The thrilled crowd milled about uncertainly, drawn to the spectacle by its grandeur and at the same time repelled, even frightened, by its fierceness. In the glow from the flames, the faces looked aroused, happy, smiling, like those of children in Disneyland. The visitors stole glances at one another, bonded by the shared excitement. Not one countenance expressed shock, horror or sorrow at the awesome destruction of a national treasure. Naturally; it wasn’t theirs.
By the time the fire brigade and the police turned up to organize and spoil things, a group of musicians from the eastern region, fired, as it were, by the conflagration, had begun to thump out an irresistible foot-tapping rhythm on their drums, enthusing others in turn to clap their hands, shake a leg and chant along. Thus, for the visitors, the burning down of TFIN Complex became an enormous, memorable campfire experience, for which, at dinner the following evening at the Gajapati Aflatoon Sports Stadium, with giggles and nervous simpers, they profoundly thanked the Prime Minister.
‘My God, exactly how primitive are we? Don’t we have firefighting systems in our buildings? Alarms, that sort of thing? Or are they all—all those hundreds of them—meant to be ovens? Grill, Bake, Toast and Barbecue? Answer me, c’mon, I’m waiting.’
‘You’re asking the wrong person, sir.’ Even while conversing with the Prime Minister, the Public Works Secretary continued to be as suave as silk, all white coiffure and expensive aftershave. ‘It may be recalled, sir, that despite the best efforts of my Department, Routine Maintenance of Welfare State Property has not been centralized with us. It remains the responsibility of the administrative or residing Ministry.’
He was still smarting from his visit to TFIN Complex the evening before. He’d received a confused phone call about the fire from the Disaster Management Cell of Home Affairs at about eight p.m. and’d decided to drive down to the site in his private Maruti car without waiting for an hour for the official white Ambassador. Two kilometres away from the building, the cops’d stopped him and forced him to turn around. Naturally, seeing his car, they’d refused to believe that he was who he was. Dazed and hurt, he’d cruised around for a bit, gazing at the vast glow in the night sky that had looked as though the night lights at the sports stadium had suddenly turned orange, the crowds in the streets rushing towards the spectacle, and had distractedly wondered whether he could get some tea somewhere.
The ancient demand of his Department to maintain all the official property of the government was a routine empire- aggrandizing move to which Bhuvan Aflatoon acceded after the father of all fires’d burnt itself out. In the first phase of its Revised Firefighting Measures Programme, Public Works proposed an additional budget of nineteen crore rupees. After an intense skirmish, Finance sanctioned one and a half.
On the buildings directly under its control, Public Works began the firefighting programme on a war footing. Their manoeuvres looked, sounded and felt like war too. At the Prajapati Aflatoon Welfare State Public Servants Housing Complex Transit Hostel, for example—one of the first to be taken up—work on the alterations to the different wings of the six buildings began within four days of the Prime Ministerial order and actually went on, without pause, day and night, for weeks. The jokers in Public Works said that the Transit Hostel’d been declared Top Priority because the mistress of the Departmental Secretary stayed there, and surprise inspections of work in progress enabled him to officially visit her once a day—over and above, that is, his regular lunch-hour assignations. He was an indefatigable man. It is true that his mistress, a short-haired, short-tempered, widowed Assistant (later Deputy) Financial Advisor, Mrs Minu Tutreja by name, stayed in Apartment C-308, but the real reasons for the choice of the Transit Hostel as one of the first ten properties to be dealt with were: 1) that it was large; lots of money could be shown as having been sunk into it and nobody would notice—this was a crucial factor because the end of the financial year loomed perilously close and they still had this monstrous budget left, and 2) that it was full of people, legitimate occupants even at night; it looked good that the government thought first of the welfare of inhabited buildings.
Fire extinguishers had always—since time immemorial, as it were—hung on the walls of the corridors, unnoticed, unchecked, nooks for geckos, a formal stipulation in some municipal bye-law; they obviously weren’t meant to combat anything. The revised firefighting measures were altogether more ambitious. They proposed the construction, beside the veranda of every fourth flat, of a one-metre-wide wall that, from the ground floor, would stretch right up to the eighth. On the outer faces of these walls would be fixed three rows of water pipes that too—naturally—would reach up to the heavens. To these walls—and to all the strategic corners of the hostel—from the six gates of the complex, zig-zagging across the lawns, would be laid lanes of tarmac wide enough for the standard fire engine and for a total length of twelve kilometres. The new walls and pipes would of course be painted and appropriate signs put up.
Ferrying sand, gravel, drums of tar, bags of cement, bricks, pipes and stone chips, trucks roared into the Transit Hostel by day and night, at four in the afternoon and three in the morning, shattering the sleep even of the sozzled. With each arriving lorry, the entire population of some twelve hundred public servant families cocked its ears to wait for the hellish engine to calm down to an idle growl—it was never switched off—and the incessant babble from the everpresent labourers—the shouted questions, hails of greeting, the cries of annoyance and whoops of incomprehensible glee—to again become audible; then the clink, clang and clatter of the sides of the truck being unfastened, followed by the infernal din of drums of tar simply being pushed off the vehicle, or the steam-like hiss of sand streaming down. Even at three in the morning, some families could be spotted on their verandas, breathing deep the fog of dust that hung over the entire complex like a curse in a fairy tale, and dazedly watching the construction simply because they couldn’t sleep—not only because of the noise, but also—as February slipped into April—the heat. There was hardly ever any electricity because the contractors’d tapped the mains for their construction work. Besides, the numerous fires that’d been lit all over the lawns to melt and mix the tar, sent up shimmering waves of heat that seemed to drift in through the doorways and open windows to settle on one’s wet skin like a warm shawl. Were one philosophical, one would admit that watching the leisurely—but steady—rhythm of the workers was lulling, and that one could rest as in a daze, with eyes blinking and smarting, observing the road-rollers that trundled up, down and all over the lawns with the ponderousness of elephants, like children’s cars from some primitive giants’ amusement park; the bidi-smoking masons with towels wrapped around their heads, who materialized like magic outside one’s sixth- floor bedroom window, stopping their regular slapping of cement on brick to ask—quite politely—the housewife on the veranda for a drink; the buckets of water being hauled up by precariously-knotted rope from the cement tank by the car park; the hammocks made out of old saris in which slept the infants of labourers whose drying drawers, vests, lungis and saris dotted the gardens like corpses after a skirmish.
Before the invasion, the lawns had been fairly green, with lush grass and tastefully-placed bushes of hibiscus and jasmine, ideal for burp-releasing after-dinner promenades. However, save for the occupants of C-401, Dr Srinivas Chakki and of A-214, Agastya Sen, no other inhabitant of the Transit Hostel seemed to really mind—or mind enough—the degradation. Karma, tolerance, maya and all that, no doubt. Some of the residents actually welcomed the change. The eight-to-fifteen age group, for example, obsessed with cricket, went mad with joy at the sight of all those walls coming up, each with three parallel, perpendicular, perfectly-centred pipes and an even asphalted surface leading up to it, to boot. Some of their parents too, tired of squabbling and scrambling for parking niches for their cars and two-wheelers, were overjoyed at the unexpected quadrupling of available tarmac surface. The support systems as well of the Transit Hostel—the vegetable and fruit vend
ors, for example, who for lack of space had had to park their handcarts just outside and around the gates, narrowing the passageway down to the width of one car, causing unimaginable—but permanent—chaos, resembling a fishmarket set up on a crowded railway platform, only noisier, with angry horns and yelled curses being exchanged like gunfire on the border—they too were happy with the largesse of the Welfare State. Thus, within a matter of a few months, when the walls and the pipes were up and the lanes for the fire engines all neatly laid out, one could glimpse, on a Sunday morning, fierce cricket matches crisscrossing one another, like life on a city’s roads viewed from far up in the sky, being played out amongst cars, two-wheelers and handcarts parked all anyhow, sprawled out, as it were, like sunbathers on a spacious beach.
Agastya was an illegal occupant of A-214. That is to say, the flatlet had been allotted to him three years ago during his tenure in the Ministry of Labour. When he’d been transferred out to Navi Chipra, he’d simply forgotten to surrender it to the Commissionerate of Estates. ‘Surrender’ is the verb officially used to denote the restitution of government property to the Ministry of Urban Affairs. It is in keeping with the idiom of general hostility in use amongst different departments. No one anywhere had noticed Agastya’s lapse. The records of the Estates office were at that time being computerized. The consequent chaos had helped cases like his considerably.
Even though he was aesthetically revolted by the renovations to the Transit Hostel, he, being an illegal occupant, felt at the same time a bit removed from all the turmoil of building construction. He was a bird of passage; when things became insupportable, he could always take wing.
‘But things became insupportable a long time ago,’ objected Dr Chakki to his attitude outside the Mammary Dairy milk booth at six in the morning on a fine day in April. ‘What is left of the body politic if its steel frame takes wing? We must fight the rot on a war footing. Prod the middle classes awake.’
‘I’m upper middle class, I hope. What about us?’
For them all, as a first step, Dr Chakki wished to spread the word. Firefighting too was best begun at home. Since he was on leave and dangling between two posts, Agastya helped in the drafting.
Anyone who’s ever lived in this hostel, surely the ugliest building—pure Public Works—in one of the suburbs of hell (complained Dr Chakki in the letter that he sent to the Minister and to a dozen newspapers, and a copy of which he endorsed with compliments to Mrs Minu Tutreja of C-308, with a humble request to push the plaint with all the clout at her command), will testify that on the good days, that is to say, three times a week in the monsoon, all the flats on the third floor and above get water in their bathroom taps from six to six-thirty in the morning and from six-thirty to six-forty-five in the evening and in their kitchen taps from five-thirty to six-fifteen in the morning and from four- thirty to five-fifteen in the evening. On the bad days, that is, for the rest of the year, the taps of those eight hundred-and-fifty-plus flats are as dry as the mammary glands, so to speak, of an old desiccated male of the species. Those less-fortunate residents have worked out a deal with the inhabitants of the first two floors; they haul buckets of water up in the mornings, when the pressure is strongest, by elevator when they’re in working condition, and up the stairs or by rope or knotted saris from their verandas when they’re not—which, naturally, is very often, this being hell and electricity being as rare amongst us as statesmanship and honesty. Each bucket of water costs three rupees. It will interest you to know that w.e.f. January 1 next, the rate will be made more specific and scientific, i.e., three rupees for twenty litres of water or, if you prefer, fifteen paise per litre. Payment in kind is officially discouraged because it tends to cloud the clarity of the exchange.
Of course, you’re well aware that in most offices and schools, when a latecomer is asked why he isn’t on time, his perfectly genuine reason, that he stays on the third-floor-or-above of the Pashupati Aflatoon Transit Hostel and that he spent three hours that morning hauling water up by bucket, is not accepted. This fatheaded attitude of government needs to be reviewed, or water provided to all of us, whichever is simpler.
Our Welfare Association also wishes to propose that our elevators be converted to a manual pulley system that will function exactly like a well and for much the same purpose. I enclose with this letter rough but reliable sketches and diagrams of the minimal changes mooted in the two lifts in each residential block. Their weights—with and without buckets of water in them—have obviously been taken into account in our plans. The counterload suggested is our litter. We consider the proposal a rather fine example of Appropriate Technology, well adapted to need and availability. Gastero In, Garbage Out.
Blueprint C provides the overview of the plan. It was truly inspired architecture that originally placed the garbage chute of each building right beside the lifts, because now connecting the two will be a piece of cake. Of course, at the moment, the chutes aren’t very popular with the residents because they—the chutes—all choked up some five years ago—somewhere between the third and fourth floors in Wing B, that’s for sure. A dead body, insist our oldest inhabitants, of a chowkidaar who was far too drunk to distinguish between an open elevator and the chute with its lid raised; of course, to be fair to the dead, one doesn’t have to be intoxicated to be confronted with the problem. But he’s there, maintains the pro-chowkidaar lobby, because the stink bears him out. Which isn’t being fair—again—to the march of time, because—naturally—the chowkidaar hasn’t prevented the stuffed polythene bags from landing on him, even though at the same time his stink has deterred some of my neighbours from getting close enough to the chute to open its lid to junk their rubbish. Thus, on each floor, the entire corridor area around the chute has become an awesomely-colourful garbage dump, each plastic sac—if you permit—like a faded, puckered, birthday-party balloon resting on the vegetable scraps and banana peels that have burst their skins of polythene and with time come to resemble the good earth. Aaaaaarrgghhhhhhh, gags the unsuspecting newcomer as he exits from the lift, that is to say: Where in heaven have I arrived? Hell’s refuse dump? What this place needs is a bloody sweeping flood.
To which we’ll gladly contribute our buckets. Frankly, while on the subject of our water problem, we need to fight fire with fire. Our Association—we have a dream!—would be quite happy to consider your fire engines to be water tankers that will use the new cricket-stump-pipes of our energetic adolescents to pump water up to our deprived neighbours round the clock—that is, if the fire engines can ever negotiate our gates and the new parking lanes to reach the new walls.
As a citizen, I wish to know: whatever happened to the water that was freely available—to return to where we began—at TFIN Complex, which is just down the road from us and whose rich glow on its last night we sadly miss during the evenings when we lack electricity? ‘Water theft,’ whisper the contractors who supervise here the convulsion of the structure of our lives, ‘in our country, remember, we even sell cowdung.’ Naturally, we’ve discussed the subject with them in some detail and suggested that they steal some more water, which they can sell to us—we don’t want them to lose in the deal, obviously—at a rate less harsh than fifteen paise per litre. Our negotiations have been significantly hindered by the lobby—a wretched breakaway group—of the denizens of the ground and first floors.
Apart from Mrs Minu Tutreja of C-308, Dr Chakki also presented with his compliments four copies of his letter to Sukumaran Govardhan. That is to say, he pushed them into the letter-box of the guest house of the Regional Potato Research Organization that occupied all the four flats of the top floor of the east wing of the second apartment block. Its letter-box was affixed to the wall beside the stairs on the ground floor. The guesthouse itself was cut off from the rest of the building by an iron gate at the mouth of the corridor that led to its constituent flats.
Contemporary legend had it that Govardhan had a hundred and eight residences dispersed all over the country, that number be
ing auspicious, and that he spent an average of three and a half days in each. No one—naturally—had actually seen him on the top storey of the Aflatoon Transit Hostel but then nobody had spotted him anywhere else in the country either. If anyone had, he, after a few months, had changed his mind. However, the prostitutes who operated out of the guesthouse did confirm that once or twice a year, those of them on duty were asked to pack up and disappear and invariably, for those few days, a handful of new, very young girls were ferried in from some dot on the map.
Govardhan moved about and in and out of the Transit Hostel—claimed the buzz—generally at dusk, when the traffic chaos was maximum. To ease his passage, that he arranged for general power failures in the area was, as was noised about, perfectly possible.
He’d be rather disturbed, wouldn’t he, debated the residents of Prajapati Aflatoon amongst themselves, by these firefighting measures, these walls and pipes three feet from his bedroom window? By all reports, the flats of his guesthouse from within were quite posh and tastefully, intelligently and completely illegally inter-connected. After those decades of dealing in sandalwood and ivory, his developed aesthetic sense would surely revolt against government-inspired renovations to any building. Apart from the enhanced security threat, of course.
The Mammaries of the Welfare State Page 33
