The Mammaries of the Welfare State

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  ii) When did you start being corrupt? Was your father corrupt? Your mother? Was she a Customs official, by any chance? Did you ever steal money from your servant?

  iii) Do you prefer bribes in cash or in kind? Diwali gifts of laser-disc videos? Johnnie Walker Blue? Paid holidays in Goa? With pussy?

  iv) Is it true that Mrs Raghupati began life as a profitable foreign exchange racketeer? Capital gains tax, securities, trade cartels, import/export regulations, over-invoicing, duty evasion, bank charges, gold smuggling, tax havens, chronic balance of payments crisis—that she understands and freely uses such phrases daily? Is it a fact that she abandoned her Economics degree in her second year in college to try her luck at the Miss India Beauty Contest?

  v) Don’t you find it morally baffling that criminals like you are nowadays—sort of, well—admired?

  Dr Kapila himself did. At the Golf Club, twenty years ago, he imagined that someone like Lala’d’ve been shunned—like the pariah in the play school who’s done potty in his pants—but in the present Dark Age, it depressed him to see that when a Lala type stepped out of his after-office-hours, chauffeur-driven, personal Cielo, and womanishly swayed into the foyer of the Club, cootchie-cooing to his kids on his mobile phone because he’d simply no time for them in the evenings at home, heads of other Lala types turned; they waved from across the hall and loudly, in Hinglish, invited him over for a drink.

  Changing times, no doubt—and hence morally baffling. One couldn’t easily distinguish anymore between the Club type and the Lala type. They both wore Arrow shirts and perfumed themselves, as though their deodorizers were extinguishers for their armpits on fire.

  vi) Please confirm that what follows is your modus operandi. In any given set-up, you will first identify the principal source of power. Once identified, you’ll push, with single-minded sycophantic intensity, to get close. When within sucking distance, you’ll genuflect. Then, your relationship having stabilized, you’ll magnanimously share your booty and your soul with him.

  Dr Kapila knew of bureaucrats who, whenever they met the present Head of the political party in power—which was about twice a week—in greeting, touched his feet with their hands, and on holidays and festivals, with their foreheads—and when they feared his displeasure, with their lips. When Dr Kapila sat across from such colleagues at meetings or stood beside them in the Officers’ Only urinal gazing pointedly ahead at the tiles before their noses, he’d often wanted to ask them how it actually felt, physically, to kiss someone else’s feet. The owner of which—the Soul of the Masses, the Beacon of the Downtrodden, the Great Light himself—had reputedly told his inner circle about the more sycophantic civil servant: ‘If I ask them to eat my shit, they’ll gobble it up with salt, pepper, chilli powder and gratitude.’

  vii) However can you do it? How can you face an applicant across your office table and how can your lips and tongue frame words like: ‘Perhaps we can meet in the evening to discuss your case’—or whichever words wicked people use in such circumstances. How come my middle-classness makes me uncomfortable and suspicious in front of any applicant in a safari suit and mobile phone and your middle-classness makes you want to befriend him?

  viii) It has been suggested that you accept bribes only from persons officially richer than you. Given your salary, that means a lot of people, doesn’t it? Do you therefore consider yourself a socialist? Do you dread the forthcoming Pay Commission Recommendations because they’ll upset your calculations?

  ix) May I include here an anecdote for you to mull over? It concerns a certain Agastya Sen who, three years ago, was an Under Secretary—and my subordinate’s subordinate—in the Department of Labour.

  He dealt with Gulf Traffic—namely, he processed the papers of the thousands of skilled and semi-skilled workers—electricians, plumbers, carpenters, masons, fitters, welders, tailors, gardeners, barbers, garage mechanics, undertakers—who were lured by crafty middlemen every month to the Persian Gulf with the promise of a better—if not life, then at least pay. His task was Herculean—to eliminate, as far as possible, the craftiness of each deal, to establish its bona fides, to try and ensure that the worker, in each of thousands of cases, wasn’t being ensnared, for example, into a kind of slavery, or some flesh racket, or into becoming a courier for the drug trade. The pressures of the job, as Sen discovered on Day One, were enormously harrowing—an unending stream of oily, bright-eyed visitors whose every syllable seemed to insinuate at a bribe, phone calls from the most unexpected higher-ups about how to decide certain cases; from three in the afternoon onwards, another endless line of bouquets, boxes of sweets, baskets of dry fruit—as though he’d just got married or promoted, or the country’d won a crucial one-day cricket match. Upset, feeling as though he was about to drown, he began to refuse all the gifts, even the flowers. His obstinacy made his visitors look at him sadly and long.

  By the end of Week One, honest, upright, upper-middle-class Sen learnt that he simply couldn’t trust his superiors and Dr Kapila’s immediate subordinates; by the middle of Week Two, his personal staff either. Close to cracking up, he nipped off to Personnel to ask to be transferred. Oh no, hang in there, admonished Personnel, after its usual fashion and because it couldn’t be bothered. You’ve been sent there to clean up the muck. You’re doing a great job, we hear. Keep it up.

  Sen stayed those days in one of the holes in the Prajapati Aflatoon Welfare State Public Servants’ Housing Complex Transit Hostel near the Pashupati Aflatoon Public Gardens. Those familiar with the Transit Hostel and its ghastly layout know that outside each flat, alongside the doorbell, is a handy letter box in which the residents receive their daily milk, newspapers and their occasional mail. Three Sundays after Sen had joined the Department of Labour, at eight-thirty in the morning, along with two packets of full-cream milk, The Statesman and The State of the Times, he found in the letter box of his flat a blue plastic packet that contained twenty one-hundred-rupee notes.

  He was infuriated at having his Sunday morning disturbed by a petty feeler of a bribe. With its presence, the money clouded his morning tea and his 5BX exercise session. He needed to get rid of it before it ruined his entire day. At eleven, cursing his potential bribers, he put on his crash helmet and with the plastic packet in his knapsack, rode off on his bicycle.

  Beneath the new Trimurti Aflatoon Centenary Celebrations Flyover lived Sen’s favourite beggar family, a one-legged father, two nubile daughters and half-a-dozen younger siblings. He thrust the packet into the hands of one of the daughters and, overcome with emotion, sped off without waiting to see her reaction.

  He hadn’t travelled more than thirty metres from the spot when a sudden, frenzied and sustained yelling made him brake, stop and look back. A motorcycle—with two men on it, both in dark glasses, and with the pillion rider tucking something into his shirt front—flashed past him. The entire beggar family was out on the street, bawling, waving their arms, bringing traffic to a screeching halt, gesticulating frantically in the direction of the motorcycle, shouting at one another and at startled pedestrians, darting forward for a couple of steps, then stopping short as though they’d changed their minds, then springing forward again.

  With a shrill ring of protest from his bell, Sen took off after the villains. He hated motorcycles because they thought that they were sexy. He much preferred the knee-pumping openness of his Atlas bicycle. The booty-snatchers were nowhere in sight. At the first traffic light, he barked at the auto-rickshaw driver idling beside him, ‘Which way did they go!’

  ‘Who?’ asked the auto-wala, not unreasonably. Offended by Sen’s urgency, he dug deep into his nose and emerged with a comet—to wit, a hard head of snot with a long, liquidy tail—which he examined for a moment before flicking at Sen for his inspection. But in God’s scheme, all acts have a purpose, because in jerking his head away from the comet, Sen spotted the duo on the motorcycle on the other side of the street, shooting away from him, back the way he’d come and up the flyover. ‘Stop the thie
ves!’ he snapped at a neighbouring cyclist and jumping the red light, U-turned and zipped off after them, with a policeman’s enraged whistle screeching in his wake.

  Sen was an instinctive economist—one of the nation’s finest, was Dr Kapila’s firm opinion. Even on that bicycle, darting crazily through that indisciplined Sunday-morning traffic, he was breaking down and docketing away for further analysis some of the less obvious but nevertheless fascinating aspects of the activities of the past few hours—the Welfare State subsidies on petrol, for instance. Of what use were they? Why was the taxpayer paying for the energy source of the motorcycles of the hoodlums of the land? And unemployment, a knotted, vexed question. Had his quarry of the moment, those damned robbers of the poor, ever enrolled at an Employment Exchange or answered the advertisements of the Staff Selection Commission? Had they ever joined the service of the Welfare State, for example, in the Department of Rural Development and had they been clerks disbursing the funds of the Consolidated Agricultural Regeneration Programme, would they have robbed the poor more, or less? On the motorcycle, moreover, the scoundrels had—strictly speaking—merely snatched back their own money—or rather, their boss’s—and had in fact been hard at work, carrying out instructions for which they’d be paid a fee, or even a monthly salary; as delivery boys or Courier Supervisors, they probably had legitimate roles in some illegitimate organization, in the books of which their wages were all properly accounted for. Their zipping about on a motorcycle therefore was licit economic activity, whereas as clerks, while siphoning off funds in Rural Development, they’d actually be converting white legal money into black, thereby adding their bit to rock the touch-n-tumble balance of the State economy. To say nothing of their dubious contribution in their paperwork towards achieving the objectives of the Consolidated Agricultural Regeneration Programme. All in all, therefore, as an economist, a thinking man, keeping the welfare of the state in mind, ought he to chase the motorcyclists?

  A road block and a diversion at the bottom of the flyover. Just a board in the fast lane, propped up on a flower pot. It read: ROAD CLOSED. USE—↑, the arrow pointing at the heavens. Sen braked before an awesome Ganesh belly and demanded peremptorily, ‘Who is it? PM? Real route or decoy?’

  But he’d lost the chase, he knew it. He must learn for the future, though, how to dig deep for, emerge with and flick a comet, all in one smooth movement.

  It would be a useful counter-missile against the flying nosey of other cyclists which, he’d concluded after a few weeks’ pedalling in the capital, was the third most dangerous thing on the roads after public buses and the white Ambassador cars of the government. One couldn’t of course fight the flying nosey of others with one’s own because when one, without pausing in one’s cycling, swivelled one’s head to blow one’s nose in the air, one’s nosey unfortunately flew backwards to bespatter the cyclists behind one.

  He returned to his flat, defeated. He felt weird and foolish all day, tense, jittery, expecting the police to come and harass him any minute. In the evening, he dropped in unannounced—as was the custom in the Transit Hostel, it being as informal as a slum—on one of his neighbours, Dr Srinivas Chakki, an entomologist in the Ministry of Public Health. Over many cups of tea, Sen described and analysed the events of the day and life in general in the Department of Labour.

  ‘What was most significant, Dada, was that I, in person, even though it was only for less than a minute, could actually hand over what to them is a substantial sum of money, to some of the poorest of our poor—though of course, statistics and reports indicate that our urban poor are quite well-off when compared to their rural cousins. My beggar family actually has to pay some kind of rent, for instance, to some subterranean creature to be allowed to exist under the flyover. But nevertheless, it seems to me that I committed today a perfect, pure act of welfare that lasted all of forty seconds—that is to say, I pounced on the ill-earned money of some wicked man and handed it over—the well-thumbed, greasy, germ-packed cash, the naked notes themselves—to a bunch that needed it more than me. Could welfare be clearer, cleaner? None of that junk about helping the needy to stand on their own two feet. Because you don’t know either who the really needy are or what they truly want! Because your Village Information System functions not on fact, but on caste and clout! No fourteen-page forms to be filled in triplicate by an illiterate and submitted along with six annexures and a bribe at the Block office forty kilometres away after waiting in a queue for six hours—for all of which the applicant’ll get sixty rupees a month. No insanely complicated bank loan to buy a dried-up, malnourished cow when what the bugger really needs is water for his three square feet of plot. No, none of that. Just plain, hard, filthy cash passed on in a second to the female adults of the family for them to do what they like with. No imposing on the good citizenry that breathes at the bottom of the heap your own doctrinaire theories on what constitutes the good life. Only give them the means to define for themselves, by a process of trial and error, what the good life is.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t call me Dada. Just because we’re Bengali, you think that I can and want to be called Dada. Well, as the Bengalis love to say, we should change the system. I’ve a theory or two up my sleeve that however need some honing before I can roll my sleeves up and make them public.’

  The next morning, Sen made it a point to reach his office before everyone else. As soon as his PA showed up, he asked him to call the police, declaring that within the span of one hour that morning, there had been both an attempt to bribe him and a subsequent theft. His PA had looked doubtful, had raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips and gone away. He’d returned a while later to inform Sen that they hadn’t reckoned with the Police State. The Station House Officer of the local police station had apparently told the PA that he wasn’t going to move his arse all the way to Aflatoon Bhavan for an official as lowly as an Under Secretary and for crimes as mundane as bribery and theft.

  The Steel Frame in Sen had then swung into action. ‘Did you speak to him in Punjabi, English or Hindi? . . . Put him on the line, I’ll suck his balls dry in Punjabi.’

  By cop standards, the SHO was tall, slim, even good-looking. Sen’s PA later explained that their particular police station tended to have slimmer and better-looking men because the entire force collectively made a—well, minor—killing—just enough for their tea and cigarettes—out of seducing, terrorizing, beating up, sodomizing and blackmailing the closet homosexuals who cruised after dark in the Pashupati Aflatoon Public Gardens.

  ‘Well, you ought to’ve told me all that before. Was that why the meeting was such a cock-up? I mean, was I supposed to turn him on or he me or what?’

  The SHO had entered and saluted Sen with elaborate, stylized insolence, boots detonating on the floor, et cetera. While Sen’d wondered when to ask him to sit, then or a bit later, the SHO hid sat down, sighed, asked him in turn whether he could smoke and lit up while Sen had begun to point out to him that smoking was forbidden on Welfare State premises.

  ‘Ahhh . . . too late . . . perhaps next time,’ the SHO had lamented in Punjabi, examining his cigarette and exhaling richly at the table top. ‘Why do we issue regulations that we can’t implement? It gives governance a bad name. Makes the public conclude that we aren’t serious—I’m so sorry, would you like to smoke?’

  They’d got down to business. Sen had worked most of it out. ‘I usually turn up in office pretty early . . . before everybody else, before the day starts. I go through my files, plan my day, prepare for my meetings. My desk is usually spotless, from the way I’d left it the evening before. I’ve instructed my peon not to dust it. I dust it myself. He didn’t look hurt that I’d further lessened his workload. I keep the duster in the bottom drawer on the right-hand side of my desk. This morning, when I opened the drawer for the duster, I noticed on top of it a blue plastic packet. That drawer, I must make it clear, has never contained anything other than two dusters, a sheet or two of blotting paper, some pieces of chalk, and a fa
ir amount of rat shit, both dry and fresh. My skin began to tingle, gooseflesh and all that, as I opened the packet. It contained hundred-rupee notes. I counted them. My fingers were clumsy. Twenty in all. I folded the packet neatly—neater than it was, in fact, put it back in the drawer, picked up the duster and began reorganizing the dust on my table—my mind, as they say, in a whirl. I distinctly remember that I shut the drawer before beginning to dust. To cut a long story short, while dusting, I felt an urge to visit the toilet, so I went, leaving the duster on the table beside the phone, to the Officers’ Toilet, which is in the East Wing, next to the canteen of the Department of Mines. I was away from this room for about nine minutes—not more, I’d imagine. We can time it, if you like. I returned, finished dusting and opened the bottom drawer to put the duster back. The packet had disappeared. I searched the other drawers of the desk, the cupboard, those shelves . . . it wasn’t anywhere . . . I spent some time wondering whether I should simply forget the incident or report it as a case of attempted-bribery-cum-theft. I finally decided on being straightforward.’

  By spinning this yarn and lodging a complaint with the police, Sen’d actually hoped, in a schoolboyish, Enid Blytonish, Five-Go-Off-and-Bugger-George-on-Smuggler’s-Hill kind of way, to confound his adversaries, to show them that they were dealing not with a cretin, but with a major player, who knew the ropes and could call the shots. The meeting with the SHO therefore could be considered a turning point in his official life.

  For lazily, through the cigarette smoke, after hearing him out, the SHO drawled in Punjabi, ‘I’ve a constable waiting outside with your PA. We’ll call him in, you dictate your complaint, he’ll read it back to you, you both can sign it, we’ll give you a copy. But tell me, when you submit an FIR like that to your Tax Officer, saying that you’ve lost, say, ten thousand rupees—that’s simpler, and more respectable, than adding all those confusing details about the blue plastic packet and the Officers’ Toilet—does he grant you tax exemption or what?’