Free The Mammaries of the Welfare State by Upamanyu Chatterjee

the five skits comprise knockabout money-talk of this kind. Karam Chand’s salary, for instance, is debated by abunch of boisterous characters; each Allowance, Emolument, Increment, Advance, Subscription, Contribution, Payment, Instalment, Settlement and Repayment is a persona clothed in greyish-muddy kurta-pyjama; the dismal hue is meant to convey the colour of the Welfare State file covers. These players clamber onto one another’s shoulders to suggest ceiling-high stacks of files in a typical office cubicle; they hide behind one another to mimic files getting lost, they slink out when the narrator-persona pockets a bribe; one stoops and bears another spider-like on his back to convey both the oppressive load of the work and the inconsequence of the subject matter; they move—skip, hop, leapfrog, bob, buck, prance, shuffle, glide—all the while to the catchy, rap-like Hinglish chatter of the narrator-persona and the Karam Chand player:
O kinsmen of the ‘Welfare State
—
behold your clerk!
    Earns sixteen hundred a month of
your
cash! A lark!
    His work? The Cycle Purchase Advance Part Settlements
    Of nineteen point five rupees per month of other gents
    Like him! Does the welfare of this
—
the cream, the fat,
    Ever reach anyone other than the bureaucrat,
    The Minister, the clerk, the peon? Thousands of files!
    Stacks a metre higher than the clerk
—
who has piles
    From roosting on some trivial matter for ages.
    The more footling the subject, the many more the pages
    Of comment and counter-comment
—
some clerks, of course,
    Spend their office hours yelling themselves hoarse
    Touting their wearunders all over the pavement
    Of Junction Road. You object? Shouldn’t they be sent
    Back to work? And punished?
—
You say so, no doubt,
    Because you’d like another eye or two gouged out.
    May we add here?
—
that blind girl, poor thing
—
some kind

   
soul
    Took her to the Welfare hospital for that hole
    In her face. The doctor
—
the usual Welfare quack,
    Disinterested, on the bottle, with a bloody knack
    For fuck-ups
—
patched her up. And then, examining
    Her a week after, they saw sepsis, blossoming.
    And Karam Chand?
—
Sick of his undies, he slithered
    Away to buy a caste certificate from a bird
    In the tehsildar’s office. And from there, with strife
    In his heart, he moved on, elsewhere, to a new life.
    ‘Hmmm,’ observed Commissioner Raghupati. In his later years as a civil servant, he had come to prefer ‘Hmmm’ to ‘Interesting’ and ‘I see.’
    Suroor leaned forward and added animatedly, ‘In our sequent skit, we compare—juxtapose—our time and the Kautilyan—which, to my mind, is the archetypal Welfare State.’
    One-eleven p.m. The Commissioner needed to return home for his bracing massage and his light lunch. He smiled at Suroor, scarcely disarranging the hard fat of his face, and pushed a paan into his mouth. He was a perennially hungry, carnal man. In his unending, unscientific tussle with obesity, he’d snacked for years on paans. Stocky, the hard fat enclosing cold eyes and a gap-toothed, brutish mouth, the sort of figure that, while erect, rocks all the time on the balls of its feet. ‘The Collector told me that you and he enjoyed a long chat last evening.’ Raghupati disregarded the minutiae of his work, but was on the ball, intuitively, about the stuff that cast long shadows. So to Suroor he added in a purr, ‘I’ll be delighted to attend the performance on Friday.’
    Hot outdoors. A winter afternoon in Madna was usually thirty-five degrees plus. Raghupati namasted his way through the press of petitioners waiting for justice or some crumbs of largesse. As a civil servant, for twenty-three years, he’d seencrowds outside a good many offices of the Welfare State; the numbers had now grown, like the discontent and cynicism, and the clothes were different. Changing times, everyone looked less resigned, more sullen; in the air was less the whiff of those close to the