Free The Mammaries of the Welfare State by Upamanyu Chatterjee Page B

Clerks, Auxiliary Diarists, storekeepers, Chief Clerks, typists, accountants, stenotypists, Head Clerks—for none of whom are the batteries in the wall clocks of their grey, grimy crowded halls replaced even once in ten years; their perks are the intact window pane, the not-yet-fused light bulb, the water jug that doesn’t leak, the ceiling fan that rotates, the rexine of a table top that hasn’t yet been shredded by some clerk crazed by inertia. In their halls—their boxed-in verandas and caged-off corridors—nobody provides them file racks for the knolls of files that rise all anyhow up to the ceiling, the snug burrow-lairs of ants, moths, termites, worms, beetles, cockroaches, mice, rats, moles, mongooses, pigeons. Some of that rot doubtless slithers into the quality of work of the inhabitants of these office warrens.
    But the expenditure of a little over forty million. Opportunely, in good time, several original, attached, dependent and subordinate offices of the four hundred and eighty-seven Ministries and Departments of both the central and twenty-seven regional governments of the Welfare State bought over a thousand air-conditioners—and a good many fridges, freezers, chillers and ice buckets—for the offices, official motorcades and residential offices of their Cabinet Ministers and First Speakers, their Chairmen-Designate and Commons Judges. To that should be added proportionate portions of the costs and overheads of all the activities of all those involved in the issuing of the economy-measure circular—that frenzied dictating, noting, placing on record and compiling, photocopying, cyclostyling, ferrying to and fro, the drafting, minuting, typing, redacting, translating, the bullshitting, the time-wasting—plus bits of the scores of salaries, allowances and emoluments, of the expenditure on upkeep, services, electricity—on the four air-conditioners, forexample, in the Treasury Minister’s chambers that have to be switched on at least an hour before he turns up in the morning for the rooms to be chill enough to facilitate his brainwork, his ponderings.
    Thus it was that the replaced air-conditioners tumbled down the ladder into the offices, Ambassador cars, bedrooms and puja-rooms at the homes of Raghupati and his several hundred colleagues strategically dispersed all over the Welfare State.
    On cue, Sharada Prasad the driver switched on the cassette player along with the a.c. Raghupati preferred the fifties’ and sixties’ Hindi film songs of Mutesh. When Mutesh, in his doleful, reedy, atonal voice, sang of the aches of love, the perfidiousness of friendship, the ups and downs of survival— his range, in brief—he conjured up for Raghupati the image of a male rape victim singing under duress, while being buggered, or even—with Mutesh, as with Raghupati, anything was imaginable—fucked in the gullet. He played Mutesh almost always during his massages in his puja room.
    Through the black-filmed car window, he noticed the sign painters on their scaffolding, flies on the giant billboard that dwarfed the Commissionerate gates. The black film itself—and all tinted glass, et cetera—had been the subject of another, more recent, circular of the Home Secretary.
To help the State in its effort against terrorists, gunrunners, smugglers, kidnappers and other anti-social elements, the police would henceforth regulate how tinted car windows could be. Welfare State-car windows could be darker than private-car windows, but should definitely not be opaque, i.e., a policeman should be able to see inside the car, easily, from a distance of seven feet (2.07 metres).
Or so Raghupati had deciphered the circular, which had been issued only in Hindi, the official language.
    On the billboard that publicized only Welfare Stateschemes and projects, Small Savings was making way for Family Welfare. Small Savings had been a smiling family watering a sapling.
SUSTAIN THE TREE OF LIFE,
had urged the branches of the sapling.