The Mammaries of the Welfare State

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  The whisky was a gift from Makhmal, who’d flown in that evening from Navi Chipra. Raghupati loved the richness of its fumes. For years now, whenever he’d had a cold or a sore throat, he’d inhaled from, and then sipped, a peg or two of neat good Scotch. In a sensationalist article on espionage in the Illustrated Weekly, he’d read once that Indian spies could be bought over by just one bottle of Scotch. He hadn’t found the notion particularly absurd or objectionable. Of course, it depended on the whisky. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue, for example, golden, limpid, perfect, seemed a reasonable wager for one’s soul.

  The stronger the bouquet, naturally, the worse the stink that one is trying to subdue. By that standard, Makhmal Bagai was a two-week-old, putrefying, maggot-ridden cadaver. He routinely doused different parts of his body with scented hairoil, talcum powder, aftershave lotion, eau de Cologne and deodorant. The charm that he always carried with him was a tiny sandalwood Ganesh, the powers of which were periodically revived, as it were, by dips in sandalwood oil. To neutralize his foul mouth, he ate over a dozen perfumed paans a day (he and Raghupati shared, among other things, the same taste in paans). He liked incense to be lit in the rooms that he occupied, however temporarily. His attendant of the day carried, beside his paan box and mobile phone, a box of incense sticks; his manifold duties included lighting one of them up before Makhmal could notice its absence.

  ‘Whenever the case of Miss Natesan surfaces in court, that will be my argument—me-laard, the macro view. A point of order. The sight of her sari squeezed into the crevice of her bum upset my love of order, so I plucked it out. With my thumb and forefinger. I could’ve used my teeth. Why should my love of order so convulse the harmony of the world? Me-laard, reflect instead on the larger issues—bonded labour, corruption in high places, freedom of speech, the suppression of immoral traffic, crimes against women, caste reservations, violence in politics, the Police-or the Welfare State. Leave that fat, charming and pig-headed Lina Natesan to her memos and reminders.’

  ‘I could arrange for some acid for her face. Take her mind off her bum.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary. Her face is nice, don’t spoil it. In fact, after that cock-up with Rajani Suroor last month, your father and I both feel that for a while, we could do without your help, thank you.’

  Makhmal didn’t feel secure without a weapon. It was usually a switchblade. Were he to reflect on the subject, he’d’ve been both puzzled and relieved that unlike him, the wide world didn’t believe in the perfect simplicity of the efficacy of violence. My God—how much people talked, and wrote, and argued! Use a gun, boss, or a hockey stick, because time’s running out, look, gurgling down an unplugged drain.

  When he’d dropped out of school, his father had packed him off to the North because he’d wanted Makhmal to broaden his horizons, get out of Madna, out of his hair, see the country, maybe find a vocation. At his uncle’s sweets shop in Dundimandir, Makhmal had sat behind the cash counter for six months, acquired a taste for the scent of rose water, improved his Hinglish, broken a bottle of Limca on the jaws of an ill-tempered customer who couldn’t wait for his change, and from his associates picked up a Punjabi manner of pronouncing English words. The accent had waned with the years but could still, every now and then, particularly in moments of stress, bob up in his delivery. ‘Jealous’ became ‘jaluss’ as in ‘jalopy’, for example, ‘shock’ was ‘shokk-uh’ and ‘memories’ ‘mammaries.’ He didn’t have very pleasant mammaries.

  ‘Miss Natesan’s case shouldn’t pose a problem. I’ve discovered that the judge is likely to be S.H. Sohan, who in his after-hours is a Punjabi poet. I’ve spoken to him on the phone—in Punjabi, of course—and I’ve an appointment with him early next week. Would me-laard like to be, I asked, our Official Delegate to the World Poetry Conference in Honolulu? Return air ticket, six free days in a deluxe hotel, per diem at par with international standards, facilities for simultaneous translation into five international languages while me-laard recites his immortal verse in Punjabi before Nobel laureates, literary agents from London, publishers from New York—would me-laard do me the honour of deigning to accept? In reply, he fellated me on the phone. If the case comes up, who knows, he might send Miss Natesan to jail for conduct unbecoming of a civil servant . . . Just press the bell—I need some milk to make a new, great cocktail.’

  Incompetent and dangerous, Makhmal had had no choice but to enter politics. In his late teens, he’d been quite an asset to his father during both the Parliamentary and the Assembly elections—dropping in at polling booths with jeeps full of gunmen to terrorize voters and steal ballot boxes, bribing policemen with petty cash, food and cheap whisky to look the other way, whisking away and beating up members of rival gangs, shooting rounds off into the air when things looked too quiet—ahhh, politics was the good life. After the third elections, Bhanwar Virbhim had appointed him one of the General Secretaries of the State Political Party. He’d wanted his dunderhead son to learn some of the facts of life, to revere wealth, not to remain forever retarded, to grasp that money was infinitely more powerful than the gun, that nothing was socially more respectable than power, that to be on the right side of the law, one simply needed to be above it. Expectedly, Makhmal’s record of violence earned him Z-category Black Guard Commando protection. All those guns, that screaming motorcade, the awed, frightened faces of bystanders, went to his head. Fast cars began to attract him almost as much as weapons.

  In the one week that he’d spent in Madna jail, his father once again had become a Central Minister. Virbhim had let his son stew a bit behind bars because he’d correctly gauged that it would look great on his own cv. Finally, before using his clout to extract Makhmal, he’d conveyed down the line that that would be the last time that he’d be interceding on his son’s behalf. One more misdemeanour and Makhmal would be quietly tossed out into the cold.

  Being a fool, the son didn’t see—or didn’t care—with what agility his father’s ambition, his arrogance, was ascending. Not his father’s alone, for it was in the air. The stars, no doubt. Jayati Aflatoon, Sukumaran himself—already half-legend and now aiming for the heavens—Dharam Karam Chand, Baba Mastram, Bhupen Raghupati—their fortunes were all sap-filled and on the rise.

  Raghupati in particular considered himself quite lucky over the Lina Natesan mess. Time and again, he’d plagued Baba Mastram for an angle on her.

  ‘She has a knack of attracting calamities,’ the Baba had divined after a couple of days of thought. ‘Perhaps she irritates her stars too, who knows?’

  ‘When they fail, mortals can but hope to try to help. I feel that I should repay the love that she doubtless feels for me but which—messed-up introvert that she is—she can never reveal even to herself in this life. So I’ve decided to recommend her name for one of our long-term, government-to-government, foreign training courses. I’m glad to learn that she will be accepted at L’Institut Europeen D’Administration Publique at Strasbourg. She’ll soon dazzle Europe with her reports. Once there, Paris and all that, who knows, she might even find true, requited love. So, after Judge Sohan, that’s my second safeguard against the siren.’

  Things that didn’t concern him didn’t register with Makhmal. He was on his first visit to his parents after his stint in jail but had no wish to meet either of them face to face. He would have liked Raghupati’s counsel on how to plan his future in politics but felt that he already knew too well—and would be utterly bored with—what he would hear. He wished to be Minister of State for Coal and Mines for he’d heard that bribes for the lease of a mine could touch a crore of rupees. Think big, think quick, that was his style. Change it, is what Raghupati’d been advising for ages.

  ‘Coal and Mines is Big, Big, child. Remember that just to get Heritage and Time Pass, Bhanwar-ji brushed Jayati Aflatoon’s feet with his forehead. Wait a while—the hierarchy needs patience and cunning. In the meantime—I’ve told you before—stop carrying guns. Stop slapping the Opposition with your slippers in the W
ell of the House, particularly when the indefatigable governor is in the midst of his inaugural address of the Budget Session. Stop lifting up your kurta to display your pyjama-strings to female members of another party. So what if the TV camera’s on you? Some of your viewers might actually wish for better returns for the one lakh rupees per second of taxpayers’ money being spent on running the Assembly. A new leaf, therefore, for the new age, Makhmal. Learn to give speeches on weighty subjects. Learn to read. Clamber on to one respectable bandwagon or the other—three or four, if possible. Make a start somewhere. Let me see . . . When you learn to read, my dear gem of the Deccan, I’ll give you a comic-strip called Asterix. Our Assemblies remind me of his life and times.’

  Half in alarm, Raghupati watched Makhmal’s face crumple up with the strain of expressing an idea. ‘I must have a reason to discipline myself. In the last three years, I’ve attended as a special visitor nine sessions of the Assembly. The anti-aircraft gun scandal, the sugar deal, the securities cover-up, the bank fraud, the telecom fiddle, the fodder swindle, the urea scam, the insurance racket, the export licence rip-off, that’s what we discussed. And side by side, the desecration of places of worship, the bomb blasts, two nuclear explosions, one official and one unacknowledged border war and the riots after riots after riots. Not a whisper, in three years, about welfare, about the good of the common man, whoever he might be. Why should I discipline myself?’

  ‘Hey Ram! . . . For a long time, your father and I’ve believed that the inside of your skull must resemble the stuffing of an old, old mattress, the sort that is periodically redone by those wandering mattress-makers . . . don’t you wish to follow your father’s footsteps? Distance yourself as much as you can from your past. Change it whenever necessary, it’s as natural to human beings as blushing. Look at him, it’s the silly season here, so he’s swished off to Madagascar to sign a Cultural Agreement. It wouldn’t be necessary for me, he said, to accompany him because the text of the Agreement was straightforward—just the Director (Cultural Agreements) would do. She’s forty-two, with fat chewable lips and watermelons on her thorax. Your father’s been complimenting her on her saris for some weeks now. Ahhh, the call of the flesh.’

  Amongst his wearunders, safari suits and bottles of anti-flatulence pills, Bhanwar Virbhim carried with him to Madagascar an impressive array of cassette tapes on both Northern and Southern classical music. Some were gifts for his host Ministers in Antananarivo, the others were for his own listening pleasure. As Culture and Heritage Minister, he needed to know at least something about the musical traditions of his country. Ditto for literature, painting, the fine arts, the works. Thus within a week of his taking over the post, Bhupen Raghupati had suggested to him that his, the Minister’s, day should begin, be filled, and end, with appropriate music. CD players, tape recorders, discs and cassettes were bought. Peons crept into Bhanwar Saab’s bedroom on tiptoe at five in the morning to switch on an apt bhajan. They were transferred to places far far away if the tapes had been incorrectly cued and if, as a result, the Minister had to suffer some notes of music inappropriate to—and therefore inauspicious for—the hour and day of the week. What good, Raghupati would thunder at his staff, is the Ministry of Culture, Heritage, Education and Welfare if it can’t even provide its Minister the music of his choice at the hour of his choice? Remember that he doesn’t have time for music and yet he needs to hear it, to imbibe it—therefore the right kind of music, and always in the background.

  While in the foreground? Politics, need one ask? The politics, for example, of an appropriate past, both personal and public. An example of the new personal past, from the opening paragraph of Virbhim’s speech at the annual convocation of the National Academy for the Performing Arts—Bhanwar Virbhim as created by Bhupen Raghupati: ‘In my college days, my father would give me a certain amount of money every week for my bus fare. I saved that money by walking to and from college. With the money saved, twice a month, I’d buy tickets to local Kathak concerts and ghazal evenings . . . Once (chuckle chuckle) . . .’ Such fictions are perfectly natural and harmless, and come even more easily when no records exist of the persona of the reminiscences having ever set foot inside any college anywhere in the country, unless it be in some police file for harassing a female student, smashing chairs and windowpanes, and making bonfires out of the property of others.

  And the new public past. As Heritage, Upbringing and Resource Investment Minister, alive to the sense of history, in the very first month of his tenure, Bhanwar Virbhim commissioned a set of social scientists to write, in phases, the—as it were—memoirs of the nation. The standard texts were outdated (he minuted in Hindi in the file on the subject) and completely colonial in their approach. They didn’t do justice to—in fact, didn’t even mention—the pivotal roles played by certain subaltern political movements, social classes and most significantly, less prominent castes—for example, Bhanwarji’s own—in any of the significant developments in the country in the last two hundred years. The best way to inform our fellow citizens, surely, was to provide them some A-one reading matter. The work of the new social scientists would be supervised by a Committee of Experts comprising, in the main, retired bureaucrats with just-published, flatulent memoirs. The books would be written in English and, after the texts were approved, translated into the eighteen official languages recognized by the Constitution. In all, there were to be twelve tomes that would cover the history, geography, sociology, anthropology, geology, biophysics, environment, botany, zoology, religion, language and culture of the country and its peoples. The entire project was to cost the Welfare State seventy crores over a period of five years. Out of the panel of names of suitable savants submitted to him, Bhanwar Virbhim rejected seven and added eleven new characters out of his own pocket. Those recommended by him were all either from his part of the country or his caste or both.

  The intelligentsia of the Ministry of Heritage, Upbringing and Resource Investment was quite appalled and too spineless and devious to fight back directly. In its routine manner, it diffused the word. Thus two Sundays later, for instance, the Weekend Today, that claimed a readership of over two million, ran an eight-page article, an extract from a longer work entitled The Magic of the Aflatoons. It was written by a Dr Srinivas Chakki, an entomologist by profession and a Thinker on the side.

  . . . How does one enter the record books? One way is to act so as to be worthy of them, so that history, as it were, will remember one. Another, far easier, way is simply to rewrite the record book and include oneself in it. Do not merely devote all the space of the book to the also rans, but also analyse the motives and performances of the never-rans. History as determined by the would’ve-liked-to-runs . . .’

  After a couple of paragraphs of this style of attack, Dr Chakki hadn’t been able to resist broadening his target to include—indeed, aiming way off the original mark at—all Members of Parliament and of the Legislative Assemblies.

  It had been hoped when we became independent that in pursuit of an ideal of the trusteeship of the national wealth, the leaders of the State would set examples in austerity and take no more than five hundred rupees each per month as salary. It is noteworthy that several decades on, our legislators have not belied that hope in the letter, but as for its spirit, as the French would exclaim, oo la la! Our guiding lights, forty years after Freedom, still vote themselves a monthly pay of five hundred rupees (that is to say, roughly the equivalent of a few packets of Rothmans Twenties), but over the years, have invented a wide variety of devices for augmenting that income on the sly. They of course routinely give themselves free housing—four-bedroom-villas plumb in the heart of Lutyens’s City—free cooking gas and water, free telephones and transport, and a multitude of other benefits. They also take care that at all times, their basic salary of five hundred—which is all that they reveal to the taxman—remains below the taxable income. One notes of course in contrast that their perks, when received by you and me, are madly taxable, thanks to them. Afte
r all, they make the laws. That’s what they’re being paid those Rothmans for. Yet they decided—in passing, as it were—that they needed an incentive to attend office, to come to work. So they provided themselves a daily allowance—non- taxable, of course—for being present in the House. Attentive readers of this paper will recall that several years ago, it’d been the first to point out that our guiding lights, like errant college students, were in the habit both of cutting the House after roll call and of noting their attendance even for the days on which they were absent. Ah, the power of the pen! For, after a spate of such articles had held them up to ridicule, and accused them of continuing in Parliament the fine traditions of their college days, the signatures were dropped but alas, the per diem remained. They still earn it for the entire duration of the session and, for good measure, for the three days preceding and succeeding each of their sittings. Acknowledging their own need to form a little capital on the side, they allow themselves to sanction cooking gas connections and allot ten telephones per annum to their nominees, no questions asked.

  It has been calculated that were our guiding lights to be regarded as ordinary mortal citizens liable to taxes, their current emoluments, for each one of them, on the average would work out to about twenty lakh rupees per annum (not counting their guns, of course). Other things being equal, as our economists say, how many of them would command such a figure in the open market is not a question that need detain us here.