Bhootnath Gaitonde’s manner seemed to suggest that Shri Sen shouldn’t be chuckling in office all the time. ‘For us, the class implications of the mysterious disappearance of Chamundi are clear. We intend to give this resonantly symbolic act the widest publicity. It is what in essence all your Welfare State programmes do to all your beneficiaries—what else is buggery but base exploitation, tell me? . . . Vyatha, Suroor’s drama group, is very enthusiastic about the theme that I’ve proposed to them. I met its second-in-command at the Madna International a couple of days ago. An absolute tiger in his enthusiasm, though in appearance, more a dragon—a Bengali too, perhaps you know him?—I’ve suggested a full-length street play that will revolve around Chamundi, how the innocent boy has been ensnared by the web of the Welfare State . . . the entire family frankly rues the day when the grandfather became one of the first beneficiaries of the Integrated Tribal Development Plan . . .’
Well, not perhaps the entire family, since it is more accurately an enormous tribal clan that stretches up to the horizon and beyond. Beyond because Chamundi’s agnate uncle, for example, a one-legged father of two nubile daughters and half-a-dozen younger siblings, has for some years been residing far away in the capital—more precisely, beneath the new Trimurti Aflatoon Centenary Celebrations Flyover. As for his more immediate kin, his sister has been discharged from the Madna Civil Hospital with a livid scar on her cheek and a numbness in all her faculties. She returns to the International Hotel to learn that they don’t want her back with her new face. She is thus poised to sink back to her roots in the jungles of Jompanna. Chamundi’s elder brother, Dambha, is fed up of riding an auto-rickshaw in Madna rigged out as Durga and is on the lookout for starting off anew elsewhere. He would have quit the district months ago had he not been dissuaded by his wife, who is blind and was last in the news eight years ago when she had been attacked with a hot ladle by an attendant at the Hemvati Aflatoon Welfare State Home. A truly unfortunate—but representative—clan, dispersed in an enormous diaspora and up against it everywhere, its members individually and haphazardly thrashing their limbs about to stay afloat and above the Poverty Line, dimly aware that unless they seized and moulded their futures themselves, the single miracle that could officially deliver them would be the arbitrary decision of some state planners to improve the economic health of the nation by simply lowering that crucial line.
Up against the plague too, even though it was one of the few misfortunes that hadn’t touched them yet. For Commissioner Bhupen Raghupati had decided—and suggested to the Police Superintendent—that the AWOL Chamundi could profitably be considered a victim of the epidemic and should anyone enquire about him anywhere, he was to be told so. Inspired by the idea, Makhmal Bagai, fresh from jail but unrepentant, had proposed the same diagnosis—or else—for both the scar on the face of Chamundi’s sister and the long trance of Rajani Suroor. The Civil Surgeon had taken three days’ Casual Leave to mull the theories over.
‘Hmmm’-ing, and ‘I see’-ing intelligently at regular intervals, Shri Sen switched off while Bhootnath Gaitonde ran on. His conscience reminded him that he was being paid, inter alia, to listen to whoever sat in front of him. In turn, he pointed out to his conscience that he was sure that his concentration was commensurate with his pay.
In his years in the Civil Service, time and time again, usually when he’d been plumb in the middle of something, Agastya had stepped outside himself, observed for a while whatever he’d been doing, and then asked himself whether it—his activity of that moment—would in any way, directly or indirectly, immediately or eventually, actually help the absolutely poor, the real have-nots, the truly unprivileged, the utterly godforsaken—in brief, the supposed primary beneficiaries of the Welfare State. His answer had always been no.
For one thing, development, to be successful, had to be achieved by stealth. No one must know. If the word spread, everybody would move in and walk all over one.
For another—well, how did his day pass? 1) Listening, off and on, to Bhootnath Gaitonde, a middle-aged, dark star of an unimportant, Leftist-ish political party. That was certainly not going to help anybody. What else?
2) Pushing files on different subjects. Signing a clerk’s General Provident Fund Loan Advance. Grabbing hectares of some hapless soul’s land for a thermal power project that would take off two decades after. Answering tedious Parliament and Legislative Assembly questions. Allowing agricultural land to be used for generally illegal, non- agricultural purposes. Enquiring into the misdeeds of a Municipal Officer who retired four years ago. Replying to lengthy audit objections. Sanctioning special holidays in the district. Permitting the Electricity Board to build a substation beside the Primary School. Sending two hundred different kinds of statements to fifty different offices. Writing stinkers to subordinates, drawing their attention to earlier stinkers. Ordering other offices to depute their staff for special drives. Disallowing a peon’s Medical Reimbursement Claim. Gearing up for a V∞IP visit that would always start three hours behind schedule. Unwinding thereafter. Tearing down encroachments and slums. Watching from his car their inhabitants attack the police. Inspecting the records of a district treasury or subordinate office. And so on. None of that even remotely touched the lives of those at the bottom of the pile. What else during the day?
3) A seven-hour-long District Planning and Development Council Meeting, the miasma of which was interrupted only by a stultifying lunch. At such gatherings—Members of Parliament and of the Legislative Assembly, local politicians, prominent citizens, chums of the party in power—all harangued the government in general and the bureaucracy in particular for their misdeeds. Their revelations and accusations were on the whole accurate and had the sting, the fury, of those done out of a deal. Not even one such allegation or denunciation, in Agastya’s experience, had been prompted by any sense of justice, propriety, fairplay, ethics, decency or right. However, being fundamentally clearsighted—or innocent—he still believed that these concepts existed and had meaning in the Welfare State. As far as possible, for example, and without cracking up, he wanted to ferret out and help the neediest of the needy, the sort who actually died every now and then of hunger; he wished to work out a system, a method, by which these millions could be precisely located, to cleave through the mountains of off-white paper to arrive at the heart of the matter, the essence of the Welfare State. Of course, working out that system would require more off-white paper. Fortunately, there’d never be a shortage.
Sure enough, he’d ruminated in his black diary:
Out of all these schemes, plans, projects and programmes of ours that look so snazzy on paper, who benefits in the end? After every bugger down the line, that is, has wolfed down his cut? It’s almost always someone familiar with the system, isn’t it? He’s benefitted before from some other programme, so he knows how those dreadful forms are to be filled up, which twenty-three documents are required, whom to bribe to get what faked. If he himself can’t apply the second time round under his own name, then his mother, father, wife, sister, sons, uncle or cousin can, or he himself can under an assumed name. Not that he doesn’t need the peanuts that we dole out, but surely, in this monstrously populous, economically haywire country, there exist millions who need them more. Of course, one column of the dreadful form will routinely ask the beggar whether he or, his near and dear ones have ever sucked before at these dugs, or at other dugs, of the State. We might run out of milk for them, but not for ourselves, and never will we run out of paper. If only we’d all been cows.
Bhootnath Gaitonde left after decades, with an assurance, however, that they would see each other again within the hour at the special meeting convened by the Commissioner to discuss the minute-to-minute programme of the Prime Minister’s visit.
The special meeting was actually two. To the second meeting had been invited the Army, the Air Force, the police, Public Works, National Highways, the Municipality, Public Health, the District Council, the Intelligence Bureau, the Security Br
anch, the District Education Officer, the press and media staff, General Administration and of course Protocol. All of them had to attend the first meeting too, formal invitations to which had only gone out to the elected, political and other heavyweights of the district. The two meetings would naturally discuss the minute-to-minute programmes of the Governor and the Chief Minister as well, since they were the principal among the many dignitaries expected in Madna before and for the PM. The second meeting would actually chalk and iron things out—who would garland whom, when the Army would salute and where the schoolkids with their paper flags and patriotic songs would be lined up. The first meeting had been organized mainly to ensure that no one felt offended at being left out of the Top—but open—Secret deliberations of the second—which of course the invitees to the first wouldn’t attend, it being hush hush and restricted only to about a hundred officials.
To be honest, the second meeting—which would be the first of a series of many, held with increasing frequency and panic and decreasing method—would map everything out but the nitty gritty. How many in the helicopter? Who were the others? The exact time of arrival? Was Bhanwar Virbhim part of the entourage or was he now officially in some other camp? Would the PM’s food taster be on the flight? Where was lunch? Was the helipad to be sanitized twenty-four or forty-eight hours before the landing? Could they presume for heavens’ sake that the police would not insist on photographs on the temporary identity cards that would be issued to the privileged who would be allowed into the V?IP enclosure at the helipad? No V∞IP enclosure at all? Did they know what they were saying? Would his route to Aflatoon Maidan skirt the plague or pierce through it? Was it really necessary to have armed gunmen on the rooftops all along the route? Provide them packed lunches and bottled mineral water? Really? Why don’t we set up Committees for each macro event and sub-committees for the micro events? Well, micro as in bottled mineral water for armed gunmen en route? Who would clear, from the Security angle, private video cameras? Not you? You only do TV channels? Then who? Will we need separate passes to have access to the twenty-four-hour control room? Is the visit to Rajani Suroor in the hospital official? Oh, a private diversion? At the Maidan, a maximum of how many chairs on the dais? Chairs with armrests? Are sandalwood-scented garlands acceptable to the PM? You know, because of sandalwood and Sukumaran Govardhan?
The list of questions was never-ending; further, they changed with every meeting. Those answered and settled beyond doubt on Monday became irrelevant on Wednesday. Is the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary a vegetarian? was Monday’s question. He isn’t coming, was Wednesday’s information, but his Principal Personal Assistant is. Well, what’s his name? Not much is known of this one but he keeps a vow of silence on Thursdays.
Different sections of the vast police network of the Welfare State—Intelligence, Security, Anti-terrorism, Vigilance, the regional police—knew some of the answers to some of the questions but they weren’t telling. For one, they couldn’t—no one could—be absolutely certain of their information. For another, to reveal it was an unnecessary security risk, that is to say, knowledge is power. I do my job, if others had done theirs, the country wouldn’t have gone to the dogs.
When they did communicate what they knew, it was either because the news was stale and safe or it had already been passed on by somebody else. The transmission was almost always oral—by wireless or telephone; firstly, because writing stuff down took time; secondly, because notes and faxes became records, the undeniable, ineradicable evidence of an event, and therefore avoidable. The receivers sometimes wrote the information down and telegrammed or faxed it back for confirmation, which hardly ever arrived, usually because by then the facts had changed. On the rare occasions when minute-to-minute programmes weren’t turned around at the last minute and Headquarters could boast of a responsible and dutiful set of officers, the written confirmations trickled in, in twos and threes, a week or so after the event.
Between Bhootnath Gaitonde and the two-in-one meeting, the Collector of Madna tried to meet all his hundred waiting petitioners in under half-an-hour. His best timing till then had been twenty-eight minutes for one hundred and thirteen of them. He was however tripped up completely by the forty-third, a spirited eighty-year-old woman who claimed to be a Veteran Freedom Fighter. Her bewildered rage didn’t look as though it could be assuaged by thirty undivided seconds of the Collector’s time. Sighing, Agastya settled down to focus on her complaint. The letter to Daya would have to wait a while. Chidambaram glided in with some sheets of whitish paper and the local newspapers. Without interrupting his ‘Oh dear’-ing and ‘Let me see’-ing, Agastya ran his eye over the headlines. He was comically outraged by one leading news item. He summoned Chidambaram.
‘The Dainik has this time confused leptospirosis and the plague. I mean, where do these people live? I want you to ask the PRO to arrange to send an intelligible rejoinder . . . perhaps even organize a press conference . . . the subject can be . . . The Rats of Madna: A Comparative Survey . . . that should cover just about everybody . . .’
Places weren’t marked for the officials in the meeting hall of the Commissionerate but nevertheless, they all sat in strict pecking order to the left of the Commissioner around an enormous round table, facing the members of Parliament and Legislative Assembly and other worthies. On Agastya’s right sat Madna’s Superintendent of Police, Panna Lal Makkad. Atop the files that Agastya had carted along for psychological support lay the sheets of whitish paper that he hoped by the end of the meeting would become his letter to Daya.
Makkad was gruff and glum, with hooded eyes, and a toothpick and fist in his mouth. Post-lunch was clearly not his time of day for special meetings. While the Chairman of the District Council declaimed on the need to have the Prime Minister commemorate his historical visit by inaugurating the unfinished new premises of the Madna Janata College, the necessity therefore of completing construction in six days and the general criminal laziness of the district civil engineering staff, Makkad belched and yawned at regular intervals before falling into a light doze with his eyes wide open. At four- thirty, after the non-official special invitees had taken a quarter of an hour to physically quit the hall, and the Collector had jotted down a few points with which to reassure—if not lull—the assembly into believing that all for the PM’s visit was well, Makkad leaned across and breathed into Agastya’s ear, ‘He isn’t coming, you know. Don’t tell anyone because you aren’t supposed to know officially till next Monday.’
The Collector controlled an urge to clamber on to the table and do a striptease. He instead observed the armed forces, clearly miffed at the civilian notion of their place in the hierarchy, gather up their things and reposition themselves in correct descending order alongside the Commissioner’s right elbow.
‘His piles acting up?’
‘Sort of, what with all the drama that’s going on. His advisors fear his being upstaged by Sukumaran Govardhan. Who, it is true, has sent out feelers for a trade-off. An unconditional surrender for a general pardon; then run for Parliament, and with his crores, back the right horse for PM.’
Fact tarted up as fiction, garnished as fantasy, but nonetheless fundamentally fact. Agastya began to love the meeting. He valued them in particular when they—almost officially—became pointless. ‘Has he decided whom to surrender to?’
‘He naturally wants it to be the PM. Live TV coverage while he ceremonially hands over a couple of flame throwers. The PM’s Secretariat has snapped its fingers at the idea. A criminal can’t simply start from the top. He must wait a bit to get there.’
‘So the buzz is true—he and Bhanwar Virbhim and the rest of Jayati Aflatoon’s caucus to orchestrate a palace coup, following proper democratic procedure, of course.’
The Superintendent merely smiled in reply and while continuing to gaze beatifically at the armed forces, settled down to snatch a quick supplementary nap.
A Pest in the Corridors
of Power
To re
ndezvous with Daya at the earliest, and at the expense of the Welfare State, far away in anonymity, peace and quiet, the Collector of Madna suggested on the phone to the Under Secretary for Demotic Drama at Aflatoon Bhavan that he be summoned to the capital fourteen hundred kilometres away to report, in person, to the Centre on exactly what happened in broad daylight to Rajani Suroor.
‘Sure, good idea’, agreed Dhrubo. ‘Bring that pest from the hospital, Alagh, along. Make it a delegation.’
He looked less like a pest and more like the dragon of the comic-strips, Dr Alagh the Civil Surgeon of Madna did. He had hooded, sleepy eyes and a long nose, almost as wide as his mouth, with inordinately-flared nostrils. His lips were pale and thin, but his mouth enormous; when he smiled, his face became quite pear-like. The gaps in his teeth could comfortably allow the exhalation of fire; perhaps they—the gaps—had been created by his breathing under stress. Certainly, both his moustache and goatee had an uncertain, wispy, singed look. Appropriately, his remaining teeth were dark brown from smoking.
Except for a patch of forest above his left ear, he was bald. He wore that patch long, oiled it, dragged it up and across his dome down to his right ear where, mission accomplished, he abandoned it; tendrils of hair wandered all over his scalp, determinedly searching, like vines, for support.
He was short and podgy, perennially shabby, generally in sandals and off-white trousers and bush-shirt. For the meeting at the Centre, he carried a leather briefcase with his wallet, a small towel, his cigarettes, some Nivea cream for his chapped lips and a few books in it. They made him feel intellectual and creative, like a college student with a future.
The Mammaries of the Welfare State Page 17