The Mammaries of the Welfare State

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  Diamond Street Market after Junction Road and a right therefrom on to Diamond Change Bazaar. Raghupati’s Ambassador car raced—in a manner of speaking—down routes along which, in everyday circumstances, it would have crawled, honking boorishly. Almost all the shop shutters were down— and not just because it was afternoon. Under their tarpaulin and plastic awnings on the pavements sat a mere handful of hawkers, half-hidden behind their suspended wearunders, handkerchieves, goggles and cloth masks, intrepid but subdued by the absence of custom. Garbage littered the streets—rags, broken bottles, plastic bags, reeking vegetable and animal refuse—and black pigs, stray dogs and vicious alley cats wandered amongst it, disturbed now and then only by the youth gangs, with their cloth masks resembling clusters of surgeons in some fancy dress pantomime, hunting—so Raghupati had heard—for vector rats. The contrast with the bustle around Aflatoon Maidan—a bare couple of kilometres away—was fearful. Here, in the older part of town, all was silent and bleak, as though time itself was wary.

  Not wholly on account of the plague, though. Mere fleas and their carriers could never have compelled the diamond trade to down shutters. Raghupati believed the buzz that he had heard, that over the preceding months, Sukumaran Govardhan had expanded operations, and from his half-mythical feats in the illegal timber trade, in skins, drugs and gunrunning, had stretched out a talon to touch diamonds and politics.

  At airports, railway stations, bus terminuses, market places, cinema halls, university coffee houses and municipal toll tax collection centres, every now and then, whenever some new heinous exploit of his had come to light, the distinguished features of Sukumaran Govardhan had stared out at the world from the thousands of black-and-white Wanted-Dead-or- Alive posters that sprang up overnight on walls, doors and pillars. True, the posters did seem a little anachronistic at the end of the millennium, a bit desperate, even unbelievable— but on the other hand, they served to remind the citizens that the Welfare State in many ways was the Wild East and that in the matter of Govardhan, the police was at the end of its tether.

  If You Have Seen This Man Somewhere, Don’t Panic But Call 100 or 4763213 (6 lines) and Win Tax-Exempted Award of Your Dreams.

  On different occasions, the telephone numbers in the poster had changed but the photograph above the advice hadn’t. It was blurred, magnified several times—a fleshy, clean-shaven, bespectacled, professorial face with a jungle of inch-long hair sprouting out of his ears and reaching out like black tendrils to the edges of the paper.

  Raghupati’s car turned in at the gates of his bungalow with a frightful honking and blaring to warn the Residence peons to switch off the TV and down their cups of tea. On the veranda, Murari, the oldest and laziest of the House staff, waited deferentially with a glass of chilled coconut water and what he considered the more important items of the morning’s mail.

  On his way to the puja room, Raghupati’s penis twitched as he ripped open an envelope from the Civil Service Welfare Association. On his good days, his penis quivered even when he spotted a gecko on the wall, poised to pounce on some moth fluttering about in the wan blue of a tubelight.

  His massage-boy, Chamundi, waited for him in the master bedroom on the first floor of the house. One of the boy’s several duties was to smile, exhibiting his dimples all the time that he was with Raghupati. Whenever his smile slipped, which happened ever so often—when the Commissioner’s cock swayed alarmingly close to his face, for example, or when he was huskily ordered to mix his, Raghupati’s, spunk with the massage oil, usually mustard—the Commissioner’d lean forward and tweak his cheek rather hard.

  Chamundi bolted the door to the veranda, Raghupati flopped down on the bed. The boy began to remove every item of the Commissioner’s clothing. This took a while, since each piece—sandal, belt, hankie—had to be neatly put away before the next could be touched. ‘Mai dream to make da seets run red,’ faltered Chamundi, grinning from ear to ear in bashfulness at his pronunciation.

  Naked, spanking his thigh with the buff envelope, liking the sound, arm flung around his masseur’s shoulders, Raghupati strutted off to the adjoining puja room. Ten-by- six, windowless, red night light, incense, shivalings and Ganeshes all over the place, flowers from his front lawn, mattresses on the floor, freezing airconditioning, Mutesh’s whine from the tape recorder. ‘Here, before you start, just shave my armpits and my crotch.’

  More than a month ago—at the last get-together of the Civil Service Welfare Association, a dinner convened in the capital to honour Dr B.B. Bhatnagar for having wangled, after two decades of undistinguished and venal self-service, a Ph.D degree out of the Bhupati Aflatoon International Open University—more than a month ago, Bhupen Raghupati had for the first time set eyes on Miss Lina Natesan Thomas. She’d been wearing a grass-green georgette sari that evening. It had slunk deep into the crevice of her meaty, rather attractive arse. On the preceding Sunday, The State Today’s Thank Your Stars column had advised Raghupati that the dominant colours for Scorpios that fortnight would be red and green. His personal astrologer, Baba Mastram, who visited him thrice a week, rheumy-eyed and halitotic, had confirmed that very morning that green would be triumphant for him uptil Thursday. Thus it was that on the veranda of the Golf Club, when they, glasses in hand, were comparatively alone in a shapeless queue before the water cooler, Raghupati had plucked the sari out of the crack, in the process coming richly into his pants, which in turn he’d interpreted to mean that the gods were with him. He’d been about to ask Kumari Natesan whether she was virgo intacta, and if yes, whether she’d like to redden some bed linen with him, when up had bustled Chanakya Lala, a comparatively junior bureaucrat and Raghupati’s erstwhile subordinate, the one whose after- shave could be sniffed twenty paces away.

  ‘Shame on you, sir,’ Kumari Natesan had hissed and stalked away, jiggling more than ever in her distress. For a moment, Raghupati’d thought that she’d meant the spreading wetness in his trousers. Then, calm of mind, all passion spent for at least half an hour, he’d sliced through the vapours and focussed on making polite conversation with a life-size, animate bottle of Fabergé.

  While lathering Raghupati’s crotch, Chamundi, as was his wont, began to prattle of office matters. ‘After Saab left this morning, three advocates came, also one morcha to demand the transfer of the Keeper . . .’ To speak thus of processions and petitions, of course, was to assert that one too was a respectable employee of the Welfare State, and not just a wastrel of the streets picked up for one’s smile and one’s tight brown skin. Officially, in different files, Chamundi was a Commissioner’s-Residence-Telephone-Answerer, a Tribal-Quota-Daily-Wage-Gardener, an Eldest-Eligible-Male-Family-Member-Granted-Employment-on-Untimely-Death-of-Only- Wage-Earner-of-Selfsame-Family, a Reserved-Category-Class- IV-Transferee-from-the-Prime-Minister’s-Grant-Project and a Hidden-Beneficiary-of-the-Integrated-Tribal-Development- Plan. ‘ . . . And Makhmal Bagai Saab dropped in minutes before you arrived. Murari showed him into the camp office, from where he made a couple of phone calls, one even to Madam Saab in Navi Chipra . . .’

  His camp office, regrettably, was not the room wherein Raghupati could officially indulge in camp, but instead, a specimen of a venerable colonial institution—simply the office away from office, set up at home or anywhere else, sometimes temporarily, but more often, like several other creations of the Welfare State, for a season that spanned for ever.

  Triplespeak:

  i) I, being such a senior officer, need a gang of lackeys at home to cook, wash up, wash the clothes, massage me, knead my wife’s feet, look after the children, scrub the floors, scour the toilets, tend to the lawns and the grandparents, buy vegetables, drive the family around, switch on the television. However, I am too senior to be so foolish as to actually pay these lackeys out of my own (truly meagre) salary.

  ii) The office, the Welfare State, should pay for them because, as per our Civil Service General Regulations (No. VI. 74. a.xiv. in conjunction with No. VII. 22.f.ix.), since I may be summo
ned for official work at any hour of the day or night, I am on duty every second of my life till I retire or die, whichever is earlier; every moment of my existence is therefore official, thus the State should cough up for every breath of it. Naturally, the more senior one is, the more indispensable one becomes—experience and all that; if the earth doesn’t tremble when one walks, at least the downtrodden do.

  iii) I am well aware that the welfare of its senior civil servants must not be seen as a priority item on the agenda of the Welfare State. It is therefore suggested that a) to justify the presence in one’s official home of several office employees,

  b) to pass off various kinds of domestic work as official and

  c) to fork out official wages for the same, the simplest course would be to carry on a colonial tradition and open a camp office in the bungalow—a telephone with national and international dialling facilities, severe wooden chairs, a couple of photos of some Aflatoons, discoloured jute matting, a heap or two of grey files and casually-strewn, rough, off-white paper.

  The Joint Secretary of the Civil Service Welfare Association had forwarded to Raghupati for comments and ‘a preliminary reaction’ a handwritten novella of complaint from Miss Lina Natesan. Her letter was addressed to the Union Cabinet Secretary and some half-a-dozen other senior bureaucrats. With an eye seasoned in scanning bilge, Raghupati riffled through the pages of near-hysterical prose. He’d have to try again to arrange for her transfer to a post under his thumb. His hooded eyes watched Chamundi thwack and pummel his left thigh. He shifted so that his tumescent penis could be bang under the boy’s nose. The boy shifted too. Raghupati saw red. He reached out, grabbed Chamundi by the scruff of his neck and yanked his head down so that it bobbed inches above Tumescent, which, in welcome, began to perk up quite a bit. That restored Raghupati’s good humour. He lifted his bum off the mattress and swayed his hips and his tool to the whines of Mutesh. Chamundi remembered to giggle nervously. He, however, knew that Raghupati wouldn’t actually bugger or assault him in any other orifice without clearing it first with Baba Mastram.

  ‘Babaji I’ve a lot of extra heat energy in me that I could— with benefit to both—transfer to the massage-boy. What do you advise? Today?’

  ‘No, not yet, sir. Be patient. To fret under patience is to despair, but with calm to conserve, to augment one’s sap, one’s vital forces, is to overcome the world, and all in it.’

  ‘Hmmm. And that new steno in my office, a very junior person—I’d want to share with her too, the instant the conditions are propitious.’

  Raghupati did nothing important without consulting his astrologer. Had it been feasible, he would have checked with the stars even before buttoning up his shirt or scratching his elbow or breaking wind. A family tradition. Over the years, astrologers and palmists, yogis and fortune-tellers had advised him on whom to marry, what new first name to give his wife, when to copulate so as to beget only sons, when to officially drop his caste-revealing surname, what allonym to adopt, when to angle for a transfer, which posts were both lucrative and safe, whom to beware of, whom to trample on, whom to suck up to, when to separate from his wife, which functions to attend, what colours to wear on which occasions, what food to eat when, when to divorce—in brief, how, when and where to place every step of his life.

  Baba Mastram had been his guiding light and troubleshooter for, off and on, two decades now, ever since the affair of the bungalow peon at Koltanga. In that time, whenever practicable, he’d arranged for the Baba to follow him wherever he’d been posted. He was now toying with the idea of buying him a mobile phone. He’d turned down two positions at the Centre because the Baba had counselled against both when he’d sensed that he wouldn’t have been part of Raghupati’s baggage on either occasion.

  On most mornings, Baba Mastram’s session with the Commissioner ended by eight-thirty. He then ambled around in the compound for a bit, drank a glass or two of coconut water, unravelled dire futures in a couple of sweaty palms, and at a quarter to ten, along with the domestics, hung about in a circle to watch the Commissioner leave for office. Afterwards, excitement over, they all got down to the day; they breakfasted for a second time. While readying lunch, they snacked, and throughout the day, quaffed litres of tea in front of the TV.

  On Tuesday morning, Baba Mastram warned Chamundi to be particularly vigilant of his person in the next two weeks, and above all, not to wear green; nervously—and in gratitude— Chamundi massaged him with especial vigour.

  On the quiet days, Raghupati’s massage was followed by a bath, lunch and a nap. He generally returned to work at about four. Not that there was anything at that hour that couldn’t wait till next week, but old habits die hard. By posting him to Madna and making him responsible for Land Revenue, Depressed Tribes and Forests Protection, the regional government had wished to teach—not the wildlife raiders and timber smugglers but Raghupati himself—a lesson. The Commissionerate had neither money nor manpower, none of those rungs and rungs of torpid employees ranging away to the horizon.

  Just before he dozed off, he mentally composed a rejoinder to Miss Lina Natesan.

  My magnificent Niss Natesan,

  I was intensely moved that evening last month at the sight—or should I say, vision?—of a greyish-brown shadow in the crevice of your green-georgetted hips. I went mad trying to figure out what it could be. As you know, I do not put on my spectacles in front of ladies. At last, at 10.10 p.m., I realized that it was a stray wisp of your false ponytail, the rest of which tapers off at your sari-line. And then, at that very moment—a staggering coincidence!—I see God’s hand here!—you scratched the crack of your arse, thereby pushing your sari deeper in. A less sharp-eyed man, admittedly, might not have noticed, but for me, sex is power is money, and I wonder how people can differentiate the three. I wanted to free your sari from your almighty, disdainful buttocks, and thence free your mind too, to haul you into the arms of power, because then you’ll feel—and warm to—that power as well, and all the sex will overwhelm you in an indescribable rush.

  Such were the anonymous letters that he’d never actually written, leave alone posted. What he had often mailed, however, to all sorts of acquaintances, were almost-blank sheets of Welfare State off-white foolscap onto which he’d ejaculated while lolling about in his office chair. At home, in his camp office, he typed out the addresses on a Devanagari manual machine: after all, as far as possible, all correspondence was to be in the official language. He’d been sending these billets doux out for some years now—rather generously, some four or five a week, to his office staff, colleagues, deputies, assistants and associates, to his ex-brothers-in-law and the office-bearers of the Madna Club, and further from home, to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Governor’s Secretariat, to the Resident and Executive Editors of The State Today and Our Time, the Chief Executive Officers of Chipra Zinc and Vindhyachal Oil, the Managing Directors of Airports Authorities and Highway Transport Corporations, to the Cabinet Secretary and the Chairman of the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction. On all sheets he—before fouling them up—typed in Devanagari, Namaha Shivaya. He thought it appropriate.

  When he’d been jerking off, in a rather business-like manner, once, a couple of months ago, onto a letter addressed to Dr Harihara Kapila, his once-upon-a-time boss, he had been slowed down momentarily by the thought that forensic science could pretty easily trace his spunk back to him. Then he had recalled with a guffaw, Hell, don’t be silly, not our policemen—and that very day, had posted off two more billets doux, one to one of the constables who was most often on night duty in the sentry-box at the gate of his Residence, the other to Madna’s Police Superintendent.

  For close to decades now, by and large, only sex-related statements had registered with Raghupati—that is to say, at official meetings and so on, he sat up in his seat, pricked up his ears, or blinked slowly, many times, only when a stray word or phrase, expression or idiom, hinted at, or suggested, the sexual. For example:

&nbs
p; ‘Despite good rainfall, the production of rape in Pirtana this season has been poor, sir.’

  ‘The trainees at our Industrial Institutes do not have even tools to get the hang of things with, sir.’

  And,

  ‘This is conduct unbecoming of a civil servant, sir.’

  On his good days, when Raghupati was being bright as a button, it could be said that to him, everything sounded, looked, smelt, tasted and felt like sex. Experienced subordinates, when they wished him to focus on a topic, would use an appropriate idiom: ‘VD’s on the rise, sir, amongst the young of Ranamati, because of the improved irrigation in the area.’ Button-bright Raghupati would correctly interpret this remark to mean: Better irrigation = richer sugarcane yield = more money = profligacy.

  Aroused, keyed up, overheated, day in day out, round the clock, week upon week, like a mythic punishment that felt like a reward, a rut that had dominated him every second of his past two decades and had shattered, amongst many other things, his marriage, transforming each pore of his tingling skin—or so it seemed—into a hard-on. That is to say, twenty-three years in the service of the Welfare State had cracked him up. Its waste, inefficiency, sluggishness and futility had honed his sense of time running out at the speed of light and thereby sharpened as well his consequent excitation that was half-foreboding. Twice, sometimes three times, a day he would summon his PA Shobha just to paw her; at home, he’d rub against his dog or Chamundi—he’d always, with the approval of Baba Mastram, lined up someone, a sweeperess, a driver’s daughter, a gardener. No backlash could sting him if he abused the right people. No backlash could sting him if he knew the right people—and indeed, himself remained one of them.