The Mammaries of the Welfare State

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  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.

  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,