The Mammaries of the Welfare State

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  ‘Stop breaking the door down. Yes, who is it?’

  ‘Uh . . . do you stay here?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘No—I mean, do you stay here officially or are you a trespasser?’

  ‘You need help, brother.’

  In many cases, it is a neighbour who responds to the banging on the gate or door. He too is equipped with a torch and a weapon. If they wish, they can duel in the dark.

  ‘Yes? May I help you?’

  ‘I’m looking for a house.’

  ‘Yes? Which number?’

  ‘Uh . . . any number . . . any vacant house . . . is this one occupied?’

  ‘If you’re senior enough to move in on the sly, you shouldn’t be making such a racket.’

  After a couple of nights of house-hunting, the civil servants return to the Commissioner of Lands, Estates and Built-Up Properties with the addresses of three or four houses that they’ve liked, any one of which they wish allotted to them. The Assistant Commissioner scans the addresses, purses his lips and forwards the list to the Private Secretary to the Minister of Urban Affairs. Urban Affairs was once called the Ministry of Works, Housing, Roads and Edifices. As Prime Minister, Bhuvan Aflatoon officially rechristened it because he felt that Urban Affairs sounded more compact, honed, polished and directed. It could not, moreover, be abbreviated to an absurd acronym. The Prime Minister’s Office suggested to the Department of Constitutional Languages to pay Softsell, the ad agency that thought up the phrase Urban Affairs, a fee of fourteen lakh rupees. The ministerial change of name cost the taxpayers of the Welfare State twenty-seven lakh rupees in stationery and nameplates alone.

  Traditionally, in the Office of the Private Secretary to the Minister for Urban Affairs, the bribe rates for the allotment of official accommodation to civil servants are fixed according to location and carpet area. Changes in the rates are okay only up to a point, beyond which the overly avaricious Private Secretaries and Personal Assistants would be guilty of conduct unbecoming of a civil servant. Those stuffy, old-fashioned bureaucrats who refuse to cough up the bribe—and who sometimes are silly enough to complain—wait for about a year for accommodation, and are then allotted a flat on the sixth floor in the suburbs somewhere, in a grey building without a lift, or on the ground floor right next to an illegal abattoir.

  The air in the Private Secretary’s rooms was very fragrant, almost overpowering. Every hour, a daily-wage labourer padded about the luxuriously-carpeted floors, spraying room-freshener everywhere. Closer to the person of the Private Secretary, the more refined bouquet of his aftershave—airy, pine-forest-like—mingled with the rather vulgar scent of the room-freshener. With Raghupati’s entry, moreover, a blend of Yardley’s and sweat was added to the heady mix.

  Pleasantries . . . ‘It’s good to see you in this key post . . . your eyes are gleaming more than ever before . . .’ Then down to business . . . ‘My Minister has finally decided on two bungalows to house himself and his immediate staff. Both are on Ganapati Aflatoon Marg, Numbers 21 and 9. Neither of course features on the list that the Estates Commissioner sent us . . . a Security requirement, apparently . . . Number 21 is vacant and is meant for the Minister himself. The number is auspicious and the few changes required are fortunately quite minor . . . the kitchen at the moment faces east, that of course will have to be shifted to face north-west—at the very least . . . the Master Bedroom will also have to be moved to the east side. Then the number of stairs to the first floor are six short—our Baba is quite definite that the required figure shouldn’t be less than twenty-one . . . one wall of the camp office will have to be knocked down for windows—so that we can benefit from the favourable four o’clock light. The swimming pool needs to be filled up and made into an exclusive Visitors’ Hall—anyway, these are minor details, the main issue being that the Baba has vetted and cleared both the bungalows as auspicious. Number 9 unfortunately is at the moment occupied by the One and Only, Fair and Lovely Kum Kum Bala Mali—so the lurid posters of Baap Ko Jala Kar Raakh Kar Doonga called her. Can your Ministry issue her an order directing her to allow me to move in with her? . . .’ Stag chortling. ‘ . . . The location, conjunction and combination of Numbers 9 and 21 are exceedingly favourable—this type of positioning of houses is extremely rare and therefore doubly propitious, so Baba Mastramji has confirmed. I suggest that your Ministry write to Kum Kumji to prod her pussy a bit, come come, Madam-ji, your time’s up, pack your bags. I’ve found out that she was given official accommodation as a Nominated Cultural Luminary—extraordinary, some of the categories that our people come up with. Your letter could inform her that her Discretionary Allotment’s being cancelled because there hasn’t been any Significant Contribution to Culture from her in the last sixteen years—certainly none since the cabaret-in-the-rain, song-and-dance milestone in Moochhon Ki Kasam—do you remember it? Wet clothes, mammaries the size of Asia, jiggle jiggle, nipples like the heads of street urchins at your car window, some Bharatnatyam steps, crooning into her armpit, then all of a sudden, soaking see-through wet, she was at a temple before Kali, praying and warbling: Hey Ma, Aap Ke Paas Main Chhoti Si Aas Le KarAayi Hoon, that is to say, Hey Ma, I’ve Come to You with a Small Arse . . . Our censors didn’t ban it! A truly broadminded culture, ours . . . and by any standards, an extraordinary admission before a divinity, apart from being an outrageous lie. I can tell you right away that when you ask Kum Kum to vacate, she’ll defend herself with the argument that as a Culture Luminary, from her present address, she’s interfaced with so many other Culture Luminaries, both national and global, that the bungalow is now no longer mere Welfare State accommodation, but a Seat of Culture. Send her reply to me. I’ll take care of it—Security Reasons, I think, should suffice. Then we make her an offer she can’t refuse.’

  Raghupati’s progress across the lawns was feudal. Peons, attendants, gardeners, sweepers, washermen, housekeeper, drivers, masseurs, cooks, milkmen, constables, chowkidaars, watchmen, bearers, jamadars, dafadars, orderlies, daily wagers and indefinable lackeys all stopped idling, straightened up, cringed, beamed and saluted him. Each of their appointments had been either a favour granted—whenever possible, at a price, and to be redeemed in good time—or a debt repaid; whenever possible, the debts repaid too had been construed as favours granted. Dozens of associates, comrades and cronies of Bhanwar Virbhim, of his Begum and their redoubtable scion and Honourable-Member-of-the-Legislative-Assembly-to-be, Shri Makhmal Bagai, of Raghupati and Shri Dharam Chand the peon—dozens of their acquaintances had sons, nephews, brothers-in-law and protéges who were either jobless or underemployed and who needed the aegis of Welfare. Raghupati had signed up as many as he could, age, education, experience, knowledge, competence no bar. Like countless others, he liked being munificent at the expense of the Welfare State. The BOOBZ ban on recruitment applied only halfheartedly to the personal staff of Central Cabinet Ministers, that is to say, like many other policies, it had to be sternly fought, with clout, from within. Minister desires—such a clause should supersede the law in practice; such was Raghupati’s belief—why else would one wish to serve the State? Minister desires, for example, the seat of the occupant of the Seat of Culture at 9, Ganapati Aflatoon Marg as a token of gratitude for a favour rendered.

  Raghupati desired just as much the seat of the prospective lackey who approached him at that moment from the bungalow, bearing on a tray a glass of milk. He was Dambha, the elder brother of the still-AWOL Chamundi.

  Almost a month after his brother’s disappearance from Raghupati’s house in Madna, Dambha had suddenly showed up in Lutyens’s City with a hope of employment on compassionate grounds and letters of recommendation from two local, powerful timber smugglers. Bhanwar Virbhim’s son, who wasn’t very good at letters or indeed in general at anything written, had even spoken to Raghupati on the young man’s behalf. Whom Raghupati had found rather fetching and from whose sullen, morose professed ignorance of his brother’s whereabouts had jumped to the unnervin
g conclusion that Chamundi was safe and lying low, vengeful and plotting, flat out on a bed in a hut in his tribal village somewhere in the ravaged, discontented forests of Jompanna, plumb in the heartland of Sukumaran Govardhan country.

  Raghupati hadn’t been lying when he’d stated that on that December afternoon of the day before the attack on Suroor, after he’d spoken to the District Collector on the phone from his bedroom, he’d strutted back to the adjoining puja room and found that his massage boy—who till a minute before had been unconscious and bleeding from the head—had disappeared, merged into the blue.

  Officially, no one had seen him since. The blood stains on the floor Raghupati sponged off before descending. He didn’t even mention Chamundi till eight-thirty the morning after.

  ‘Where is he? I can’t be bothered with this irresponsibility. Do we have anybody else with hands supple enough for a massage?’

  Out of sight, gradually out of mind. Besides, in the ensuing weeks, everything else had gone Raghupati’s way so splendidly—Minister Virbhim’s return to the lap of the Aflatoons, his own consequent new post, the presence of Baba Mastram in the capital, the silly Natesan court case—that with time, he had begun to feel quite confident of managing any fallout from the Chamundi business.

  In Lutyens’s City, at 21, Ganapati Aflatoon Marg, therefore, he asked Dharam Chand to accommodate Dambha suitably. In turn, Dharam Chand attached the newcomer to the milkman to whom he, Dharam Chand, had rented out one of the servants’ quarters of the bungalow. Part of the rent was paid in milk. Mrs Milkman also did the house, ironed the clothes and washed Begum Virbhim’s wearunders, it being terribly lèse majesté that male hands should ever touch them. Milkman Junior, socially more upwardly mobile than his father’d been, grew orchids, broccoli and artichokes in the back lawns; they were sold to the capital’s fancier hotels. On every left-over square metre of kitchen garden, he’d squeezed in potatoes, tomatoes, papayas, pumpkin and coriander. Some of that was sold by handcart in the back lanes of Lutyens’s City. Father and son had also opened up a dhaba in the courtyard of the servants’ quarter—entry from the service lane, of course. It provided tea, rusks, biscuits and plat du jour lunches and dinners to the vast population of underlings and factotums in the area. Of course, cups of tea and plates of food—lumpy islands of congealed rice rock steady in a lake of reddish gravy, on the surface of which floated an oil slick—were also sent up, as and when required, to the bungalow. Officially, the dhaba didn’t exist because it was a Security risk. When not on duty, however, the Black Guard Commandoes guzzled there for free. Milkman paid Dharam Chand four thousand rupees a month as rent, of which three thousand reached Raghupati, of which fifteen hundred reached Begum Virbhim. From the minister’s salary, the Welfare State deducted five hundred rupees every month as rent for the entire bungalow.

  Raghupati asked Dambha to wait while he downed his glass of milk. Hot frothy milk at four o’clock sharp, straight from the udder, as it were, was his way of cutting down on tea and coffee. It made him feel full and ill all evening. His fingers brushed the other’s as he picked up the glass. ‘So how are things with you? . . . How are the cows? Is the bull fucking them well or does he need goading? You look well-hung, you could teach him a trick or two. Now that you’ve almost joined the Welfare State, you’d better watch your organ, oil it, take care of it, or else it’ll shrink. The State’s been known to have that effect under its Integrated Small Tools Programme . . . Are you any good at massage? . . . You are? Excellent! Why then, you’re overqualified for us! You milk cows—squeeze, squeeze?—grow and sell broccoli, run errands for a dhaba and massage bodies—and yet you hope to join the Welfare State as a lackey on daily wages . . . yes, job security and all that—there’s none, incidentally, while you remain a daily wager. There’s only the promise of permanent employment dangling before you while you’re pushed around and exploited. The good life starts when you become a permanent servant of the government . . . and gets better and better as you climb the ladder—take the case of your present demi-god Dharam Chand, in whose presence I dare say that your organ begins to leak out of nervousness . . . some years ago—so the story goes—the moment he was made permanent—he was then called Karam Chand, but that’s another story—he stopped going to office and instead began selling wearunders, in earnest, all day—near the railway station of his native town. He was at that time an attendant in some State-run blind school. After some weeks, his boss the Superintendent asked him to return to work. Dharam Karam Chand was so offended by the order—an insult to his status of a permanent employee—that is to say, it’s temporaries like you who’ve to fetch, carry and obey without question, the permanents have an option—so Dharam Karam, deeply disturbed as a consequence of the felt insult, in the course of his official duties, gouged out the right eye of a blind girl—and nothing permanent happened to him as a result. He became a fat file, of course, part of the collective memory of the Welfare State—it’s the natural outcome of the buck-withering process. And that’s why you’d like to join us, isn’t it? . . . Well, I too like being close to and part of our fat files—those Himalayan ranges built out of thick, brown, depressing, faded-even-when-new covers and millions of pages of thin, cheap, off-white paper produced at astounding cost—surrounded by all that, you feel snug, as though you belong and your identity fits, like a tiny screw somewhere under the bonnet of a car. You’re doing your bit, you feel, to run the country even when you’re ferrying the kids of a Controller of Rationing to school. Did you know that Dharam Chand feels that it’s time to change his name, now that he’s moved up and is with the Minister? A new lifestyle, a new identity, a smooth snake shedding its skin. He’s toying with Naram Chand . . . good boy, thanks for the milk. Come over to my camp room for a trial massage after dinner tonight. About ten-thirty, after Shri Bagai leaves, okay dear? . . .’

  A submissive Assistant Engineer from the Electricity Board waited a few paces away, head down, file in hand, the correct junior courtier. The false ceiling in the camp office was in place and the third air-conditioner had just been fitted; would Minister’s Secretary Saab care to see?

  ‘Yes, after I inspect the West Garden. Have those silly electricity bills been sorted out yet?’

  The Assistant Engineer shuffled about and giggled in nervous excitement. ‘Yes sir. No sir. I understand that the Honourable Minister has written to the Honourable Power Minister, sir. I’m sure that it’ll all be settled soon.’

  ‘I’d even advised that the Divisional Manager be transferred because of his attitude. Has that happened?’ ‘Yes sir. No sir. Not yet. In fact (nervous giggle), he’s appealed to the Power Minister against what he calls Unnecessary Interference in the Smooth Functioning of the Government.’

  ‘How smooth does he want it to be? Like the shaved cheeks of his arse?’ Shrieks of nervous laughter.

  The previous inhabitant of 21, Ganapati Aflatoon Marg, had been a Hindi film actor—a matinee idol—and an ex-Member of Parliament, a Nominated Culture Luminary to the Upper House. In his time, he was reputed to have earned fifty thousand rupees a day, year after year. He owned a flat in Bombay City, a villa in the suburbs, a sort of castle by the beach and two office complexes. He had air-conditioned—at official expense, of course—the outhouses of his official bungalow to house his Siamese cats. He had surrendered the bungalow to the Commissioner of Estates after a titanic, two-year struggle (it had even been mooted that the Army should be sent in to evict him). His argument—spread over a dozen letters addressed, among others, to the President of the Union, the Vice-President and the Prime Minister—had been, more or less: 1) However can a petty bureaucrat ask the idol of the masses to move his bloomin’ arse? 2) And yet people continue to wonder what is wrong with this country! 3) Why doesn’t the Army move in first to evict its own hundred Generals from the bungalows that they’ve overstayed in for years?

  Matinee Idol left behind at 21, Ganapati Aflatoon Marg, among other things, an outstanding electricity bill of some eight
lakh rupees. Raghupati found it outrageous that the Electricity Board should bother Bhanwar Virbhim, the new occupant of the bungalow, with the sins of the previous one. Not that Raghupati considered it a sin—indeed, it was standard practice. One fitted a bungalow of that size with fourteen air-conditioners and six geysers and one used them as befitted one’s status, but to pay one’s electricity bill emitted terribly wrong signals; it clearly meant that one was slipping down the ladder. Only people without clout paid their electricity bills. Those with, never received any. They instead asked for—and got—official air-conditioners in their loos.

  By serving the representatives of the people, one serves the people. Were the Electricity Board ever to ask Raghupati why on earth it should forego its dues outstanding against the occupant of 21, Ganapati Aflatoon Marg, he would’ve reasoned such. Or, since every second of the official life is official, the office should bear all expenses incurred. Then again, the bounty of welfare extends in all directions and knows no bounds; only the niggardly and the shortsighted think of economies. In a large country, you have to think big.

  ‘The macro view,’ explained Raghupati expansively to Makhmal Bagai, in Hinglish, long after office hours, in his camp study, over glasses of Johnnie Walker Blue, ‘has always been the need of the hour. Sit on the moon, and in the cold blue light, gaze down on the remote, quiet, sombre, beautiful and tranquil earth. Distance provides perspective and objectivity. All our squabbles and tensions will be seen for what they are—fundamentally petty, trivial. What, for example, is a roadside brawl, a disruption of some piffling street play, in the grand scheme of things? Nothing, merely a ripple, just frolic’