The Mammaries of the Welfare State

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  Cannabis and Piles: Didn’t de Quincey and Sherlock Holmes have haemorrhoids? Please find out. Also, it is extraordinary how many civil servants have piles. In my eight years, I myself’ve met Kulmohan Singh, Killer Venkita, Shengupto, Singhvi and Tutreja. The Fellowship of the Rose. Surely sitting around on files can’t be the cause. But how fascinating if there’s a link.

  One of the challenges of his job that he’d particularly liked was acquiring dope simply and inconspicuously. The best dope in town was of course with the police, kilos and kilos of it seized in routine raids and swoops. The Superintendent of Police of Madna, Shri Pannalal Makkad, wise and wicked, had already sent the Collector a consignment of the best.

  Though Shri Makkad, socially and culturally, came from a different planet, Agastyaji the Collector Saab got on well with him and considered him a friend. They had socialized twice in the first ten days—booze, reminiscences and a terribly late dinner. Shri Makkad’s recollections of thirty-five years spent in the service of the Police State were what enthralled Agastya. For, as he joked all the time to whoever was listening, for the life of him, in his eight years of service, he hadn’t been able to distinguish between the Police State and the Welfare State. There wasn’t any difference between the two, was there?

  The Welfare State, for example, was totally committed to Protecting The Planet, but who actually profited the most out of illegal tree felling and the criminal timber trade? The police, of course. The Welfare State had outlawed beggary, but just before the visit of Gorbachev or Nelson Mandela, when it actually wanted to keep the beggars out of sight, who did it turn to to round them up, stuff them into trucks and ferry them a hundred kilometres out of the city? The police, of course. ‘We can never Eradicate Poverty,’ Shri Makkad used to intone over his fourth whisky, ‘but we can eradicate the poor. All we need is intelligent legislation.’ When the intelligent legislation of the Welfare State backfired horribly, as when, on the basis of the recommendations of the Kansal Commission, it ratified the reservation of an awesome seventy- three per cent of all its jobs for different categories of Backward, Depressed, Repressed and Suppressed Classes and Castes, and thus triggered off nationwide riots that left officially eighty-four dead and unofficially 342, whom did it, the Welfare State, blubberingly beseech to stop the carnage? Its police force, of course, which later, frenziedly searching for a scapegoat, it blamed for provoking the riots in the first place. Agastya respected the police because it was everywhere and always there to create the shit, wallow in it, to take it. When his monthly Small Savings target, for instance, fell short by a few lakhs, he wouldn’t bother to summon his slothful Assistant Directors of Small Savings to exhort them all afternoon to move their butts. No. Instead, he’d phone Makkad and ask him to send around his most persuasive Station House Officer to the more prominent traders and businessmen of Madna with an earnest appeal to participate in the State’s laudable schemes. Again, when he wanted a train ticket in a couple of hours, or when he found that the garbage dump at the junction of the main road and his lane had mounted high enough for Moses, he’d turn—not to the Railways or the Municipality—but to the constables who hung around the gates of his house.

  Madna is probably Makkad’s last appointment before he retires. He’d been posted as Police Superintendent in that district once before. He is a widower. Rumour has it that he burnt his wife some twenty years ago in a fit of rage because she used to criticize his drinking. All of Madna can attest to his ill-temper.

  During his first stint as Police Superintendent, at the Hemvati Aflatoon Welfare State Home for the Visually Disadvantaged, an infuriated attendant, with a hot ladle, had gouged out the right eye of a blind girl, just because at breakfast she had asked for a second helping of gruel. The incident, naturally, had stunned Madna and the entire region. Questions had been vociferously asked in the Legislative Assembly. The tabloids of the town, led by the yellowest of the lot, the Dainik, had plastered the face of the victim on their front pages and run interviews with the unrepentant attendant for days on end. Several protest marches and processions had been organized and the redoubtable Shri Bhootnath Gaitonde himself, on the morning of the District Planning and Development Council meeting, had led seventy blind students of the Home and about a hundred of their supporters in a dramatic silent march to the Council Hall. The—men of vision, shall we say? including Shri Gaitonde—had all worn dark glasses to—presumably—symbolically and visually underscore their support of the purpose of the march. The men of vision had thought the dark glasses a brilliant idea, but the Superintendent of Police hadn’t. Makkad had been so incensed by what he considered tasteless and gimmicky exhibitionism that he’d verbally commanded the constables on duty at the Council Hall to swagger out and cosh the non-blind protesters about a bit. Unfortunately, the police coshed more than a bit and did not discriminate amongst the dark glasses.

  Sixteen grievously injured and seventy-one with bumps on the head. Shri Gaitonde was rendered speechless with ecstasy at this heaven-sent opportunity to plague the Welfare State. And plague it he did, with elan and gusto, exploiting the mishap at every turn till the next elections, when he formed the New Vision Party and won the Madna seat of the Legislative Assembly. Of course, a high-level enquiry was ordered into the incident and the State appointed the then Managing Director of the State Industrial Development Corporation, Bhupen Raghupati, to conduct it. The Superintendent of Police, deposing before the Enquiry Officer, was aghast at the insinuation of the Inspector on duty at the Council Hall that he, the Superintendent, had ordered the lathi charge against the procession. When he learnt of the Superintendent’s stupefaction, the Inspector, who knew what was what, in turn retracted his statement, instead owned up himself to having ordered the assault and on the advice of his well-wishers, pleaded temporary insanity on the morning of the march because of sunstroke and exhaustion. The Civil Surgeon of Madna, a pleasant sluggard called Alagh, certified that during the enquiry proceedings itself, the Inspector had suffered a relapse of the same whatever-it-had-been-that’d driven-him-round-the-bend and needed to be hospitalized immediately. After fifteen months of cogitation, the Enquiry Officer concluded that since the Inspector had acted when not in complete control of himself, he needed first to be issued a stern warning against such lapses of reason in the future and second, to be posted to a less strenuous job where he could be observed for a few months. Only thereafter could the extent of his guilt be accurately ascertained. In his recommendations, the Enquiry Officer himself suggested a transfer to either the Police Wives’ Welfare Board or The Police Sports Stadiums Authority.

  In the February section of his diary, Shri Sen recorded this characteristic activity of the Welfare State as worthy of further scrutiny under the title Withering the Buck:

  In his address to the nation on Independence Day next year, the Prime Minister would do well to exhort his countrymen to take to rugby. Perhaps one of the reasons that we pass so well is that there are so many of us around for the relay—and each time the buck passes, it’s funny how it becomes vague, loses focus and direction, how its passing never ends—it just gets tired and disintegrates, withers, like a cripple paralysed on the grass verge of some monstrous highway, slowly crumbling into dust. A golden rule: When you’re with your boss, always, always make sure that your subordinate is with you—someone to whom you can pass on the spot. In an emergency, even the driver’ll do. If you’re so inclined, you can even turn around and wave to the buck as it recedes, withers and disintegrates.

  ‘Chidambaram, phone the SP’s office and tell them that Gaitonde is on his way . . . Do we have decent envelopes? . . . Probably not . . . Did you ask the boy to buy some envelopes as well? . . .’ Chidambaram bows his head in shame. His bald dome gleams with the sweat of contrition. ‘ . . . Never mind . . . Have our daftaris started remaking envelopes in their spare time? . . . I’m sure not, despite my recent circular . . . unofficially inform all our peons and daftaris—how many do we have? . . . forty-seven? . . . tha
t if I don’t see fifty remade envelopes from each one of them by the end of this week, I’ll stop their pay.’ This is power.

  A sort of razor’s-edge sanity as well. Agastya has always been a voracious reader of trash. Thus, he’s taken to—and devoured—with enthusiasm the literature of the Welfare State—handbooks, manuals, statutes, reports, returns, gazettes, minutes, memorandums, documents, correspondence, affidavits, acts, and regulations; periodically, he distils what he reads into circulars for the edification of his office. He has sedulously maintained that though ignorance is bliss, knowledge is power, and the servants of the Welfare State need to know well the facets of their master.

  His favourite bedtime reading is the Revised Manual of Office Procedure. It has often kept him up till the wee hours, marvelling at his master; it’s been one of the richest sources for his exhortations to his subordinates.

  To help you to use your time more efficiently in office and to ensure that you are economical in the use of the stationery and property of the Welfare State, your kind attention is drawn once more to Rule 17c (iv) of Section 28 of Chapter III. I quote ad verbatim from the Revised Manual. Please note that the Manual was last revised not in the last century, but in 1981.

  ‘i) Those note sheets that are blank on one side, do not contain confidential matter and have been retrieved from old files that have otherwise been marked for destruction should be used in new files for notes.

  ‘ii) Envelopes with communications inside them that are received from other offices should be carefully slit open (and not carelessly torn apart) and preserved. After a sufficient number has accumulated, they should be handed over to the peons and daftaries so that they can remake envelopes in their spare time. The correct procedure for remaking envelopes is to unstick the gummed portions, turn the envelopes inside out and regum the ends neatly. Pasting slips of paper on used envelopes is not the correct method of making them fit for use again. The last procedure, observed too often in our offices, smacks of laziness and lack of discipline. Also, its end product reflects rather badly on the financial resources of the Welfare State.

  ‘iii) All communications that have to be sent to the same address on the same day should, as far as possible, be collected together and sent in a single envelope or in the smallest number of envelopes that will with ease contain them all.’

  As Collector and District Magistrate of, and the principal representative of the Welfare State in, Madna, I feel that it is one of my pivotal functions to encourage my colleagues and staff to continually reflect on the nature of their duties and responsibilities, and thereafter to suggest ways and means of improving our present system, for which—I am sure that my colleagues will agree—there exists ample scope. There is always room for improvement—even when one doesn’t want it.

  Though the circular was Agastya’s, its inspiration could just as well have been Prime Minister Bhuvan Aflatoon or his Think Tank. They did that sort of thing all the time, though of course on a far grander scale. It was part of the magic of the new PM, of a government that was going places while breezing forward into the new millennium. In February of that year, for example, Agastya himself had attended a District Collectors’ Conference summoned by Bhuvan himself, no less, at the Gajapati Aflatoon TFIN (The Future Is Now) Complex in the capital.

  The Conference had been a pleasantly chaotic affair, with two hundred-odd cutthroat-keen delegates from all over the country, all spectacles and statistics, in an atmosphere of quiet turmoil, brimming with Black Guard Commandoes glaring menacingly at everyone else while bumping into one another, the sort of place to which one could ferry an old, insane or troublesome parent when one wanted to lose him forever.

  The conference had puzzled everybody—quite naturally, since it had been dreamed up by the Prime Minister’s New Men as the best way of Getting to Know the Cutting Edge of Administration. The several rungs between the Prime Minister and the District Collectors—the Cabinet Ministers, Chief Ministers, Secretaries to the Centre, Chief Secretaries, Additional Secretaries, Principal Secretaries, Joint Secretaries, Commissioners, Directors, Deputy Secretaries, Joint Commissioners and Additional Directors—in all, about sixty thousand servants of the state—had felt left out, hurt, relieved and happy. The agenda had been freewheeling, that is, had followed whatever had brushed the tabula rasa of Bhuvan Aflatoon’s mind. He himself had looked rather cute—fresh and starched in his white khadi churidaar-kurta set, his pink jowls and helipad nose glistening with the complacence born out of believing completely his white khadi-clad sycophant- advisors. ‘Ever since I took over this hot seat,’ he’d minced into the microphone with a beguiling simper, ‘I’ve wanted to have a brainstorming session with you all, the scalpels—indeed, the scissors, knives, and pincers—and the hands, arms and legs, to boot—of my government . . .’ Talk to me, tell me all, he’d declared in his otherwise-beautifully-phrased inaugural address, what’s it really like out there.

  The sixty thousand who hadn’t been invited to the conference had been surprised that the Prime Minister was so foolish as to spend an entire day lending an ear to the hot air emanating from two hundred junior civil servants. True, all that blah did pull Bhuvan down a bit; he left at five looking more grey than pink.

  Since, a year and a half later, Agastya proposed marriage for the first time to Daya in the main auditorium of the Gajapati Aflatoon TFIN Complex, it will not be amiss to devote a couple of lines to it at this stage.

  It is an impressive, ten-storey structure. The original building took eight years to construct and cost the earth. Over the years, to keep up with the times and the state of the art, it has—at impressive expense—been periodically renovated. It is the happening place of the Welfare State. It has a series of convention halls, the largest of which can seat two thousand, facilities for simultaneous translation into five international and fourteen national languages, central air- conditioning that works right through the most parlous summers, an enormous five-star cafeteria the weekly menu of which diplomatically does justice to the different regional cuisines of the country, an advanced closed-circuit television system, terrifically modern computer and communication gadgetry and—not the least—an unusually eco-friendly, open car-parking area, with bougainvillea, neem, gulmohar, jacaranda and unnoticed wild Congress grass separating the berths of tarmac.

  Dominating the vast central lobby of TFIN Complex stands a not-bad-looking, two-storey-high, abstract sculpture in red sandstone that—obviously—is not meant to look like anything specific on earth, but sometimes resembles three mammoth, irregularly-concentric ovals, and at other times a huge stone female breast with an alarmingly large, inverted nipple ringed by a mysterious, presumably decorative, ovoid quoit of a lighter shade. The sculptor was the late Balwant Chhabra, dear friend of Pashupati Aflatoon. He took six years to create his gift to the Complex, christened it Om, was apoplectic when the press criticized it, married—almost in revenge—an ageing French yoga student and dope addict, and flew off with her to the west coast of France to shiver in the winds, complain of the cold and the food and feel sorry for himself before dying of a heart attack—of a broken heart, lamented his country after he’d gone.

  Om is the primal sound of the universe, he’d explained to a mystified Pashupati Aflatoon, the-then Education and Heritage Minister, at the chaotic unveiling of the sculpture. Om is the Beginning of Communication, of Connection and therefore of Existence, because it is the seminal Chord, the first vibration that shatters the vacuum. If The Future Is Now, then we’re in tune with time and—here in this foyer of a Modern Temple of Discourse, Debate and Dialogue, how better to express the harmony of our intentions with the Beginning, the Now and the To Come, than by the concrete depiction of the Fundamental Sound?

  ‘Bravo—yes, I now see what you mean,’ Pashupati Aflatoon had pronounced with calm conviction, ‘I think you should write it all down—exactly as you said—and give it to the Deputy Secretary, and we’ll put it up on a black marble plaque right next to this thing
. Very good. Thank you, Balli.’

  ‘Payṇcho,’ an aghast Balwant Chhabra is reported to have muttered in response. The entire event has been described in fair detail in the racy—but generally unreliable—memoirs of Balwant’s half-mad half-sister, who was present at the unveiling because she never left his side, not even—it is said—at night. The work is in Punjabi-Hindustani. After Balwant took flight with his French dope addict, she plagued him with faxes and letters to move his arse to get European publishing houses to translate and publish the opus.

  It is likely, however, that on that occasion, the sculptor did react to the Minister’s suggestion with a Payṇcho because it was his primal sound—was—is—indeed, the fundamental expression of a whole culture, that of the north country. The actual Hindustani word of course is Bahenchod, that is, Sister-Fucker, but time, usage and a sluggish tongue have weathered the three syllables down to two and of them, honed the first and abbreviated and softened the second. More fragmented than Om, less solemn, more nasal, whining, less sure, less complete, nearer to the heart, more physical, Payṇcho more correctly expresses the Zeitgeist, the state of the times. In her memoirs, therefore, Balwant’s half-sister continually alludes to his sculpture at the TFIN Complex as Payṇchom.

  Of course, in her defence, it should be clarified here that the word doesn’t simply mean Sister-Fucker anymore. The most respectable Punjabi and Hindustani speakers use it in everyday discourse as an exclamation, a succinct comment, en passant, on the human condition. ‘This morning, Payṇcho, it was raining Payṇcho, so hard Payṇcho, that I decided Payṇcho not to bathe. Payṇcho the dog refused to Payṇcho go out Payṇcho for his morning potty Payṇcho and he did it Payṇcho on my wife’s Payṇcho office shoes.’