The Mammaries of the Welfare State
Page 41
12) Did he spit into the urinal while pissing?
13) Or sigh audibly and invoke a god while leaning forward, resting his head against the tiles, gazing down and playing a sort of billiards with the naphthalene balls in the bowl with his jet of urine as the cue?
And so on. The questions that one poses will depend, naturally, on the parties in question, on who is being interviewed about whom for what job. Rest assured that I don’t envisage selecting more than a couple of wise guardians per year. They’ll of course undergo a series of physical, medical and psychological tests—if a blue flag flapping in the wind suggests a woman drying her long hair on a terrace on a bright Sunday morning, and a glass of cold coffee suggests a middle-class wage-earner contemplating a crime, then what does an empty goods train hurtling through the night signify to you? Confidentially, of course. That sort of thing.
Well, you’ve selected your SAge-Man-for-All-SeASons and he’s distributed his mithai in celebration; what next? Why, he rushes off to his astrologer, of course, to tap the future. Okay, and after? After, you ask him to handle a specific project, keeping in mind the field of his expertise. No macro-level crap. Back to the grassroots. Dump on him acres of wasteland, for example, to convert into a profitable orchid farm. Let him pick his own team, back him to the hilt, no knives in the back. Give him constitutional and extra-constitutional protection. Tell him to tackle the problem of traffic in your megalopolises. Ban cars completely downtown and wherever else the action is. Update your neolithic buses and trains, and instead of your air-conditioned, chauffeur-driven automobile that inches forward, sleekly and silently, at four kilometres an hour, use the bicycle-car, the manufacture and popularization of which will be given top priority in the new Welfare State. You know, doubtless, what I’m talking about? The cycle-car? With four sets of bicycle pedals, two in front, two at the back, that is to say, one for the driver, three for the passengers, with a steering wheel, a tooter and a set of gears in front? It’s either that or the normal, standard bicycle. My sixth sense—or my astrologer, if you wish—tells me that it—the cycle car—will become incredibly popular and will in fact totally revolutionize industry. You see, while pedalling and giving some shape to your leg muscles, you can at the same time bicker with your husband, paw an object of desire, or daydream to a Rani Chandra cassette. No exhaust fumes, traffic jams or parking nightmares because it’s half the size of every other car. The country’s petrol consumption plummets, its air improves and jet loads of multinationals bid it tearful farewell, only to return by the next flight, in new lightweight suits, with firmer handshakes and different briefcases with state-of-the-art plans for the various components of our cycle car. Rest assured that their modern technology simply won’t leave us alone.
Of course, no one, absolutely no one, will be above the law that will oblige the citizens of our cities to park their purring cars far away in some ghastly suburb and use our new trains, buses, cycle-taxis and cycle-cars to get to work. No exceptions, no insidious class hierarchies or caste reservations. Ministers, terrorists, cops—all equally subject to the new regulations.
Yes the police too. I intend to devote an entire session—for which the script is ready—to the management of the police, so I won’t anticipate myself here—not beyond a point, anyway. It is monstrous how we, in our daily lives, continually allow to be flouted and belittled the bedrock-axioms that ensure the health of the state: namely, that the upholders of the law must never be seen to be above it, and that the hand that holds the gun shouldn’t sign the order to shoot. When you don’t rein it in, the beast goes berserk, and tramples all over your life and mine, and swaggers up to the richer farmers of the north and demands of each one of them a lakh of rupees, or else it’ll whisk away, torture and finish off their innocent, full-blooded sons and then congratulate itself the morning after for having wiped out some more dreaded terrorists.
The question that needs to be answered is: Is Operation SAMASAS beyond the reach of the tentacles of the Kansal Commission or not? That is to say, though it is true that the lowering of standards is fundamental to the idea of the accommodation of all imperfection within the Welfare State, isn’t it equally important that one mustn’t compromise in the least on quality control in certain key areas? That one must not lower one’s standards to the point where the rot might start to set in?
The rhetorical questions continued for the rest of the paragraph. Dr Chakki’s scripts were best read out by Dr Chakki himself. He thought so too but since Suroor hadn’t responded to them with the alacrity that was their due, he had concluded that perhaps they needed to be delivered in a voice more melodious. Miss Lina Natesan’s had suggested itself when she had phoned him at the hotel the previous week.
‘Can you, Dr Chakki, arrange for someone to receive me at Madna station when I arrive there next Tuesday? My trip is official, so I deem myself entitled to a reception committee. I have repeatedly faxed, telegrammed and phoned the Municipality but have received no firm reply.’
‘It will be a pleasure, Miss Natesan. We will recreate in Madna a little of the good times that we enjoyed inside Aflatoon Bhavan and outside the milk booth of the transit hostel. Particularly since Mr Agastya Sen will be here too, fresh from Europe and en route to Jompanna to take up his post as Officer on Special Duty for the negotiations with NeSLaY. May I ask what brings you down here?’
The plague, was her answer. She reminded Dr Chakki that it had always been with them. It had broken out in the national newspapers more than a year ago only because none of them, in the silly season, had been able to bear the agony of waiting for Jayati Aflatoon to grant audience to Bhanwar Virbhim. It had now receded in the main to where it had always thrived, the alleys and drains of places like Madna. It also survived, for a season and gathering dust, in Miss Natesan’s thirty-page memorandum on the table of the-then HUBRIS Secretary, Dr Harihara Kapila. He had skimmed through it till Housing Problem and then given up. However, before he quit his post to climb the ladder, he marked her complaint down to a subordinate with the remark:
May please forward to the Disaster Management Cell in Home Affairs for advice on her and her colleagues. Meanwhile, if she can’t be accommodated in one of our training courses abroad, pack her off to Madna.
A.C. Raichur was well enough by Tuesday morning to be ferried off to the railway station with a description of Lina Natesan and a board with her name on it. Just as well, for even those who knew her well would have failed to recognise her when she stepped off the train. In her externals, she had changed but marginally. It is true that her spectacles had been replaced by soft contact lenses that lent a sparkle to her eyes, and her hip-length hair had been pruned to a mannish helmet, but the georgette saris remained the same. It was her demeanour, her deportment, that had been utterly transformed. Inner fire on a war footing, no doubt. Her victory in the court case, her success in Paris, and her recent appointment as General secretary of Tetra Pack had all contributed to give her a sense of purpose and a springy step.
After a few hours of dialogue on the phone, Tetra Pack was the name for their new party that Dhrubo and Agastya had finally come up with. Tetra of course for tetracycline, for the party that would rid the country of the plague.
In the auto rickshaw, the new Miss Natesan’s preferred mode of transport, en route to the hospital, she recruited, in her unique mellifluous Hinglish, an awed A.C. Raichur.
‘We have to think small. Big is clumsy and slow to move. Once it moves, Big is uncontrollable because of its size. Look at our policemen in a riot, for example, monsters gone berserk. Big is filthy, inefficient, wasteful and causes calamities. The hills of garbage in this town that the Municipality leaves unattended is one contributing factor of the plague, isn’t it? Remember that over the decades, every single institution, organization, building, agency and establishment that has been taken over by the government has been unsystematically ruined. The State needs immediately to shed weight, you know. It can retain defence, foreign policy, finance, ju
stice and a couple of others but no more, I say.’
She spoke non-stop. The auto-rickshaw reached the hospital, they alit, walked through the corridors, entered Ward Two, greeted Dr Chakki and the simpering Miss Shruti and Miss Snigdha, did a round of the beds and she was still speaking. She had a hand on the door knob of Rajani Suroor’s room when all of a sudden, her voice began to boom.
It took Dr Chakki a second to realize that inexplicably, the lone air-conditioner in the cubicle had gone off. He was vexed. It’d never happened before, at least not officially.
Agastya, who was at that time inside the cabin, was not however at fault. He had just that moment managed to prise open the stiff fingers of Suroor’s left hand and place in his swollen, livid palm a Yin Yang box full of dope. He then remoulded the fingers tight over the box. ‘You look as though you need it, friend.’
Miss Natesan turned the knob and opened the door a fraction when they all distinctly heard from somewhere inside Rajani Suroor a groan. It was a slow, loud and deep rumble of disgust, exactly the sound that one hears from someone who is wrenched out of sleep by the heat. To Agastya, it sounded dreadfully like a long-drawn-out Pa-yn-cho-om. They were a set of syllables appropriate for the occasion, he felt, a couple to bid adieu to the dead and with the balance, to greet the world of the living.
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First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 2000
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Copyright © Upamanyu Chatterjee 2000
The quotation from Kautilya’s Arthashastra on Housing Problem is from the Penguin translation by L.N. Rangarajan.
The extracts on Hubris Ascending from the essay ‘The Magic of the Aflatoons’ are in part inspired by an editorial in the Sunday Statesman of 8 March 1992 entitled ‘The New Class’.
The quotations from Plato’s The Republic on Wake-Up Call are from the Penguin translation by Desmond Lee.
Cover photograph by Ashish Chawla
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