The Mammaries of the Welfare State (12 page)

‘The sarpanch swaggered into the Health Centre this morning without his goons. I was surprised to see him alone. He had two subjects to discuss with me, he said. One concerned the conduct of his cousin, a frightful drunkard who, the evening before last, had implored his wife, an
Anganwadi worker and the family’s single wage-earner, for some more cash for hooch and’d been refused; in a frenzy, he’d snatched up their two-year-old daughter and hurled her down on the ground. The child’s skull’d split open like a pomegranate. The sarpanch wanted me to say in my post-mortem report that she’d
died of Japanese encephalitis. He’d already taken care of the witnesses. They wished to stay on in their village, he said.

‘ “I’m sure that you can work out the details,” he added graciously, “meanwhile, I’ve this other problem—” and he lifted up his kurta, tucked it under his chin, and hoisted up both his dhoti and his drawers to exhibit to me a penis the foreskin of which wouldn’t retract.

‘Raghupati Saab, the Welfare State must launch, on a war footing, the new IRHBTFP, Integrated Rural Hygiene Beneath the Foreskin Programme; as Assistant Collector, you must propose this revolutionary scheme to both the Departments of Health and of Rural Development. The logo for the project could be the rubber nipple of an infant’s feeding bottle and the slogan,
Are YOU Sterilized Enough to Be Sucked?
Do you suppose that our Muslim brethren would protest against the programme on the grounds that it’d rather shrewdly route huge funds towards non-Muslims alone?’ Dr Srinivas Chakki had then sighed. ‘Development is a tricky business.’

Just then, the Mutesh cassette ran out. Raghupati welcomed the silence because it’d help him to think. He plodded back to the puja room. Chamundi hadn’t stirred. The blood beneath his forehead, though, had clotted. The offending penis, Raghupati noted, was now dried up, black and sad. Chamundi was innocent and sleek in coma, unless he was dead, in which case he was innocent, sleek and problematic. Should he feel his pulse, Raghupati asked himself, or his bum? All at once, his bedside phone buzzed, loud and harsh; it never failed to make him jump.

He frowned, looking back through the doorway of the puja room at the phone. This was unbelievable. He’d instructed Murari and that lot a hundred times that he was
never
to be disturbed during his meditation. For them, never meant twice a week. The phone buzzed again. He strode across to it in a fury.

‘Sorry to bother, sir, but Honourable Collector of Madna on the line, most urgent, sir.’ Murari pushed the extension button down before Raghupati could start his abuse.

‘Hello . . . hahn . . . Mr Raghupati? . . . Good afternoon, sir, this is Agastya Sen, how are you? . . . I’m sorry that I haven’t yet been able to call on you, sir and I was wondering if I could later this afternoon . . . How kind of you, thank you . . . nothing that can’t wait—except that it’s driving me up the wall and preventing me from discharging my duties calmly and objectively . . . one can’t, you know, from near the ceiling . . . I gather that you also handle Divisional Accounts, sir . . . it’s a matter of the Travelling Advance that I took from my earlier office, of two thousand rupees for the train journey to Madna . . . the Accounts Officer here at the Collectorate tells me that I have to pay back to the government the bank interest that I might have earned on the Advance for the period that I didn’t use it to buy my train ticket with . . . Yes, sir, only you can waive it . . .
waive
sir, as in—or rather,
not
as in wand, sea and hair . . . would four-thirty be fine, sir? I have some kind of inspection at the Madna International Hotel at five . . . Thank you, sir . . . Good-bye.’

T
he Madna International is a decent-enough hotel and the only fully air-conditioned one in town. Winter—when its air-conditioning is likelier to be functional because the Electricity Board traditionally restricts its nine-hour power cuts to peak summer—is usually a popular season of the year with visitors who have work in the satellite factories, quarries and paper mills that dot the district. Usually, but not this year—perhaps because of the plague. For whatever reason, Rajani Suroor and the players of
Vyatha
found rooms at the International quite easily, even at a concession. Its proprietor, Dinkar Sathe, has always been accommodating, almost philanthropic, with all representatives of the government. Suroor was practically one—an agent, certainly, even if not an official representative—for more than one reason. The amount of money that
Vyatha
procured from various branches of the government, for instance, to diffuse through its street theatre diverse statements of official policy, and the ease with which it milked the State were both impressive. So was the facility, the rapidity with which doors in high places opened for Suroor. Government, of course, Sathe understood to mean power; whether legitimate or illicit didn’t bother him. Its representatives therefore included any one who could wave the wand that—poof!—made obstacles disappear. Thus in his eyes, Sukumaran Govardhan, for example, the lord of the illegal traffic of the Madna jungles, could well be the Minister for Forests and Environment—though considerably more powerful.

Because of his faith in the wand of power, its wielders, whether permanently in office or temporarily in jail, were for Dinkar Sathe akin to magicians. Illusionists, tricksters, larger-than-life distracters, the best of them were on the ball, knew exactly what was going on—who could be milked for how much and for what in return—and enacted their roles with more gusto and skill than Suroor’s roving players. Naturally, since they earned infinitely more for their pains.

All would agree that Madna’s first magician is Bhanwar Virbhim, ex-Chief Minister of the region and soon-to-be Cabinet Minister at the Centre. Dinkar Sathe has known him for about two decades, has observed him climb with mounting deference, has liberally contributed to both his personal and party coffers on more than one occasion and has received in return, over the years, diverse significant concessions and favours—the first bar licence in the town, the permission to add two floors to his hotel despite the existence of stringently prohibitive Municipal laws, a plot of land, at a throwaway price, that had originally been reserved for a children’s park, the suppressing of an unusually accurate and dreadfully embarrassing story in the local press about bonded labour on his teak farm, the protecting of his cartoonist brother from the fury of Virbhim’s son over a series of devastating lampoons, and so on. Even though Virbhim has performed for the past few years increasingly at the Centre, he and Sathe keep in touch, naturally, because Madna is the Minister’s patrimony.

His only son too, Makhmal Bagai, is well known to Sathe and is a frequent visitor at the International. Neither father nor son has retained his original caste-revealing surname for the obvious reason that for the legerdemain of politics, one travels light. En route, they have picked up, like a thousand others before them, whichever names they’ve liked the sounds of. It is standard practice in the Welfare State. Indeed, its best example would be the nation’s extended first family, the Aflatoons.

They aren’t one family at all, certainly not in the sense of being linked to one another by blood and genealogy. A couple of hundred years ago, a migrant family from the North-West—origins unknown—did settle down at Aflatoonabad and engage itself in one of the two professions traditional to that town—the confectioner’s, the other being, of course, the conjuror’s. Across the generations, some of its descendants did take to public life—the names Pashupati, Ghatotkach, Trimurti, Prabhakar, come readily to mind—but they would account for only a fraction of all the Aflatoons after whom have been named the thousands of buildings, monuments, institutions, gardens, shopping arcades, residential areas, stadiums, community toilets and other public places of the land.

The reason is quite simple—and rather peculiar to the Welfare State. At various significant moments in the history of the nation, both before and after its cataclysmic independence from colonial rule, in different regions of the country, any able aspirant to political power, quite early in his career—and overnight—simply became an Aflatoon. Documentation collectively being both the backbone and the memory of the Welfare State—it being altogether a different matter that individually considered, each one of those files, records, statements and accounts is as flimsy and fleeting, as fickle and provisional, as a used wrapper in a gale—documentation being paramount, each political hopeful produced at the right time, like a rabbit out of a hat, the required proof of identity—a hospital record, a school certificate, a Municipal extract, a court entry. Lo and behold, yet another Aflatoon! Except that at the moment of the manifestation of the new magician, there usually stood by no audience to witness the miracle because one doesn’t come by audiences that cheaply, not even in an overcrowded country. However, by the time that the parvenu Aflatoon, of whichever political hue, came to be noticed in Municipal, district and
regional circles, a decade or so would have passed and the assumed name would have become as snug as a second skin—peelable, of course, in moments of grave crises.

Bhanwar Virbhim, for instance, had once been an Aflatoon and it was rumoured of Sukumaran Govardhan too (not to forget Makhmal Bagai, who a couple of times had toyed with the notion as with a gun, but had been sternly rebuked on each occasion by his father for even thinking of tarnishing a fair name by adopting it). Compelling caste factors—votes, in brief, ‘national emergencies’, to use Virbhim’s own compelling phrase—had guided him in his choice of various aliases. In general, he had picked wisely, having become Chief Minister of the regional government twice and between the two tenures, Deputy Minister for Information at the Centre.

However, ambitious and astute that he was, he did sometimes wonder whether in the long run, he’d played well his cards—and indeed, whether for him the game was over—because in the seven decades since Independence, the nation’s sixteen Prime Ministers had all been Aflatoons.

These Aflatoons popping up, time after time, like boils all over the country—what did the original first family think of them? Not much, really. In the first place, it wasn’t even certain of its own existence; however could it have the collective strength of purpose to reflect on and reject these obscure, small-town, provincial pretenders? It questioned itself but rarely; when it did, its examination was myopic. No two family members could agree on which line of descent constituted the main trunk of its tree—it couldn’t possibly be Tirupati’s, for instance, for his eldest had in the early twenties decamped with his Chinese masseuse and apparently died utterly content running his restaurant in Hong Kong. A trunk after all has to be rock-like, solidly respectable. We are a banyan tree, asserted those of the clan that could be bothered; with the years we spread and thrust down new trunks. In the vast area that we provide shade to (and in which in general
we prevent any vegetation of worth from growing), it is quite possible that now and then some bastard sapling, resilient, doughty, survives to attain a respectable height and indeed, with time, comes to resemble one of our offshoots. Doubtless because it has imbibed some of our qualities, some—if you permit—of our magic.

Thursday evening. In the fifty-by-forty lobby of the Madna International Hotel, the players of
Vyatha,
some ten in all, led by their deputy, lounge about, awaiting Rajani Suroor’s return from his round of the offices of some of the senior bureaucrats of the district. Headless, the players have spent the day roaming around the town, avoiding certain localities like the plague, searching for alternative sites for their shows. They now quaff tea before the TV, placed at a loose end by the day-and-night cricket match on it having been interrupted first by a duststorm and then, more permanently, by acts of arson in the stands.

Makhmal Bagai and Suroor arrive simultaneously at the hotel. Suroor is in the private taxi that he’s hired for the duration of his stay in Madna, a sad, dusty, hot, noisy, off-white Ambassador, Bagai in his lorry-like Tata Safari, steel- grey, black-glassed, air-conditioned, monstrous. It augurs ill for Suroor that his Ambassador doesn’t realize that it has to allow the Safari to precede it up the fifteen metres to the porch; Suroor moreover debouches and mounts the steps without so much as a backward glance. The third thing that puts Bagai off is that the single parking space available under the porch has been taken up by the one kind of vehicle that he cannot dislodge, an official car, again an off-white Ambassador but this one altogether from a different planet—gleaming, with wraparound sun glasses, an aerial, a siren and a large crimson light on its forehead.

The fourth thing that miffs Bagai is that Dinkar Sathe
doesn’t receive him in the lobby. Indeed, no one does. In contrast, a large gang has abandoned the TV and is milling around that long-haired joker from that seedy car. ‘See to things,’ Bagai commands one of his cohorts who, smirking in anticipation, stalks off towards the reception counter. From where, a few minutes later, he returns, looking apprehensive.

‘No one’s available, Prince. The Collector of Madna dropped by on a surprise inspection and everyone’s scurrying around after him.’

Bagai subsided into a sofa and glanced across at Suroor smiling intelligently at whatever his Deputy was telling him. On an impulse, he snapped his fingers at and beckoned to him. To his horror, Suroor, continuing to smile intelligently, snapped his fingers at and beckoned to him right back. Somewhat at a loss, Bagai then took out from his kurta pocket his father’s gun, a .22, and aimed it at Suroor’s face. ‘Prince, no!’ hissed a cohort in panic. Suroor, dramatic to the last, acted out being shot and with a moan and a hand over his heart, toppled back into the sofa behind him, perhaps to avoid further conversation with the Deputy.

‘Find out who he is and whether he knows who I am.’ Without enthusiasm, a cohort shuffled off in Suroor’s direction.

Bagai weighed the gun in his hand. It was terribly unmanly to take it out, wave it about and finally not to use it, particularly when everybody was gaping at it. Both depressed and nervous, he placed it between his thighs on the sofa and covered it with the end of his kurta. To the female attendant who timorously tripped up to him to repeat that the entire hotel merely awaited the Collector’s departure to focus all its attention on Bagai’s wishes and to add that until then, whether there was anything in particular that he and his companions wanted, he calmly said, ‘Ice cream.’

‘Of course sir.’ She was short, dark and pretty, in a sari of
green and gold. ‘Which flavours would you like?’

She was not servile enough. She spoke her few English phrases too facilely. She didn’t look as though she was physically being attracted to him. She was about to spark off his notorious frightening temper. ‘Who are you, Madam, to ask me questions? Why do you lie when you claim to know who I am? Has not the hotel been instructed time and again to phone my house every weekend to find out whether I’m free and likely to drop in with my friends for a drink, a snack or dinner? Yet nobody calls!’ He had raised his voice and begun to glare at her but he would have preferred in the circumstances to deal with a male attendant. With a man—waiter, steward or porter-bouncer-concierge-lobby manager—he could in a matter of seconds begin his reviling, his pushing in the chest and cuffing about the head, his glancing over his shoulder to see if he was impressing any females in the vicinity with his manliness, his refusal to let an imagined insult slip by, his concern for, and support of the social order.

‘Tutti-frutti-vanilla, sir?’

‘And after the Collector leaves, whiskey,’ suggested Suroor, beaming with confidence in his own endearing ways. He’d returned with the cohort and stood beside Bagai’s sofa. He thrust out a hand. ‘I had certainly been hoping to meet you during our stay in Madna.’

Makhmal was confused. Almost in reflex, he lifted up his kurta and retrieved his gun. He didn’t like in the least the way things were unfolding. In a typical soiree at the International, within the first fifteen minutes, after the hotel staff had scampered about enough to appease him, the beers would’ve arrived and been rejected for not being chilled—and the pakodas for not being spicy—enough; a succession of hotel staff (in increasing order of importance) would’ve tried, as in a vignette out of myth, to pacify his anger. In the midst of the mess, sullenly munching, quaffing and eyeing a female receptionist or two, stone-deaf to the entreaties of, say, a
Chief Food and Beverages Manager, he, having learnt a trick or two from his father, would’ve played the caste card. It had never failed to thicken any plot. He’d’ve fixed his maroon eyes on the Manager of the moment and mumblingly accused some other hotel employee of having affronted his, Makhmal’s, caste; how would never be made clear and in the circumstances wasn’t required to be. It would’ve been in very bad taste to enquire—and moreover, not of much use, since over the years, the wide canvas of politics had compelled Bhanwar Virbhim and his family to own up to, and feel responsible for, a thousand castes. I am the voice of the downtrodden, I am the soul of
all
the depressed, backward, repressed, suppressed and unrecognized castes. Any imagined insult to
any
of those millions is an arrow in my heart. No matter
what
that poor innocent hotel employee might have thought behind his tits or expressed in his eyes, it insulted me. I
know
it, because caste is in the marrow of my bones, just as it is in his and in yours. You might want to shush it away and get on with it into the next millennium, but you won’t go very far without having to return for it. It is integral to our lives and our state; however can you dream of welfare without understanding caste?