussed, thrustful and forward-looking. These adjectives were chosen for him by his Information Advisor, one of his New Men, who were mostly youngish and greedy, mostly from his old school (where, they recalled fondly, he’d been a complete duh), mostly Oxbridge, mostly homosexual. They mostly wore white or off-white Indian clothes. In a sparkling response to a vapid question from
The State Today,
the PM had added that further, translating the new name of the Ministry would at last give the Department of Constitutional Languages some work. He—God bless him—was generally devilishly witty at inopportune moments. The ministerial change of name cost the taxpayers of the Welfare State twenty-one lakh rupees in stationery and nameplates alone. The Press conference cost just four lakhs.

Rajani Suroor had been seven years junior to Bhuvan Aflatoon at school. Traffic-paralysing street theatre has brought him and
Vyatha
to Madna. They intend to perform, outside the Mall Road Gate of Aflatoon Maidan, on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, roughly between 12.30 and 2.30 p.m.— when several schools release their charges, the shops haven’t yet shut, the drones outside the cinema theatres and the hawkers haven’t yet dissolved into the afternoon—a play, a skit scripted by Suroor, the first of a venturesome quintet on a rather grand theme. He has titled the skit
Baahar Nikal,
Ashleel Jaylee;
that is his translation of Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘Out, Vile Jelly.’

The play depicts an event that occurred in the town some eight years ago, at the Hemvati Aflatoon Welfare State Home for the Visually Disadvantaged. With a hot ladle, an infuriated attendant had gouged out the right eye of a blind girl just because at breakfast, she, like Dickens’s Oliver Twist, had asked for a second helping of gruel. The gruel had been, as always, an uneven mixture of hot water, a trace of sugar dust, wheat dust, much true grit, some cockroach shit. An appalled Directorate of Welfare Homes had forthwith suspended the guilty attendant and initiated against him both criminal proceedings and an Official Enquiry. So Karam Chand the deft ladle-wielder was ordered to skip work for months, and paid just half his salary, poor thing, for doing so. Before the Enquiry Committee, he deposed indomitably, denied the accusation, contended that he was a victim of the caste politics of the Home, and emphasized that there weren’t any credible witnesses against him, for however could the testimony of eleven blind juveniles be considered sound?— and that finally, when all was said and done, the episode wasn’t that horrifying, was it, because after all, in the first place, the girl had never had any eyesight to lose, had she? The Enquiry Officer, a spiritless Welfare official, took five weeks to conclude that since the matter was
sub-judice,
the Directorate should await the outcome of the criminal case before awarding a final penalty, and that of course till then, the punishment of suspension should continue.

For the seventeen months that Karam Chand stayed away from work, he stitched undies for men and women and hawked them on the footpath of Junction Road, a.k.a Prajapati Aflatoon Marg. He and his tailor colleagues called them wearunders. He made about sixty rupees a day—not bad, considering that it exceeded his take-home pay—namely, his
salary plus his Dearness Allowance plus an Additional Dearness Allowance plus his Regularization of Pre-Revised Pay Scales Emolument plus an Advance Increment plus his House Rent Allowance plus his Uniform Allowance plus a Festival Advance minus his Standard Provident Fund Subscription minus his Group Insurance Programme Contribution minus a Compulsory Security Plan Payment minus a House Construction Loan Instalment minus a Bicycle Purchase Advance Part-Settlement minus his Standard Provident Fund Loan Repayment minus no taxes. Karam Chand’s income was beneath being taxed by the Welfare State. A standard welfare measure, no doubt—one doesn’t snatch at the earnings of the almost-submerged four-fifths, particularly when one pays them chickenfeed in the first place. But Karam Chand— and most of the rest of the hundreds of thousands that compose that only-just-floating four-fifths—aren’t overwhelmed by the bounty of the Welfare State. We earn chickenfeed, they grumble—with misgivings for the Zeitgeist darkening their brows—hence we aren’t obliged to work hard.

Not at our jobs, anyway. In Suroor’s skit, the Karam Chand character whoops out a rather peppy song while sending up A Routine Working Day in the Life of an Attendant. Whose shift officially starts at eight every morning, but who never shows up at the Home before nine—which is when he shakes hands with the other Karam Chands, drinks with them several cups of tea, signs the Attendance Register, ungrudgingly tastes the breakfast of the day, dispenses it to the inmates, shakes hands once more with the other Karam Chands, lopes off to Junction Road to hawk his wearunders, returns to the Home for lunch at twelve, and then at two, slips back to the footpath for the rest of the day. The other duties of his post he’s disregarded for years, indeed, has all but forgotten—and like his colleagues, he steals for himself and his household whatever he can from the stores of the Home.

Whenever his Superintendent’d remind him of one of his effaced chores—‘Can you please fill up the water cooler in my room, yaar?’—Karam Chand would snappily point out, ‘Room coolers are not on my list of duties, saab . . . I don’t know, saab. I do my own work to the best of my ability, and I don’t poke my nose in other . . . I don’t know, saab. It is not my duty to know by heart the lists of everybody’s duties . . . I don’t know, saab. It could be the duty of the peons or the junior orderlies, the dafadars, senior bearers, jamadars, sweepers, the night watchmen, chowkidaars, assistants Grade IV, malis, or daily wagers . . . No, saab, why should I have a copy of my list of duties? It was never given to me . . . I don’t know, saab. You should make a reference to the Directorate . . . Arrey, suspend me, saab! But for what, for not doing someone else’s duty! . . . Control your tongue, saab! We’ve suffered a good many Superintendents like you, okay! . . . Ohhhh! You’re doing politics! You’re insulting my caste . . . I’ll make a complaint to the higher authorities! . . . I’ll make a representation to the Kansal Commission! . . .’

Tackling Karam Chand requires tenacity and cunning, the doggedness to prod the Welfare State to move its mammoth, immensely sluggish arse. One maddened Superintendent, as a first step towards fixing the attendant, did in fact make a reference to the Directorate of Welfare Homes.

The Hemvati Aflatoon Welfare

State Home for the Visually

Disadvantaged

Date, etc.

Subject: Official List of Duties of Post of Attendant
Type II in the Above Organization

Sir,

With reference to your letter No. Nil dated Nil, it is requested that the above subject is not readily available
in this office. May kindly send two copies post-haste and oblige.

Yours sincerely,

Etc.

No reply, of course. A reminder after five weeks. After a further six weeks, a second reminder, this time on flesh-pink paper, to underline the fact that it was a second reminder. Then the Directorate replied that with reference to your letter No. DTY 1093/LST 163/89/A dated etc., a reference had been made (copy enclosed) to the Ministry Of Heritage, Upbringing and Resource Investment and that their reply was awaited. May kindly see please.

In his skit, Rajani Suroor does not present Karam Chand entirely as some unmanageable monster. On the contrary, he is also portrayed as a duteous family man—for whom not even the most openhanded pilfering from the stores of the blind will suffice to sate the underfed mouths at home; a concerned father of four nubile daughters, a survivor of abysmally cynical inertness whose refrain is: Not even the Almighty can divine how I plod on. His obviously symbolic significance is further emphasized by the umpteen references of the narrator-persona of the skit to Karam Chand’s strategic drifting in and out of the other plays of the quintet. This persona—stout, jovial, tumid-eyed—like those raconteurs who doubt that their audience has grasped the point—also, every now and then, pounces on his spectators with posers like:

How much did it cost you taxpayers to have the eye of a blind girl gouged out by an employee of the Welfare State in the course of his official duties?

After much farcical calculation, he himself estimates, ‘Rs 17.45 per second, and a grand total of Rs 469318.35.’

All the five skits comprise knockabout money-talk of this kind. Karam Chand’s salary, for instance, is debated by a
bunch of boisterous characters; each Allowance, Emolument, Increment, Advance, Subscription, Contribution, Payment, Instalment, Settlement and Repayment is a persona clothed in greyish-muddy kurta-pyjama; the dismal hue is meant to convey the colour of the Welfare State file covers. These players clamber onto one another’s shoulders to suggest ceiling-high stacks of files in a typical office cubicle; they hide behind one another to mimic files getting lost, they slink out when the narrator-persona pockets a bribe; one stoops and bears another spider-like on his back to convey both the oppressive load of the work and the inconsequence of the subject matter; they move—skip, hop, leapfrog, bob, buck, prance, shuffle, glide—all the while to the catchy, rap-like Hinglish chatter of the narrator-persona and the Karam Chand player:

O kinsmen of the ‘Welfare State
—
behold your clerk!

Earns sixteen hundred a month of
your
cash! A lark!

His work? The Cycle Purchase Advance Part Settlements

Of nineteen point five rupees per month of other gents

Like him! Does the welfare of this
—
the cream, the fat,

Ever reach anyone other than the bureaucrat,

The Minister, the clerk, the peon? Thousands of files!

Stacks a metre higher than the clerk
—
who has piles

From roosting on some trivial matter for ages.

The more footling the subject, the many more the pages

Of comment and counter-comment
—
some clerks, of course,

Spend their office hours yelling themselves hoarse

Touting their wearunders all over the pavement

Of Junction Road. You object? Shouldn’t they be sent

Back to work? And punished?
—
You say so, no doubt,

Because you’d like another eye or two gouged out.

May we add here?
—
that blind girl, poor thing
—
some kind
   
soul

Took her to the Welfare hospital for that hole

In her face. The doctor
—
the usual Welfare quack,

Disinterested, on the bottle, with a bloody knack

For fuck-ups
—
patched her up. And then, examining

Her a week after, they saw sepsis, blossoming.

And Karam Chand?
—
Sick of his undies, he slithered

Away to buy a caste certificate from a bird

In the tehsildar’s office. And from there, with strife

In his heart, he moved on, elsewhere, to a new life.

‘Hmmm,’ observed Commissioner Raghupati. In his later years as a civil servant, he had come to prefer ‘Hmmm’ to ‘Interesting’ and ‘I see.’

Suroor leaned forward and added animatedly, ‘In our sequent skit, we compare—juxtapose—our time and the Kautilyan—which, to my mind, is the archetypal Welfare State.’

One-eleven p.m. The Commissioner needed to return home for his bracing massage and his light lunch. He smiled at Suroor, scarcely disarranging the hard fat of his face, and pushed a paan into his mouth. He was a perennially hungry, carnal man. In his unending, unscientific tussle with obesity, he’d snacked for years on paans. Stocky, the hard fat enclosing cold eyes and a gap-toothed, brutish mouth, the sort of figure that, while erect, rocks all the time on the balls of its feet. ‘The Collector told me that you and he enjoyed a long chat last evening.’ Raghupati disregarded the minutiae of his work, but was on the ball, intuitively, about the stuff that cast long shadows. So to Suroor he added in a purr, ‘I’ll be delighted to attend the performance on Friday.’

Hot outdoors. A winter afternoon in Madna was usually thirty-five degrees plus. Raghupati namasted his way through the press of petitioners waiting for justice or some crumbs of largesse. As a civil servant, for twenty-three years, he’d seen
crowds outside a good many offices of the Welfare State; the numbers had now grown, like the discontent and cynicism, and the clothes were different. Changing times, everyone looked less resigned, more sullen; in the air was less the whiff of those close to the land—who live by the patient rhythms of the earth—and more the reek of the sweat of suppliants who wait, fume and fret, and wait.