The Mammaries of the Welfare State

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  i) Do you vote?

  ii) The Welfare State has used your money to lead you up to this jam. Does that bother you?

  iii) Would you be very upset if the Prime Minister is blown up at this moment? Of course, that would lead, among other things, to the mother of all traffic jams.

  iv) Do you care for the official view that the Prime Minister’s journey is more important than yours? His time too?

  v) At such moments in your life, are you reminded of the New Vision Party’s assessment of our Prime Minister? To quote from their last election pamphlet: ‘By temperament, looks, bearing, demeanour, intelligence, wit and character, Bhuvan Aflatoon is well-suited to be Lobby Manager of Claridge’s Hotel in the capital.’

  vi) Why have we allowed our present statesmen and bureaucrats to mess things up completely?

  That they had Agastya did not doubt in the least. It seemed to him that he could cite without pause a million examples. On the 7th, 14th and 26th of the previous month, for instance, Dr Onorari Kansal, the Chairman of the eponymous Commission, was summoned to the Centre for talks, i.e., to discuss routine palace intrigues. On each occasion, he travelled from the regional capital to the Centre by the State Government helicopter. Being a man with many things on his mind, on each occasion, he forgot back home his favourite sleeping suit, an off-white kurta-pyjama set that had been gifted to him by his astrologer, erstwhile Chief Secretary (and present Cabinet Secretary) Shri Manorath Shukl. He sent the helicopter back each time. Thus at least one State Government made, at the common expense, at least three extra return trips in the preceding month from one regional capital to the Centre to ferry a favourite sleeping suit.

  In contrast, in the district of Madna, Agastya himself had found concrete evidence of at least eighteen cases in which poverty had forced families in the block of Jompanna to sell themselves, literally body and soul, as bonded labourers for seventy-five rupees per year, that is, for the price of three litres of petrol for a car idling in a traffic jam, per year, year after year after year. Every day, in other words, those families woke up and, in return for some scraps of food and water, worked in the fields and homes of their masters till they died, after which their heirs inherited their burden. At the end of the year, that seventy-five rupees of course wasn’t made over to them. Their masters paid themselves back—that is, wrote off for the amount a part of some mythic, ancestral debt.

  Now, felt Agastya, were the Prime Minister to announce that he was rushing down to Madna to meet face to face the bottom of the pile—the families that starved to death, the parents who sold their daughters to pay off their debts, the villagers who trudged four hours a day to ferry five litres of muddy water, the poor who, tortured and beaten, lost their lives because of some incomprehensible caste offence, the godforsaken who were burnt and mutilated so that they could beg at the traffic intersections of the cities—were the Prime Minister to decide to encounter, face to face, without a single, interfering intermediary of the Welfare State, some of the millions who were truly in need of welfare, that would be an occasion worth commemorating, the event of the millennium.

  vii) Why don’t you—sweating, overweight, bespectacled, fretting, moustached—get out of your car and take over from our present statesmen and bureaucrats?

  viii) Why do you want the Welfare State to leave you alone?

  Because all its representatives that one encountered spelt trouble, that’s why. The bribe-gobbling cop and telephone linesman, the venal Corporation clerk and electricity-metre reader.

  ix) Or is the cause within you—the frightening, limitless greed of the middle classes? You’ve fattened monstrously in the last fifty years, but you’d like to be left alone, wouldn’t you, to get on with your gormandizing and navel-gazing?

  And so the questions had run on in Agastya’s head for weeks, months and years. With a craftsman’s skill and a cop’s doggedness, he’d returned to them a dozen times a day, to chisel, polish and hone them in the hope that their subject would at last catch the light.

  (x) Do you want the most capable men and women of your country to

  a) sell wearunders, bags of cement and sunflower cooking oil,

  b) run a newspaper,

  c) or a hotel,

  d) or a Market Research Bureau,

  e) or the country?

  To him, the issues and solutions seemed eternally important; yet, Nutsyanyaya reigned all around him—an office of the Commissioner of Stationery the size of a city, for example, that couldn’t produce simple white paper, or a Deputy Secretary, Administrative Reform, for instance, who, as part of some Renewed Economy Drive, was being paid a salary to circulate instructions to peons to make new envelopes out of used ones.

  xi) What scares you most about government? Is it Nutsyanyaya?

  xii) Would you then say that it’s more frightening to be outside the Welfare State than within it?

  Agastya himself didn’t think so. Nutsyanyaya was truly everywhere and nobody could escape it. He hadn’t, for example, that February afternoon after the Collectors’ Conference summoned by the Prime Minister at the TFIN Complex had got over.

  For a variety of reasons, Agastya’d cycled down to the Aflatoon Tiffin Box from his uncle’s house, a bare ten minutes away: a) Lutyens’s City was one of the few places left in the country where one could still cycle; b) An office car from the Liaison Commissioner’s office required enormous amounts of wheedling with the lower orders; c) No civil servant ever travelled in a taxi—that would be like asking him to clean an office toilet or to carry his own files.

  Of course, no civil servant ever travelled on a bike either. So must have thought the cop who had come upon Agastya unlocking his cycle from the fence of the canteen lawns of the Tiffin Box. Hey, you, etc. He couldn’t have liked very much Agastya’s face or his manner of answering back, because he actually roughed him up quite a bit in the few seconds that he had before some others turned up. Of course, as a consequence, the policeman landed himself in temporary but deep shit.

  So did Agastya, As a fallout of the constable’s assault, but without the necessary permissions from the intervening rungs, he wrote a letter to none other than the Prime Minister on the subject of Nutsyanyaya.

  . . . Sir, may I officially be allowed to keep a gun to protect myself from the police? As the District Magistrate, I may be relied on to use it judiciously. Certainly, necessary training in the use of firearms would have to be imparted to us during office hours. I have made unofficial enquiries with the extremely cooperative Superintendent of Police of Madna and he has assured me that procuring a firearm, even a rocket launcher if need be, would pose no problem . . .

  . . . The question that begs to be asked, sir, is: why are we whittling down the generalist administrator’s executive control over our police force? In one’s youth, one used to naively believe that one should join the service of the State because once within, one was safer from our police force than when one was without. What a dangerously foolish notion! I am reminded in this connection of what a dear colleague and an old friend of mine, Mr Dhrubo Jyoti Ghosh Dastidar, tells me that he told the Selection Board of Eminent Bureaucrats at his job interview. The Magi asked him:

  Mr Dastidar, why do you want to join the Civil Service?

  Mr Dastidar: Because within the Civil Service, one is likelier to have a peon, a Personal Assistant, and an Ambassador car as buffers between one’s good self and the rest of the government.

  Mr Dastidar still holds the record for the lowest marks ever scored by any civil servant at his entrance interview. I have already written to him describing in detail my misadventure at the Aflatoon TFIN Complex and underscoring my conclusion: No One Is Safe from Them Anywhere, Boy! He naturally sympathized with me body and soul and suggested to me what in fact is my next proposal to you. Sir, Give Us Uniforms. Exactly like the cops have, threatening to explode around the belly and bum like terrycot covers stretched beyond endurance over bags of cement and twin ghatams, the navel visible like a hairy Peep
ing Tom’s eye at a keyhole. However, our uniforms, though of the same colour as those of the policemen, should be a couple of shades lighter to make it clear to all that we are above them and their dealings. Mr Dastidar disagrees with me on this point. He would prefer that our uniforms be a couple of shades darker to indicate that we can be more menacing when we want to be. The image that he has, he tells me, is that of the thundercloud.

  May I share with you my thoughts of those dreadful moments when the cop was beating me up on the perfect lawns of the Tiffin Box?

  i) However could this be happening to me? To me! I can recite almost all of J. Alfred Prufrock from memory! I sang back-up vocals on Knockin on Heaven’s Door on Yuva Vani in my college days! I’ve bought the poems of Rilke and that too with plastic! I’ve holidayed in Majorca, Madrid and L’ile Maurice! You can’t touch me! I speak English at home, all the time! I have white American friends! I am to have dinner this evening, in three hours’ time, with the Prime Minister, where Jayati Aflatoon and Rani Chandra, people like that, will be present!

  ii) How to explain all this to this frightful ape with these fists of stone?

  iii) This is the stuff of counter-revolutions. Just you wait, you fucker of the lower orders, and I’ll show you how the Steel Frame snaps back.

  I have taken the liberty, sir, of retaining the original swear-word to give you a sense of the extent of my outrage. ‘We are truly lucky that we are so far above the classes whose welfare is our headache,’ opined my colleague Mr Dastidar, when I tried to explain to him on the phone my feelings about the cop who beat me up. ‘Imagine—had we been like them, we’d have been envying people like us. Ugh. And then again I think, since we ourselves aren’t so hot, our disgust and fear of the Great Unwashed are the only proof we have that we aren’t like them. It’s time now for our revolution, as usual two hundred years behind Europe.’

  This surely, sir, is the heart of the matter, the core of the problem. How many thousand rungs beneath the cop in question does one have to descend to be able to see at last, face to face, the—if you permit—etiolated worms beneath the pavements, the most squashed of the downtrodden, the starvelings who inhabit the other side of the Welfare Line? Surely the Kansal Commission could’ve reached out to them, could’ve declared its goal to be to locate and uplift the millions who have no clout whatsoever, who are the wretched of the earth who’ve never sucked at the mammae of the Welfare State.

  Instead, mused Shri Sen in wonder, they didn’t mind spending over six crores of rupees on the Prime Minister’s forty-five-minute-long visit to Madna. Didn’t anyone have any sense of priorities, of right and wrong? I mean, dash it, this wasn’t the Army—vast, secretive about the unimportant, tyrannical and insane. This was the open society where thousands claimed to know what was going on. Yet, every time the Prime Minister left the capital, his entire Cabinet zoomed off to the airport to see him off. That was forty-two Ministers, one hundred and sixty-eight Black Guard Commando bodyguards, forty-two Private Secretaries, forty- two Officers on Special Duty, eighty-four Personal Assistants and eighty-four peons, give or take a few dozen, away from the parking lots, the corridors and the desks of power for four hours each.

  How nonplussed, how rudderless, the whole jingbang, the entire white Ambassadocracy, had felt, like chicks being abandoned by the mother hen, when the upwardly-mobile Prime Minister had switched, all of a sudden, to steel-grey Contessas for his motorcade. The twenty-first-century men in his Cabinet, after a few weeks of chin-stroking indecision, had followed suit, but the shrewd nationalists—Bhanwar Virbhim, for example—had retained their white Ambassadors—with, however, 1800 c.c. Contessa engines under their bonnets.

  The overriding virtue of the Ambassador is that, though it’s descended from the British Morris Oxford, it’s nevertheless a tremendously indigenous car. Lots of character. When one travels about in it, one can never be accused of not having the nation’s interest foremost in one’s heart. For forty years, the Welfare State has bought mainly Ambassadors for itself, some thousands a year, and has thus kept them in the forefront of the industry. The Prime Minister’s infidelity is therefore cataclysmic; it is also the first step towards God knows where. The Maruti Suzuki Esteem? The PAL Peugeot 309? The Ford Escort? The Daewoo Cielo? The Mitsubishi Lancer? The Tata Mercedes? It was all quite upsetting, Agastya concluded, and truly made one feel that one was losing one’s identity. However could one remain a servant of the Welfare State while sitting in a car that actually effectively chilled one’s brow, that glided and purred, that while moving didn’t sound like a body-repair wing of an automobile workshop?

  ‘Our agenda for the Prime Minister’s visit, Collector Saab,’ pronounced Bhootnath Gaitonde, leaning back in his chair and eyeing Agastya with grave doubt, ‘will include A.C. Raichur setting fire to himself in public, in protest against the conclusions of the Kansal Commission. The event will be quite dramatic because we hope to synchronize it with the precise moment when the PM’s motorcade enters Aflatoon Maidan. Raichur will rise from his hunger strike only to douse himself with kerosene and light up. My party has of course formally written to you and the police on this subject, giving sufficient advance notice and so on. It is incredible that the government has accepted the recommendations of the Commission without examining the implications for the institutionalization of the inequalities of caste.’ Bhootnath Gaitonde waited for Shri Sen to react; he in turn waited for his visitor to continue.

  ‘My party will also raise two issues of finance with the Prime Minister. One: that since the district of Madna didn’t have a helipad, one had to be built just for his visit. Does that bother him or not? Two: Twenty lakhs has been given to the Madna Civil Hospital to clean itself up for his visit. Our Civil Surgeon is mentally not equipped to handle such a vast sum of money. Cynics at the hospital have suggested to him that on that day, he should issue himself a certificate of illness. I’ve been told that you’ve officially disclaimed all responsibility for the PM’s visit to the hospital.’

  ‘No, no, not at all,’ laughed Agastya with innocent joy, ‘I merely wrote to the Department of Public Health that our Civil Hospital was one of the filthiest places that I’ve ever seen in my life and that a sight of it might upset the Prime Minister no end. Which is why I’d suggested that Rajani Suroor be moved out of there while the going is good. I don’t give him any chance if he floats up out of his coma while he’s with Dr Alagh and actually sees what he’s been lying in now for almost two weeks. If you ask me, he comes to every morning, struggles up into consciousness, eyes his surroundings and shocked, relapses into a deeper swoon. Then the nurse on her rounds notes that he’s slipping.’

  ‘And Chamundi?’

  ‘What’s that? A new goddess?’

  Bhootnath Gaitonde chuckled politely for a nanosecond and elaborated, ‘ . . . The boy has simply disappeared from the Commissioner’s house. About a fortnight ago, the Commissioner was interrupted during his afternoon massage by a telephone call from you. When, after a couple of minutes, the Commissioner returned to the massage room, Chamundi had vanished without a trace. Odd, but due to the pressure of office work, Commissioner Raghupati had absolutely no time to think of it then. Nobody has seen Chamundi since. This is his brother here, Dambha.’ Gaitonde indicated one of the vaguos, more red-eyed than the rest. Like a well-rehearsed exit in a play, at that point, the others rose and quietly left the room. ‘ . . . Chamundi’s relations tell me that the Commissioner was—is—greatly attached to the boy. They want to register an FIR with the police but have been unable to so far. They then of course came to me. The police and the Commissioner believe that the boy simply went home into the forests of Jompanna. He succumbed to a typical tribal instinct, they maintain, that all of a sudden revolts against order, routine, discipline, work and all the other indicators of our notions of the civilized life. He was fed up, in short, and needed a break.’

  ‘It is not improbable.’

  ‘Chamundi’s family thinks differently.’

/>   Agastya waited for Bhootnath Gaitonde to get to the point. He was curious to hear exactly how the other would phrase it. Some beating about the bush, then finally in English, ‘homosexual assault’, like a Latin legalistic term, ‘in situ’, or ‘pro rata’.

  ‘Oh dear. Sodomy and suspected murder. In the circumstances, it isn’t surprising that the police want to wait for a body to turn up, dead or alive. So should you, at least till the Prime Minister departs. Think of how much you’ll hurt the Commissioner with your accusations.’

  ‘We will of course link it up with the other sexual assault case, that of the civil servant, Kumari Lina Natesan Thomas. She’s accused Raghupati of sexually attacking her at an official dinner and he’s apparently going to receive a court summons. You’re no doubt aware of that?’

  ‘Ah yes—Kumari Lina . . . already the stuff of legend, Gaitonde-ji, and utterly admirable. A great pity, that I haven’t yet had the honour of meeting her. Yes, it does seem that the Commissioner’d offended her in some way or the other at their first meeting, and on a matter of principle, she refused to let the matter rest . . . a useful thing, principle. One wishes one had more of it oneself. No meetings, files, paperwork, inspections, reviews . . . one can focus all one’s energies on representations and written complaints instead, addressed to all one’s bosses from the PM down to Shri Raghupati. You of course know that he’s due to move now, any day. He’ll be going to the Centre as Joint Secretary. Minister Virbhim can’t wait to surround himself with his henchmen, naturally. Meanwhile, the pressure is on us to prepare a backgrounder for a White Paper for the Department on this whole Rajani Suroor business. I told them that it’d be easier to draw up an off-white paper.’