The Mammaries of the Welfare State

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  ‘Yes sir . . . no sir . . . of course sir, what an honour . . . if you’ll just give me a minute to . . .’ He rushed to Kalra’s room. ‘What gives?’

  Kalra too was surprised, a rare occurrence. ‘Maybe he’s heard of how well you work. Would you like a drink to buck you up?’

  ‘Yes . . . What of Doctor Bhatnagar’s post-lunch trauma-meeting? You’ll tell him, of course. I can see the envy and curiosity pushing his colon up, up and out of his mouth . . . You know, he caught me with the stencil-pen in my ear.’

  Dr Kapila had naturally been given one of the office’s newer Ambassadors, air-conditioned, black-glassed, fitted with a stereo and a bottle of scent on the velvet-coloured dashboard. ‘Where would you like to lunch, Mr Sen?’

  ‘The Bageecha, sir.’ Mr Sen was feeling happy after two large, quick rums. ‘It’s new, sir, an air-conditioned greenhouse, very interesting, tropical lush stuff, enormous potted plants, practically sky-high, all fake plastic, and sometimes a live band that specializes, according to the crooner, in rarities—which means terrible songs that no one in the restaurant has ever heard before. He’s clever, thinks the crooner, because if you send in a request for one of your favourites, an oldie goldie, what in my youth I would have called An All Time Classic—Now Or Never, for example . . . did you too, when you were young, sir, categorize books, movies and songs into All Time Classic, Classic, All Time Great, Great, All Time Time Pass and Time Pass? . . . Agonising, these decisions of one’s nonage . . . But the fuc—crooner. He’ll read your request, blowjob the microphone, crack a joke into it about your request—very personal, in bad taste—and then sing something else, which’ll sound as though he composed it that morning in the bus, squeezed in the crush of peak hour, with his nose jammed into a couple of armpits.’

  ‘Twenty-five years ago, when I was Assistant Collector at Pinchpaguda, your father was my Commissioner. How is he now?’

  ‘In fine fettle, to use one of his phrases. Strong enough to break a camel’s back. Not that he’d want to, of course.’

  ‘Please give him my warmest regards when you next communicate with him.’

  ‘Certainly sir. Raj Bhavan has a fax now, for sure. Do you want to fax him yourself, directly? When your regards arrive just like that, out of the blue, I’m sure that he’ll be very—well, warmed.’

  ‘I have the Raj Bhavan fax number somewhere already, thank you.’

  Their waiter was moustached and in the black and white of a penguin. Dr Kapila waved the booze menu away. Agastya recalled it to order a Scotch and soda. ‘I’m nervous, sir, if you don’t mind, to be frank. Alcohol, I’ve noticed, sharpens my wits. In office, at least. And this is a working lunch, certainly. Finance Secretary and all that.’

  ‘When I chose you for your present BOOBZ post, I’d remembered what you were like. You must be a chip off the old block, I’d reminded myself. Menon in Personnel told me that you’d whizzed off on long leave because from your Manure Supply post, you wanted to avoid going back to Madna as Collector for a second time—and that you returned from leave for the BOOBZ post only because you ran out of money.’

  ‘Ah, but Menon the triple agent didn’t tell you why I ran out of money. Because I had neither a PA nor a peon while I was on leave, that’s why. Meaning that to collect my monthly pay cheque from the Treasury, I had no lackey to send, so I’d to go myself. The Treasury of course is part of your empire, isn’t it, sir? The clerk wanted three hundred rupees before he released me my salary. Don’t be silly, you fool, I retorted, I belong to the Steel Frame, you can’t expect me to bribe you, harass somebody else.

  ‘My reaction must have offended him because as a result, he packed me off on a sort of treasure hunt in the Treasury. Here, get an authorization from the Treasury Officer, the Drawing and Disbursing Officer’s clearance, the signature of the Accounts Officer, the counter-signature of your Controlling Officer and a copy of the sanction order, duly certified by at least the Assistant Financial Controller. Toughski-shitski, marathon man, chip off the old block, absolutely, that I am, I plodded off on the first round of the hunt. I joined a queue of forty-odd losers, all lumpen, waiting to meet some bugger who wasn’t, as we say, in his seat. The peon at the door, crafty and smelly like some creature out of a fairy tale, officially had no idea when the bugger would return but for a bribe could ensure that I slipped in to meet him first of all, way before the lumpen. Class consciousness, I dare say.

  ‘Look here, I thundered, Steel Frame and all that, the lawful Descendant of the Child of Empire. The peon retorted that he’d summon the police and turn me in for impersonating an Honourable Member of the Civil Service. Shattered by the encounter with the real world, unable to control my trembling calves and chattering teeth, and with my blood at sub-zero, I prepared to wobble off to borrow some money from my uncle to last out the month. Man, what a fucking jungle. At the next table pleaded a doddering old bird whose pension they had suddenly stopped. It had taken him six devastating visits to find out that the cause was the Proof-of-Life Certificate that he needed to submit once every five years, that he obviously hadn’t deposited in time and—silly man—that was not to be confused with the attested receipts of payment that were required every month. It simply wasn’t enough proof of life that he had showed up in person before the clerk.

  ‘Who was being admirably logical, patient and unhelpful. He was a nobody, a mere clerk, a file-pusher and -preserver, certainly not a taker of—ugh!—decisions. Go and meet my boss, he’d suggested helpfully—after taking pity on the old man, as it were. The boss of course hadn’t been available on any of those six visits. The clerk had even mooted that it was time for a revolution.

  ‘It boggles the mind, sir, that millions of similar cases of harassment occur every day. I’d even propose that as an economy measure, we substitute for life imprisonment for our criminals a series of such encounters with the Welfare State at what Dr Bhatnagar—our Ace of Spades—would call the operative level. It would surely finish the criminal off within weeks and we wouldn’t moreover have to suffer any of that tiresome rubbish about Human Rights in our jails. I’ve thought most of it out. The thugs can choose from the electricity, telephones and municipal offices. The complaints that’ll be thrust on them will be some of the standard ones—the phone’s been dead, for example, ever since it’s been installed and just because one’s written in in rather strong terms, one’s received a bill of two lakh rupees, that sort of thing. One can pick and choose from the Grievances columns of any of the daily newspapers.

  ‘Two: I’ve decided that the rapists and murderers will be dispatched to our State hospitals to be treated for tuberculosis. That wouldn’t be—if you’ll pardon the expression, sir—a criminal wastage of resources because apparently we all have either active or dormant TB. If not, it can be quite easily picked up from the OPD itself. Rest assured, sir, that the hospital will take care of them all. They’ll cut them open, insert—and abandon—a rusted pair of scissors in the folds of the small intestine, stitch them up again right as rain and send them off with a pat on their backs for being so cooperative on the operating table. Each time the rapist returns with a complaint of high fever, pus in his belly button and an agonizing tummy ache, they’ll slice him open and slip in another rusted instrument. No wonder that our hospitals whine all the time about shortfalls in surgical appliances.

  ‘Three: Should women criminals be packed off to the labour room? Need more be said? Your kind attention is invited to one of the State hospitals in the north somewhere, where, just before lunch, an intern found himself alone with a woman in labour in the delivery room. Alone because, according to the muddled newspaper report, everybody else had downed tools—a vulgar expression, I’ve always felt—in a lightning strike. The intern must therefore, before anything else, be applauded for his heroism.

  ‘The foetus was in breech. The intern, having no idea what to do, panicked. He rushed up and down the corridors for a while, blubbering for help, but found nobody else on duty, apparent
ly, except a second heroic intern who was going nuts trying to patch up some fat puling hunger-striker who’d been shot at by passing terrorists while he’d been protesting against something completely different—the Kansal Commission, I think. The first heroic intern returned to his responsibility, steeled himself, groped, found a leg of the foetus and yanked. He must have heaved pretty hard because, according to the box item, he stopped only when he realized that he’d left the head and shoulders behind. The report added that it was then that he zipped off to participate in the lightning strike.

  ‘From your expression, sir, I gather that you didn’t think that to be an appropriate yarn to accompany an aperitif, and that you wouldn’t wish such an adventure even on a criminal. But why do these horror stories happen only to the poor, the wretched, the fucked of the earth? Why not to our serial killers or to Dr Bhatnagar? The Welfare State exists—has been created—for them, hasn’t it, for the economically, socially, culturally damned. So we build them a hospital to which they walk fifteen kilometres to have their babies delivered. When we satisfactorily face these questions, we’ll be on our way into the next millennium with BOOBZ. God Deliver Us from Our Interns, by the way, was the title of the news item.

  ‘One of the biggest fears, sir, of the old block, incidentally, is that he’ll have his heart attack while in harness, that unconscious, he’ll be limousined off to the Intensive Care Unit of a Welfare State hospital—from which, naturally, he’ll never return because he’ll be at the mercy of the behemoth. After so many distinguished years in the civil service, what is my daily prayer? Heaven help me, O Lord, from any encounters with the State as a private citizen. Against the cop, the telephone linesman, the property tax assessor and Dr Bhatnagar, I must have my PA, my peon and my white Ambassador car. How many civil servants do you know, sir, who zip off on long leave just for the heck of it? A handful, I bet. They’re too scared.

  ‘Calves still trembling, I’d phoned Dhrubo for counsel. Dhrubo Jyoti Ghosh-Dastidar. Do you know him? He’s a couple of years my junior in the cadre, but we’ve been friends since KG. He’s here in Aflatoon Bhavan and is my mole at the Centre. He knows people in Personnel. Last week, he managed, for example, to avoid being posted as Deputy Chief Assessor of Confiscated Contraband. He tells me that the villains are unhappy with me and want me out of the way. A monstrously unjust world.

  ‘Dhrubo it was who had suggested that I immediately return from leave, join an office somewhere and send a cop off to the Treasury for my salary arrears. We aren’t a Police State yet, I’d reminded him loftily. Once installed here, I requested our top agent, a genius at liaison, the backbone of this dungheap, Madam Tina, to do the needful. She returned with the bank. Arrears that I hadn’t dreamed of existed, lots of Regularization of Pre-Revised Pay Scales Emoluments, and Advance Interim Reliefs. Spirit soaring with visions of freedom, sick to death of Dr Bhatnagar, I applied for leave on the grounds that my mother’s become serious once more.’

  ‘Doesn’t he know that she’s dead?’

  ‘He’s God’s bad joke on Asia. Nothing that doesn’t concern him moves a bloody centimetre. So he hasn’t yet recommended my leave application. Fed up with him, I then sent in last week a letter of resignation from the civil service. Those are the only two pieces of paper on his desk. He can’t handle either.’

  A second waiter drifted over with the real menu. Agastya ordered a third Scotch, chicken tikkas, prawn fried rice, mutton curry and pork vindaloo. In pointed contrast, Dr Kapila asked for some light vegetarian crap, an eggless salad, a raita, mineral water, that sort of thing. Agastya gazed at him both happily and warily, that is, he’d half-guessed what the lunch was for, he didn’t care, he liked the impression of his companion that he’d received of a shy, gentle, well-bred and slightly boring nature, and he still wanted to see how he, Dr Kapila, would play his cards. It was good to be drunk. Sober, such a lunch with a teetotaller, vegetarian, Brahmin, senior civil servant who had, moreover, a genuine Ph.D in Economics, for him would have been inconceivable.

  He’d been reluctant to speak of their work in the office and had tried to hide his unwillingness by babbling of other things. He couldn’t see how he’d be able to convincingly explain to an outsider the pointlessness, the horrifyingly comic futility and irrelevance of the daily acts of their official lives. Dr Kapila wouldn’t believe him and would probably mentally dismiss him as juvenile, silly and unnecessarily mean. He couldn’t have believed himself.

  Not when he described, just as an example, the routine crisis that all of last week had convulsed the office, truly a place of no illusions. A fine morning, the sun had promised to be clean and warm, it had looked as though the West Indies would lose the cricket, so one-half simply hadn’t turned up at office and another quarter had melted away after attendance. Dr Bhatnagar had been tied up—literally, Agastya liked to imagine—in the Home Ministry. Kalra and Agastya therefore had settled down on the sofa before the telly in Dr Bhatnagar’s office room. Agastya had been feeling particularly good all morning because the office car had picked him up from home on time—well, almost, give or take an hour.

  Those were his principal moments of office-related tension during the day. Would the bugger show up or not, or would he have to phone Footstench only to learn that none of the cars were free because Sherni Auntie and Bitiya had commandeered one each? Three times a week on the average, when the car failed to turn up, he, cursing the life that he led, would drive to office in his uncle’s falling-to-pieces Ambassador. Apart from the moments when the traffic frightened him to death, the twenty minutes that he spent behind the wheel tended to be self-harrowing. Just why are you, in your fucking middle-age, wasting your life away, driving a kerosene tin that’s going to break down on you right now, in the next five minutes, even though you spend five thousand rupees every month on it and a further five thousand on petrol? And just where’s all that money coming from? Why aren’t you outside this car, begging on the streets, on crutches at a traffic light, importuning the windows of cars that contain suckers like you? However, when you think of where you’re heading to, of the smog-like, grey blankness of the day to come, can you will yourself to change gears, steer this wheel, pump these brakes? Quite often, in a routine traffic jam, he’d got out of the car, lifted the bonnet, feigned a breakdown and pretended to fiddle with what he thought were called spark plugs simply because sitting behind the wheel had become unbearable, because he needed to have something to do, even if it was only to add to the chaos by accidentally, in passing, touching and disturbing a wire or tube that would actually lead to the car not starting up when the snarl at last showed signs of letting up; it seemed as good a way of passing the day as hanging around in office. So low had his self-esteem been on such occasions that he’d distinctly heard disembodied voices snickering to one another: Aha—the arsehole’s on his way to office and The monkey’s prick is down and out and blue. The voices had made him feel like Joan of Arc till he’d realized that they’d snickered in Hinglish, the language of tomorrow.

  In office, they hadn’t expected Dr Bhatnagar to show up at all. Not only because of the West Indies, but also because of the successful official dinner that he’d hosted three evenings before, to which he’d invited, inter-alia, to be frank, the key Additional Secretary in External Affairs who dealt with UN postings, along with some of the chaps in Commerce. At the dinner, he’d drunk one Scotch rather quickly under the cold fish-eyes of Sherni Auntie, got high more on nervousness than alcohol and wolfed down the food with both hands because it’d been both sumptuous and free. All evening, Sherni Auntie had as usual supervised with eagle eye the loading of the tiffin-carriers that had been dispatched home at regular intervals of half-an-hour to satisfy the nutritional needs of her expanding children. The office mini-van, dubbed the Gravy Train by Agastya and the Dining Car by the cooks, had been specifically assigned to the kitchen for ferrying the food. Overseeing the stewards during the filling up of the tiffin carriers was essential, so Sherni Auntie had learnt
through bitter experience. For on the occasions that she hadn’t been around, the poor things at home had received what she indignantly called stepmotherly treatment—to wit, two compartments of curry but no pieces of mutton, dal but no fried fish, boiled rice but no chicken biryani, potato chops but no paneer tikka, potato fingers but no devilled eggs, chapatis but no methi parathas, a couple of tins of condensed milk but no carrot halwa. ‘It’s the greed and vulgarity of these lower fellows,’ Dr Bhatnagar had clarified, sucking gravy off the fingers of his left hand. ‘You see, they’re simply not used to good food and all that.’

  At these dinners, the duties of Agastya, Kalra and Footstench were to wear ill-fitting suits and hang around. Periodically, they’d fade into one of the anterooms of the Liaison Suite and sort of bathe in Glenfiddich and Royal Salute. After each Patiala peg, they’d munch mouthfuls of cardamom and walk out slowly and carefully to check on things, particularly Sherni Auntie, short, white, snub-nosed, not especially fat elsewhere but with the fattest, jelly-like arse that the Liaison Suite had ever seen, complete with a subcutaneous life of its own. Time and again, Agastya watched the faces of the guests when it traversed them; there was not one head that did not swivel to observe its gelatinous passage. It petrified the entire office, her husband most of all. In front of it, he behaved as nervously as, to use Kalra’s carefully-chosen simile, a child before its stepmother. ‘He’s an orphan, didn’t you know?’ The omniscient PA had revealed. ‘Which goes to show, doesn’t it, that even orphans can be bastards.’