The Mammaries of the Welfare State

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  At what do you play

  When your spouse is away?

  How many genuine guests does the Regional Potato Research Organization board per year in the capital? Has none of them ever wondered at the goings-on in the guesthouse, at how all its staff seems to comprise painted up, well-turned-out women rather the worse for wear? Is the billing cycle weekly, fortnightly or monthly? Does the don accept payment by cheque and credit card? Do the rates change on religious and government holidays? As you can see, Shri Dastidar has his work cut out for him.

  In his approach to the subject of his study, he has, as he says in his Introduction, distinguished two broad categories of male civil servant and one special category of female. He sees one male type as the sort who just can’t get it down, exemplified by Shri Bhupen Raghupati, last seen disappearing into the jungles of Jompanna. In contrast, the second male type simply can’t get it up, as an example of which, I’m rather surprised to note, he suggests me. Though his illustrations can be—and in one case, certainly is—faulty, Shri Dastidar nevertheless draws interesting connections between the business, the activities, of the Welfare State and the sexual behaviour of its functionaries. It is the mirage of power, he argues, that keeps Shri Raghupati in a state of permanent excitement; and significantly, when he wants to pucker down, Shri Raghupati resorts to reading Cabinet notes, demi-official correspondence, circulars, memorandums and minutes of previous meetings—in brief, to wading through the innards of the Welfare State, the very same stuffing that, whine the male mandarins of the second type according to Shri Dastidar, permanently prevents them from experiencing the joys of a respectable hardon. You’d agree that we should encourage Shri Dastidar to further probe these links between power, documentation and desire.

  Operation Bestial will have an interesting spin-off or two. We’ll become trailblazers for the International Hard-Pornography Film Festival Circuit, for instance, and when our ageing porn film stars decide to perform in politics, their pasts will help to keep them in perspective.

  Dr Chakki’s hour was up. He switched off the Walkman, stepped up to the bed and methodically removed the earphones from the head of the comatose Rajani Suroor. He took out of his backpack his sunglasses and his headdress—a Yasser-Arafat kind of thing that he’d fashioned out of a small tablecloth—and packed into the bag the machine, the earphones, his diary, pen and water bottle. As was his habit, he scanned the cubicle with experienced eye—the drips, the ECG, the catheter, the tricky air-conditioner, the voltage stabilizer—before pulling shut behind him the ill-fitting door. Outside in the ward, manfully ignoring the awesome heat, the whirr of the ceiling fans and the reek of disinfectant, he smiled at Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha, and gave off very good bad vibes. They, simperingly and in a flurry, sat up in the hospital bed that’d been placed beside the cubicle specifically for the guardians of Shahid Suroor and in which they, supine, had been pensively assessing the undulations of their forms down to their painted toenails.

  Seven other beds in the ward, six of which were occupied; all six were cases recommended by local V∞IPs, for one still needed clout to get close to Rajani Suroor. In the initial weeks after the attack on him, the cops, adept at bolting stable doors, had cordoned off the entire hall—sanitized it, to appropriate their phrase for a hospital—and hadn’t allowed anybody in, not even, at times, the doctors. However, time, the boss that eases up all crises, slackens just as well constables on duty, and thus with its passage, gradually at first and freely thereafter, patients, nurses, sweepers, attendants and visitors wandered in and out of Ward Two.

  Since Dr Chakki’d been visiting Rajani Suroor every morning for the last three weeks, he’d become a familiar face at the hospital. Some of the occupants of the other beds in the ward smiled at him as he passed by. The good entomologist had a doctorly word for each one of them. ‘ . . . So, Mr Chidambaram, still feeling nervous? . . . Don’t worry, a piles operation is nothing . . .’ Another handshake at the next bed, ‘ . . . Well, Raichur, my dear host, the gastero any better? . . . D’you think it’s God’s way of admonishing you for snacking in the wee hours while officially on a hunger strike? . . . Come come, you’ll be out soon, well in time to douse yourself with kerosene and light up at the next auspicious hour and date . . .’ Dr Chakki then paused at the foot of Bed One and modulated his voice to sound less pleased with himself and more solicitous of his interlocutor, a blind woman, with a patch over her right eye to boot, who’d been admitted for a dengue fever that simply refused to go away.

  Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha watched Dr Chakki depart with unalloyed joy. Keeping vigil at a bedside was much more fun without his watchful eye on them. On their own tape recorder, they could play for the patient one of Dr Chakki’s recorded cassettes and then settle down to concentrating properly on playing their own game of Antaakshari without being distracted all the time by his bad vibes tingling their skins. Of course, Miss Shruti, who was more sensitive, claimed, particularly when she was losing an Antaakshari session, that his bad vibes emanated from his recorded voice too, though—naturally, she acknowledged—not with the same intensity. They’d pointed out to each other countless times, helplessly trembling with mirth at their own wit, that both Dr Chakki’s voice and his choices of subject matter were so soporific that a combination of the two would never ever work like an alarm clock, and that Rajani Suroor had surfaced out of coma once, but the bad vibes from the tape recorder had immediately knocked him out again.

  It ought to be explained that Antaakshari which, transliterated, means ‘Of the last letter’, is a game generally played with film songs. One participant sings the first complete stanza of one song, or even just the first couple of lines, provided that they are long enough to convince his auditors that he knows the tune and the lyrics reasonably well. The last letter of the word on which he ends must form the first letter of the first word of the song that the second participant must respond with, usually within a tense twenty seconds. When earnestly played, Antaakshari has been known to be as harrowing as poker in a Western. Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha, whose knowledge of Hindi film songs is truly encyclopaedic, play with professional single-mindedness, completely blind and deaf to the outside world. Their ne’er- say-die sessions last for hours (no song can be repeated in the same sitting), usually till their next rendezvous with Dr Chakki. Naturally, since they don’t wish their surroundings to either interrupt or eavesdrop, they sing only for each other, intensely and softly; correspondingly, one listens to the other with the cocked ears and alert face of a dog sensing a rat.

  Thus, there was no way in which they could’ve either heard Rajani Suroor groan or seen his eyelids flicker. Moreover, he groaned mutedly, respectably, not like a starlet achieving orgasm in a blue film. One must also remember that the ladies sat outside his cubicle, both out of modesty and because neither much liked either air-conditioning or Dr Chakki’s cassettes, one of which was playing at that time beside Suroor’s pillow. Alas, one will never know whether this was the first time that Suroor had shown any signs of revival or whether he’d stirred and moaned before, but sadly, each time when there wasn’t anybody in the cubicle.

  Dr Chakki was due back from the Madna International Hotel at two. He’d spend another hour with Suroor and play him one more cassette before tea. He’d recorded all the tapes himself in one of Rani Chandra’s studios, complete with different kinds of mindless background music at the beginning, at points of emphasis and changes of topic and as flourishes at the end. Fifteen tapes in all, and that was just the first phase, for he had much to say on the subject of the rebirth of the Welfare State. Unfortunately, since nobody conscious had wanted to listen, he’d been constrained to seek out another type of audience.

  The way to Suroor, long and tortuous, had begun with Shri Agastya Sen one rainy evening at the Prajapati Aflatoon Transit Hostel, over spicy samosas and tea. ‘He has the right cv for a messiah; he’s perfect for a figurehead. He knows the people, he can act, he’s performed before them on the stree
ts, he’s famous, his resting-place’s become a shrine. When he wakes up, it’ll be as though Rip Van Winkle’d decided to contest for Parliament. Moreover, Suroor was—is—was—a sort of civil servant, a skilled survivor, he knows—knew—the ins and outs of the nuts and bolts. I think of him as a dormant dragon who needs to be roused into breathing some fire into his fellow countrymen.

  ‘I want to urge him to wake up through sound. Audiotherapy has been greatly ignored in our country. Think of him as a schoolboy determined not to get up on Monday morning no matter what tricks his mother tries. We’ve nothing to lose, you know, except Suroor. Your Dharam Chand agreed with me. God is yet to take a decision on Suroor Saab’s file, but we may issue Him a first reminder, he declared after consulting the stars.

  ‘It’s wonderful, Sen da, how you’ve kept in touch with the influential and powerful. So that’s the route that I’d be grateful if you could take for me. Mr Dastidar to Dharam Chand to Rani Chandra to Jayati Aflatoon. Our demands are quite simple. One: No fee. The work is its own reward. Two: My team and I’ve to be set up in Madna for the treatment, the duration of which I haven’t decided on yet. Three: I’m to be placed in charge of Suroor’s revival. I don’t want any myopic Civil Surgeon breathing dust down my neck.

  ‘I’ve brought with me photocopies of one of those scripts that later, I’d like to record on tape and eventually propose to Suroor to take up as themes in his street plays. You could present these pages as convincing arguments to both Rani Chandra and Jayati Aflatoon—and in fact to anybody else who you know might want to join us but’d first like to learn what we’re up to.’

  Is it coincidence (ran Dr Chakki’s script) that in Hindi our official language, Plato the Greek political theorist is called Aflatoon? Three centuries ago, when a migrant family from the North-West settled down at Aflatoonabad, dropped its caste name and picked up another—something less indicative of its social roots and region of origin—it chose Aflatoon. Was that foresight or irony? Or modesty, in that it might’ve been referring to the incredibly sweet, cloyingly heavy, mildly sickening and slightly lumpen candy of sorts, after which the town of its—the family’s—choice is named and for which it—the town—is justly renowned? Succeeding generations of the family—the leaders, thinkers, statesmen, founding fathers and polo players amongst them—have often pontificated on the nature of politics and of the Welfare State, complimented one another on their acuity and wisdom and often recalled in comparison not the candy, but their Greek namesake. He seems a good point, therefore, at which to begin.

  In The Republic, Plato’s Socrates states that Asclepius, the son of Apollo and the patron of doctors, believed that ‘no treatment should be given to the man who cannot survive the routine of his ordinary job, and who is therefore of no use either to himself or to society’. Plato-Socrates approves entirely of the idea and himself declares a bit later, ‘This then is the kind of medical and judicial provision for which you will legislate in your state. It will provide treatment for those of your citizens whose physical and psychological constitution is good; as for the others, it will leave the unhealthy to die, and those whose psychological constitution is incurably corrupt it will put to death.’ In the perfect state, in brief, imperfection has no place, naturally.

  Yes but, I mean, really, I say . . . protests Rajamani Aflatoon, the first founding father of our Welfare State, in the twenty-three volumes of his Complete Works that’ve been published so far, and elaborates in his letter to Gajapati from a Swiss sanatorium in 1951, to be found on Wake-Up Call of Volume Fourteen: Our blemished Welfare State exists, therefore, for all the millions of the imperfect who’ll never qualify as citizens of the ideal republic. Like people, like government. The quality of the second can only reflect that of the first. After all, its representatives and administrators are drawn from, and rise out of, them, the different sections of the masses. In fact, to make Plato’s monumental meritocracy work, it seems to me that his wise men must first improve the basic stock from which they choose their candidates. In other words, even the perfect state could do with a dose or two of the principles of welfare.

  Just as our poor government would fare much better, without a doubt, were we able to put into effect some of the ideas of the first and—I’m sure that our first family will forgive me—the original—Aflatoon. His proposal for the creation of an aristocracy of administrative talent, for example, which is what his rulers become after some decades of training. Well, can we juxtapose against them, even for a minute, our members of the Steel Frame? After all, they too, at the end of their careers, have worked at all kinds of government jobs for thirty-five years. On-the-Job Training, absolutely, and probably more effective than Plato’s more formal, academic cultivation of body and mind.

  I see at least one more point of comparison. Plato recruits his rulers from all stratums of society, but the vast majority of them are chosen from the top two layers—principally because they are bred for the job. The cream of the scum, without a doubt. Does one need to underline the similarity with the distorted, top-heavy representation of classes and castes in the Steel Frame that led, almost a decade ago, to the setting up of the Kansal Commission in the hope that its recommendations would redress the balance? The fundamental difference of course is that Plato views this unequable, disproportionate reflection of the people in their administrators as essential to his grand design. The perfect—versus the Welfare—State, no doubt.

  After that minute—for the duration of which we compared the two frames, the steel and the Platonic—is over, we can turn our attention to one of the end-products of our deliberations, the civil servant who retires at the age of sixty-two. Sixty-two, by any scientific, physiological, logistical, numerological or astrological configuration, is a mystifyingly insignificant number. Its triviality, its arbitrariness, as a cut-off age is underscored by the fakeness of all our birth certificates. It would be fairly accurate to say that most of our sixty-two year olds are actually between the ages of sixty-eight and eighty. Time being illusion, doubtless. Then why retire our guardians at sixty-two when we can benefit for another couple of decades from the wisdom and administrative skills of a handful of them? Ah, but the problem is—you object—how to select that handful? How to prevent the legendary Dr Bhatnagar—for example—from worming his way into that hand after his return from the UN?

  The solution, of course, is to choose your wise sixty-two-year-olds only after analysing the opinions of their subordinates. Pick only those who in all humility have for thirty years sucked below with as much solicitude and nicety as above. Remember that according to their annual confidential reports, they’d all be outstanding. How then will you differentiate between the matchlessly-outstanding and the a-national-disgrace-but-outstanding? Simple: send questionnaires to—and interview—some of those assistants and deputies who suffered your prospective guardian over their heads in various offices. Ask them:

  1) How would you define the term ‘outstanding’ in relation to the officer in question?

  2) Did he get all his promotions on time simply because everyone needs to budge a bit every once in a while, responding, as it were, to a fundamental law of Physics?

  3) What degree of relevance to the personage under discussion has the axiom that states that when one removes an officer from his position, one also causes his work to vanish?

  4) When his children dropped in at his office to phone aunts in the US and cousins in Australia, did he buy them Pepsis from the Office Entertainment Allowance?

  5) At meetings, when his boss dried him up with a look for having brought the wrong papers for discussion, did he hang his head in shame and weep silently like Tom Dooley? Or did he glance at you in such a way, just once, askance, that his boss’s ire was deflected onto you fully for the next twenty minutes? While he slumped back in his chair and smirked in witless relief at the others at the table?

  6) Did he hang around in office pointlessly, way beyond closing time, only to impress?

  7) How skil
led was he at leaving his decisions for time—that sage, that overlord—to take care of?

  8) Did he usually sit in front in the office car beside the chauffeur either because he wished to show that he believed in social equality or he was gay? Or because in an Ambassador, the front seat is a damn sight more comfortable? Or because he didn’t wish to be machine-gunned down at the back?

  9) How hard did he try to scramble into the Intelligence Bureau Endangered List? With what success?

  10) Did he regularly sign differently different official papers, depending on their importance and the extent to which he understood them?

  11) Did he address village gatherings of the semi-illiterate in English? With a quote or two from, say, Louis Mac Neice? Or did he speak some of our other languages with such perplexing fluency that in a matter of minutes, he’d notice the members of his audience eye one another in polite bewilderment?