The Mammaries of the Welfare State (8 page)

Two decades ago, when he’d been Assistant Collector at Koltanga and had all but sparked off a riot because he’d buggered his bungalow peon who hadn’t liked it one bit, who’d caved in and squealed blubberingly to his parents, the crowd that had gathered around Raghupati then had, without altogether swallowing his protests, finally done nothing but complain to
his
Collector. It hadn’t quite known how to touch—leave alone manhandle—him. In that golden time, he’d been a thousand rungs above the hoi polloi and their law that he administered. But with the years, that interspace had narrowed and warped considerably, and a few of them had even begun to dress like him—in tight safari suits of elaborate stitchery—and he simply couldn’t risk buggering bungalow peons anymore, and could just about get them to massage him instead.

He rolled up his car window so that the driver could switch on the a.c. Officially, he wasn’t meant to have air-conditioning in his car, as per a routinely silly economy-measure circular of Dr Harihara Kapila, the Principal BOOBZ Secretary, which had decreed,
inter alia,
that as per Cabinet Resolution No. CR.ES/4709/F-EM/69 dated etc., only Cabinet Ministers, Vice Ministers, Deputy Ministers, Chancellors and Additional Chancellors of the Supreme Council, Chairmen, Chairmen-Designate and First Speakers of the Summit Assembly, Master Judges and Commons Judges of the Capital Court, Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the Permanent Congress—in brief, the crème de la scum—were entitled to air-conditioning in their office suites, motorcades and those
parts of their official bungalows that they used for office work. The rest of the officialdom of the Welfare State was advised to use in their office rooms water coolers, the sizes of which per area of room the circular specified. It—the circular— was silent on whether officialdom was meant to boil in its office cars and in those parts of its office flats that it at times used for office work. Four of the seventy-six registered employees’ unions had moved various courts in the matter, alleging that the circular was offensive, discriminatory, even violative (of the Fundamental Rights Enshrined in the Consti) and unrealistic (since it discounted the prodigious humidity of most regions of the country that rendered all water coolers ineffective—and in fact, intolerable). The courts were still pondering.

The circular cost the taxpayers a little over forty million. The between-the-lines instructions of economy-measure circulars do tend to trigger off a flurry of economic activity; exhortations to be thrifty are generally understood to mean that one may buy whatever one wants, as long as it’s the cheapest. Never bother about the best. It tends to be expensive and therefore brands you as wasteful and wicked. Remember that only crooks buy for more what they could’ve got for less, using the difference to accommodate their shares from each deal. Focus instead on the cheapest, the dirt-cheap, the sub-standard, and whenever possible, on secreting away for yourself a slice of that cheapest. All things must fall apart, therefore decree each office object to have a span of life, and periodically, routinely, replace whatever is not-new with the cheapest, no matter that it might not be necessary. Remember to treat the property of the Welfare State with an almost-manic brutality, much like a serial killer his victims.

Needless to add, the crème de la scum floats far above economy-measure circulars, which apply—with stolid severity—mainly to the submerged 96.4 per cent of the employees of the Welfare State—namely, the millions of
peons and Assistants Grades I, II, III and IV, dafadars, Junior Clerks, drivers, book-keepers, Deputy Clerks, attendants, auditors, Senior Clerks, stenographers, cashiers, Principal Clerks, Auxiliary Diarists, storekeepers, Chief Clerks, typists, accountants, stenotypists, Head Clerks—for none of whom are the batteries in the wall clocks of their grey, grimy crowded halls replaced even once in ten years; their perks are the intact window pane, the not-yet-fused light bulb, the water jug that doesn’t leak, the ceiling fan that rotates, the rexine of a table top that hasn’t yet been shredded by some clerk crazed by inertia. In their halls—their boxed-in verandas and caged-off corridors—nobody provides them file racks for the knolls of files that rise all anyhow up to the ceiling, the snug burrow-lairs of ants, moths, termites, worms, beetles, cockroaches, mice, rats, moles, mongooses, pigeons. Some of that rot doubtless slithers into the quality of work of the inhabitants of these office warrens.

But the expenditure of a little over forty million. Opportunely, in good time, several original, attached, dependent and subordinate offices of the four hundred and eighty-seven Ministries and Departments of both the central and twenty-seven regional governments of the Welfare State bought over a thousand air-conditioners—and a good many fridges, freezers, chillers and ice buckets—for the offices, official motorcades and residential offices of their Cabinet Ministers and First Speakers, their Chairmen-Designate and Commons Judges. To that should be added proportionate portions of the costs and overheads of all the activities of all those involved in the issuing of the economy-measure circular—that frenzied dictating, noting, placing on record and compiling, photocopying, cyclostyling, ferrying to and fro, the drafting, minuting, typing, redacting, translating, the bullshitting, the time-wasting—plus bits of the scores of salaries, allowances and emoluments, of the expenditure on upkeep, services, electricity—on the four air-conditioners, for
example, in the Treasury Minister’s chambers that have to be switched on at least an hour before he turns up in the morning for the rooms to be chill enough to facilitate his brainwork, his ponderings.

Thus it was that the replaced air-conditioners tumbled down the ladder into the offices, Ambassador cars, bedrooms and puja-rooms at the homes of Raghupati and his several hundred colleagues strategically dispersed all over the Welfare State.

On cue, Sharada Prasad the driver switched on the cassette player along with the a.c. Raghupati preferred the fifties’ and sixties’ Hindi film songs of Mutesh. When Mutesh, in his doleful, reedy, atonal voice, sang of the aches of love, the perfidiousness of friendship, the ups and downs of survival— his range, in brief—he conjured up for Raghupati the image of a male rape victim singing under duress, while being buggered, or even—with Mutesh, as with Raghupati, anything was imaginable—fucked in the gullet. He played Mutesh almost always during his massages in his puja room.

Through the black-filmed car window, he noticed the sign painters on their scaffolding, flies on the giant billboard that dwarfed the Commissionerate gates. The black film itself—and all tinted glass, et cetera—had been the subject of another, more recent, circular of the Home Secretary.
To help the State in its effort against terrorists, gunrunners, smugglers, kidnappers and other anti-social elements, the police would henceforth regulate how tinted car windows could be. Welfare State-car windows could be darker than private-car windows, but should definitely not be opaque, i.e., a policeman should be able to see inside the car, easily, from a distance of seven feet (2.07 metres).
Or so Raghupati had deciphered the circular, which had been issued only in Hindi, the official language.

On the billboard that publicized only Welfare State
schemes and projects, Small Savings was making way for Family Welfare. Small Savings had been a smiling family watering a sapling.
SUSTAIN THE TREE OF LIFE,
had urged the branches of the sapling. Family Welfare was going to be the same trio—parents and one child of debatable gender—playing ringa-ringa roses around an inverted, crimson equilateral triangle, the heart of which would blazon the slogan:
ONE OFFSPRING, ONE HEIR,
an argument for birth control the inaptness of which for his quarrelsome, litigious fellow-citizens had struck Raghupati more than once. Time and time again in his career—as District Magistrate, as Joint Director of Land Records, as Charity Commissioner— he’d observed that his fellow human beings, on the whole, preferred the quarrel to the solution; that is to say, to them, the verdict of any court signified not the resolution of a dispute, but merely a temporary blockage of it. To satisfy their craving, tier after tier of tribunal and bench, council and board, ranged away to the horizons of the Welfare State, and each seat of justice resuscitated, infused new life into, a magical diversity of squabbles:

Me-laard, my neighbour has no right to enjoy gratis the shade of the mango tree that grows in
my
garden, on
my
side of our common boundary wall.

And

Me-laard, North’s four clubs, an unethical splinter bid expressing slam interest in spades with at most one club, was a studied attempt to mislead his opponents by underhand methods.

To suggest to such litigants that they should restrict themselves to only one issue was in fact to ask them to sin
against their progeny; heaven forbid, however could one not give one’s heir someone to litigate against?

The two ad campaigns—Small Savings and Family Welfare— dated from the four months that Raghupati had been Deputy at the Directorate of Information, Public Relations and Visual Education (DIPRAVED). His boss of those days, Harihara Kapila—indefatigable, capricious, witty after a fashion—he’d thought up the acronym of the Directorate, for example— would ever so often declare, particularly in front of outsiders and women,

‘After I take up a new assignment, for the first six months I maintain that I’m learning the ropes. For the next six, I blame my predecessor. Within one year, I begin to get the hang of things, i.e., I realize that the organization should be wound up.’

Later, when he’d scrambled up the ladder—advising his juniors en route to Suck Above, Kick Below—to become Regional Finance Secretary, he was credited with having successfully transformed ZBB—the Zero-Based Budgeting programme—into BOOBZ: Budget Organization on Base Zero. In the last decade of his unastonishing career, when he had less to suck and more to kick, and when he sucked better than ever before, he’d hang, behind every cushioned swivel chair that he’d rest his piles in, his favourite poster, framed in black. It parodied an ophthalmologist’s eye chart:

I
DO
NOT
SUFFER
FROM I
DISEASE
DO YOU?

Raghupati coldly recalled that he’d all but broken his neck once, ages ago, under one such Family Welfare hoarding. Horrible, endless rain, he’d been in extremely slippery white keds (and goggles!—because of damned conjunctivitis), approaching a village in the middle of nowhere to take stock of a landslide, six dead, the ground like watery halwa, an office peon, turbaned and all, hopping and bobbing behind him with an umbrella for his head, the umbrella along with his dark glasses making him feel like an Aflatoon on a Let-me-meet-the-Great-Unwashed-for-their-votes tour, he concentrating on every step, but he must’ve been distracted by a body—a bum or torso, whether male or female he couldn’t now remember—but when he, dazed from his tumble, had looked up at the muddle above him of outstretched hands and embarrassed faces, he’d first noticed, surrounding the askew turban of the peon, the maroon triangle of Family Welfare and alongside it, its neuter child.
My God, the State is everywhere; it grapples even with the vastness of a leaden monsoon sky.
In those few breaths, moreover, its obtuseness had humbled him anew; here, with no habitation in sight, a hoarding the size of a building, on it an inapt slogan, that too in English in a region wherein seventy-five per cent of the inhabitants were unlettered in their own tongue. Upright once more, while the diffident hands had spruced him down, he’d shoved the umbrella aside to gaze again at the distant trees and the immense, unending sky, to sense afresh the gooseflesh-caress of infinity, of the heavens belittling the concerns that move the earth. Later that week, to remind everybody that the earth simply couldn’t get away with that sort of thing, he’d transferred the peon (the bobber, with turban) to an office two hundred kilometres away from his family.

To avoid the areas of Madna town that had been affected— if not by the plague itself, then certainly by the panic at the
possibility of its presence—Raghupati’s car swerved away from Junction Road to skirt the north boundary wall and railing of Aflatoon Maidan. Thousands had fled the town in the past week, claimed the more irresponsible newspapers. Certainly, the streets looked marginally emptier and there did seem to be less of a throng of pedestrians and hawkers on the pavements of the Maidan. But one could never tell. Perhaps the afternoon heat and the one-day cricket on TV had kept the citizens indoors. Besides, this was the Civil Lines part of town, spacious after a fashion, originally planned with a preference for trees and open air over buildings that simply wouldn’t stop growing and their denizens who flooded the gutters.

Raghupati noticed, every now and then, at street corners and the occasional traffic light, an armed police constable. The rifle, he sneered to himself, was doubtless for protection in the event of the vector rats getting out of hand, not knowing their place and daring to abandon their nooks in the more fetid, filthier, more teeming parts of the old town. He could practically see Madna’s wildcat Police Superintendent commanding a contingent or two to restrain the epidemic from touching the privileged, issuing orders to shoot at sight any subversive rodent that didn’t comprehend curfew.

Ah no. The cops were visible because of the demonstration ahead that had already begun to snarl up traffic—more, that is, than was usual. ‘U turn before we’re sucked in,’ Raghupati ordered the driver. It wasn’t surprising that they hadn’t spotted the protesters earlier, what with the swarm around them of bullock-carts, rickshaws, cycles, pushcarts, tongas, scooters, three-wheelers, tempos, Maruti cars and neanderthal public buses. The marchers moreover were themselves dwarfed by the twenty-foot high canvas-and-plywood hoarding that, mounted on a van, trundled, juggernaut-like, in their midst. While their car veered, backed, honked, turned, growled and slewed round, Raghupati abstractedly admired its artwork.