The Mammaries of the Welfare State

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  He could have burst a firecracker in the constables’ ears and still not distracted them from the rite. He waited till the kerosene and a spoonful of ghee had been sprinkled on the comatose rat, a lit match touched to its snout and the burning body flung down on the ground; he’d slid away to the enthralling squeals of the dying rodent and deftly sat down on the rear carrier of a passing, torpidly-moving bicycle. When the cyclist had turned around enquiringly, he’d pleaded in his pathetic Hindi, ‘Just till the end of the road, sir. My head’s spinning like a top.’

  It did, just a bit, outside the Qayamat Road gate of Aflatoon Maidan, so Dr Chakki subsided onto the pavement and briefly shut his eyes. ‘Hunger and thirst, sir,’ declared he to himself, ‘are to be fought with firefighting measures on a war footing.’ So he determinedly entered the park and crossed over to the three-in-one hunger strike.

  It was being enacted on a makeshift stage about three feet high, appropriately elevating the protesters a couple of steps closer to immortality. The awning had been fashioned with gaily-coloured bedsheets; beneath it, the organizers had arranged for mattresses, white sheets and some white bolsters, a couple of standing electric fans, some garlanded photographs of Gandhi, Ambedkar, a fistful of Aflatoons and a smiling, full-length one of the principal striker.

  He is obese, twenty-six years old, unemployed, unemployable, with curly hair, melting eyes and a broom of a moustache. In the photograph, he is in a tight black shirt, tight white pants, white leather shoes and a white tie. On stage, he is in off-white kurta pyjama, supine against some pillows. Incense smoke wafts around him to underscore that the gods are with him in his struggle. A public-address system in the corner plays non-stop doleful shehnai music (switching to vigorous Punjabi rap only when he is propped up so that he can sip water).

  Facing the stage are a couple of red rexine sofas for V?IP visitors. They are crawling with children, so Dr Chakki steps right up to the platform, leans on it and informs the prostrate protester, ‘I know you. You’re A.C. Raichur. We’ve met before in Aflatoon Bhavan. You performed there.’

  Indeed they have and he has.

  Raichur had wanted to walk—to proceed on foot, to quote his application—all over the country for six years to spread the message of national integration and had believed that the Welfare State should sponsor him. The Department of Sports had opined that their Rules of Business didn’t cover a six-year-long walk and that national integration was definitely more a Culture subject, may therefore kindly see please. The Joint Secretary of the Department of Culture was miffed at the very idea that a freeloader as unarty as A.C. Raichur could be palmed off on to him and sternly noted in the file: We may please regret. The applicant doesn’t at all fulfil the criteria of our Programme Number 6493 for the Promotion and Diffusion of Demotic and Indigenous Drama and Other Such Forms of Self- Expression. We may, if approved, forward to Home Affairs. National Integration, though they might not know, is their concern. Eight months after his first application, an unctuous Raichur met and oiled the feet and calves of the MP—and by then, Deputy Information Minister—from Madna, Bhanwar Virbhim, for a good two hours, after which he implored him for justice from his government. Bhanwar requested his HUBRIS counterpart to sponsor Raichur’s noble cause out of the Cabinet Minister’s Discretionary Fund. After two months of frenetic paperwork, the Department granted him enough money to walk for four and a half days.

  He was rather upset—but he didn’t refuse the money. When he, wearing his black-and-white outfit, went to collect the cheque, he learnt that—well, even the Welfare State wasn’t that soft a touch. He would have to spend the money first out of his own pocket and submit all kinds of documents as proof. If they satisfied the State, it would reimburse him. This was not strictly true. When he’d return to Aflatoon Bhavan with all his faked proofs of expenditure, the clerks of the Welfare State wouldn’t give him his cheque right away, oh no. Instead, to quote from the February section of Shri Agastya Sen’s diary, ‘they’d inform him of the next passage of the labyrinth. Knowledge withheld is power. The clerks of the Welfare State wouldn’t like to part with even an atom of information, either to the public or their superiors. When pressed, cornered, they will cede, piecemeal, incomplete info, bit by bit. If a procedure has seven stages and nine annexures, they will reveal this knowledge in a minimum of sixteen separate encounters, which will be routinely interspersed with occasions when they won’t be available or will tell you nothing, or instead will hint at bribes.’

  Raichur’s outraged friends in the Dainik had suggested a hunger strike.

  Galvanized, he sat up abruptly, his lips curled like a predator’s. ‘Dr Chakki, here! What a pleasure! Here, have a Coca Cola and some laddus!’ He beckoned to one of the children on the sofas, who skipped off to the tables alongside the stage on which had been ranged baskets and baskets of food—parathas, alu chaat, idli vada, dal fry in bowls of banana leaves, samosas, condensed-milk burfis, podanpolis, omelettes. Raichur had objected to his sympathizers snacking while they were with him but had failed to dissuade them. They in turn had pointed out that the effect of a hunger strike would be far more sublime if enacted in the midst of Temptation. Ever mindful of advertisements for himself, he had decreed that the food was to be offered as well to any passer-by who stayed long enough and looked sufficiently impressed by the spectacle, and to the policemen on duty, of whom there were quite a few; the district administration—being a second target of the hunger strike for its arrest of Makhmal Bagai for having fired a gun in the presence of the Collector, no less, and for its refusal to release him on bail—had clearly felt that it should look as though it took Raichur’s open disapproval of its firmness seriously.

  ‘Two Coca Colas, please, without ice, and without a glass. I mean, I will drink straight from the bottle.’

  ‘Not for me, though,’ pointed out Raichur, ‘I’m on—’ and he gestured to the numerous banners in white, blue and red above his head and amongst the trees of the park, bright and pretty like the dreams of children, screaming injustice—but happily—against the Welfare State in general and its local representatives and the Kansal Commission in particular.

  ‘Yes, very good, this three-in-one effort. An economy drive, in other words. Will you smoke? Will your principles allow you to?’ With an effort, Dr Chakki hoisted himself onto the stage and sat down beside Raichur. He found his cigarettes, lit up and began to feel dizzy again. ‘I’m interested in politics and governance. I study the subject. As a long- term beneficiary of the Welfare State, you’d be a suitable person to pose some of my questions to. Why, for example, do we continue to vote back to power such worthless specimens? . . . and while on the topic, I should add that I’m contemplating a white paper on the magic of the Aflatoons.’

  In response, Raichur turned to the doctor and yawned like a beast, slowly, throwing his head back and arching his back, generously allowing him to view his molars and tonsils. When he’d finished, he blinked a couple of times and said, ‘I’m always ready to be interviewed. Please feel free to ask me whatever you want to know about me.’

  ‘Whatever happened to your Walk for National Integration?’

  For one thing, it had become a run. Rather than a long-term beneficiary of the Welfare State, it would be more accurate to call Raichur a long-term aspirant to the dugs of. When one had meant to walk for six years for a cause but had been constrained by lack of funds to four and a half days, it seemed more apt, to hasten the diffusion of the message, to run. His Nationwide Trot for Peace and Understanding had been flagged off from Madna by Bhanwar Virbhim himself. Unfortunately, three kilometres out, he’d been attacked by a mad dog and had had to be hospitalized; in his bed, he’d frothed at the mouth out of fear and had kept repeating that the dog had been very old, foolish, wilful, unpredictable and bad-tempered—a canine King Lear, in short.

  Ironic, because far away in Aflatoon Bhavan, Under Secretary Shri Ghosh Dastidar, who had handled Raichur’s Run, had in fact recommended that he be given mor
e funds than he’d asked for on the grounds of the extra nutritional requirement. It has been conclusively proved, argued Shri Dastidar, that the fitness level of one of our average national athletes equals that of the average, middle-aged, depressed, divorced, Scandinavian housewife, so what then of one of our average, out- of-shape citizens? It would be catastrophic to have him start his Run and, as it were, die on the hands of the government.

  Gradually, Raichur became a regular visitor at Aflatoon Bhavan. After he recovered from the dog bite, the Minister’s office procured for him yet one more berth. They packed him off to some northern town to lead a public relay hunger strike against the recommendations of the Kansal Commission. On the second day, some passing terrorists shot at them, killing all the others and wounding him. Sitting ducks, one pro-Kansal newspaper called them. As for Raichur: ne’er-say- die-even-when-wounded, truly, because he came back—and with a new application.

  Which is when Dr Chakki and some of his colleagues first heard him perform. He’d then wanted to make noises for a living, and a grant from Aflatoon Bhavan to start him off. He was simply terrific in his white shoes, white pants, black shirt and white tie. ‘I’ll begin with a sixties’ James Bond trailer,’ and he curled his lip. He would have liked to grin from ear to ear but his cheeks—dark brown footballs of frozen butter—prevented his mouth from stretching. Then his lips were sealed, and he began his impersonation. His cheeks ballooned even more, his eyes bulged, his nostrils seemed to blow scorching gas into his broom of a moustache. Above his tight black collar, his Adam’s Apple bobbed up and down amongst all those chins like a ping pong ball trapped in a beaker of boiling water. His audience shut its eyes and was transported to a movie hall somewhere in 1967 . . . first the Theme Tune from James Bond for ten-to-fifteen seconds, then a riot of gun shots, followed by a deep, wry, very British voice speaking BBC—gibberish, of course, but it sounded like ‘Care for a cup of tea? Shaken, not stirred?’ . . . after which, a couple of atom bombs went off, and next a woman purred for ten seconds, a profoundly satisfying but well-mannered orgasm. Her soft groans ended with a couple of gasps that sounded like ‘Oh James . . . James Bond’ . . . and were suddenly overwhelmed by the most frightening sounds of a car chase. The roar of engines, tyres squealing, brakes screeching, sirens wailing, the blare of angry, scared car horns, the occasional rat-a-tat of gunfire, women screaming in the background . . . the whole climaxed in a ten-second, end-of-the-world explosion, succeeded by a moment or two of startling silence, and finally, just before a short reprise of the Theme Tune, in a deadpan, underplayed but effectively dramatic, stereophonic tone of voice, a few more stray sounds of gibberish-BBC: ‘Silencers on Your Pussy,’ ‘Bad Sex with a Beretta’—a combination of the two, obviously the title of the imagined thriller. An outstanding performance indeed.

  Raichur also had an interesting variation on the Bond. A takeoff on a Hollywood movie, though it is not at all certain that he himself considered them takeoffs. For him, they weren’t funny, they were the real thing. The Hollywood one had the same sound effects and an excellent American twang. Its refrain, sometimes in a scream of rising panic and on occasions in a quiet and decisive drawl, sounded like: ‘Let’s get the helloutta here!’ . . . He was building up an interesting repertoire, including the denouement of a Hindi film—the villain guffawing while he suspends the bleeding, blind mother of the hero over a vat of boiling oil—coconut or mustard, depending on the location—and a tour de force, the sounds of a group of protesters on a relay hunger strike against the Kansal Commission being gunned down by passing terrorists.

  Shri Dastidar had tried to fit Raichur into Preservation of Vanishing Cultures, but savvy that he was, he knew that there was more money in Promotion of Indigenous Drama. More than one sage in Aflatoon Bhavan has predicted a rich haul and a fruitful future for him in the Department.

  ‘We haven’t seen you in the corridors of Aflatoon Bhavan for quite a while,’ commented Dr Chakki after he had drained his second bottle of Coca Cola and had burped satisfactorily.

  ‘I’ve been too busy here,’ Raichur gestured once more—‘answering the call of the nation—’ at the pleasant chaos around him, ‘but,’—reassuringly—‘I will come.’

  ‘Good. Thank you. I must now make a move. Where in Madna do you think I could rest in peace for a couple of days? Where the crackpots from the hospital won’t be able to find and harass me?’

  ‘You come to my place. It’s just five minutes from here. No no absolutely no problem no question of nothing doing. My wife and my family love my friends. Just five minutes from the Mall Road gate of Aflatoon Maidan. I always pop off in my vehicle for a quick snack with my kids. You come and stay and interview me all night no problem.’

  Raichur’s vehicle turned out to be a three-wheeler, a black and yellow commercial auto-rickshaw decorated with tinsel, streamers, coloured plumes, spangles and pompoms. Beneath the hole of its rear window had been tastefully painted what may well have been its owner’s guiding principle: I Will Never Say Die If You Forget Me Not. Its driver was male, small, dark, unsmiling and eight-armed. While Dr Chakki examined his unusual waistcoat, Raichur elaborated, ‘My wife made it. It was her idea, during the Puja season last year, to have our auto driven around by Mother Durga—with more arms than usual, of course—more dramatic. We charge a little extra for the privilege. Dambha—the driver here—loves it. It was so successful that we decided to have him—her—him as her—around all year.’

  ‘He doesn’t look as though he loves it,’ observed Dr Chakki as he and Raichur settled down in the auto-rickshaw. For the passengers in the rear, the six stuffed, life-sized arms a foot ahead of their noses, jutting out of the driver’s torso in all directions, severely restricted the view. Indeed, the bottom- most two protruded out of the vehicle on either side, looking from a distance quite lifelike, as though the driver was signalling an intention to turn both left and right at the same time.

  ‘No, he’s at the moment blue for family reasons. Given the size of his clan, it is surprising that he isn’t miserable all the year round. A younger sister of his is in hospital. She had her cheek grazed by a bullet from Makhmal Bagai’s gun, but we maintain that somebody else fired the weapon. It is shocking how much people will lie for money.’

  The rickshaw shuddered and chugged through the bicycles, carts, cars and buses, missing not a single pothole as it skirted Aflatoon Maidan. Passersby and pedestrians gazed, grinned and waved at Durga. Dr Chakki, tired but upbeat, waved back, particularly at the policemen. Outside the Mall Road gate of the park, where the footpath broadened out into a sort of paved square, a crowd watching a play in progress had swamped the road. The rickshaw put-putted to a halt against a row of bums and tooted a couple of times to try and budge them before giving up.

  To force their way to a ringside seat, Durga came in handy. From the tool box of the auto rickshaw, Raichur fished up a box of incense sticks, a tiny brass bell and a half- mask, the last of which he fitted over Dambha’s head. It came down to his nose. Around the holes for the eyes—and stretching up to the ears—had been painted the long-lashed outlines of even larger eyes. To the mask was attached a wig of black, luxuriant, hip-length hair. With a lighter, Raichur lit an incense stick and wedged it between the fingers of one of the stuffed hands. The bell he slung over another padded pinkie. In his new avatar, the driver, listlessly chanting:

  Mother, Mother,

  Your mother’s here.

  Do not, Brother,

  Quake in fear.

  It’s only my mask of a face

  That makes me look a basket case.

  Only the sinful and no other

  Feel guilty before a mother

  sliced a route through to the centre of the crowd.

  The players of Vyatha all wore off-white shirts-and-trousers, or kurta pyjamas. Two of them, to form a door, stood erect three feet apart balancing a wooden slat on their heads. Before them on the pavement squatted an actor playing a peon. About him were strewn some us
ed government envelopes. He was engaged in tearing open their gummed edges, turning them inside out and with a tube of glue, repasting their three sides. The hideous end-products he had stacked on his left. Now and then, rhythmically and without quite pausing in his labours, he would raise a hand to receive from a visitor his card or a slip of paper with his name and purpose of visit on it. Those chits accompanied by bribes he would pass on to one of the doorposts behind him, tucking into his own shirt pocket the currency notes. Those without he would simply slip into the oblivion of one of the remade envelopes.

  Only the bribers, of course, crossed the threshold—after, that is, folding into the pockets of one of the doorposts a second currency note. The honest, stupid and persevering turned away, trudged a few steps, wheeled round, retraced their paces and rejoined the queue before the peon to hand him once more their name slips. As long as they didn’t add the cash, they didn’t step out of the circle, through the door and into the chamber. Where lolled a fat actor in a chair before a desk. His callers addressed him as ‘Respected Private Secretary, sir.’ When Dr Chakki and Raichur tuned in, he was on the phone swinging a deal, that is to say, the stretched thumb of his left hand was at his left ear, he was delivering his dialogue into the mouthpiece formed by his pinkie, and the intervening three fingers were fisted.

  Tuning in to the play was not easy. The hubbub of the street and the laughter and comments of the spectators blocked out most lines; they in turn were totally drowned out by the stentorian, off-and-on, rapidfire commentary of the narrator-persona—tubby, with the hooded eyelids and flared nostrils of a dragon—and the thunderous drumrolls that preceded and followed each of his proclamations. Hence—and because of the inadequacy of his Hindi as well—it took Dr Chakki a while to grasp that the Private Secretary, on behalf of his unnamed Minister, was chatting to a foreign supplier of paper while the suppliant before his desk was a native manufacturer of the same commodity.