'He doesnt look as though he loves it, observed Dr Chakki as he and Raichur settled down in the auto-rickshaw. For the pa.s.sengers in the rear, the six stuffed, life-sized arms a foot ahead of their noses, jutting out of the drivers torso in all directions, severely restricted the view. Indeed, the bottom- most two protruded out of the vehicle on either side, looking from a distance quite lifelike, as though the driver was signalling an intention to turn both left and right at the same time.

'No, hes at the moment blue for family reasons. Given the size of his clan, it is surprising that he isnt miserable all the year round. A younger sister of his is in hospital. She had her cheek grazed by a bullet from Makhmal Bagais gun, but we maintain that somebody else fired the weapon. It is shocking how much people will lie for money.

The rickshaw shuddered and chugged through the bicycles, carts, cars and buses, missing not a single pothole as it skirted Aflatoon Maidan. Pa.s.sersby and pedestrians gazed, grinned and waved at Durga. Dr Chakki, tired but upbeat, waved back, particularly at the policemen. Outside the Mall Road gate of the park, where the footpath broadened out into a sort of paved square, a crowd watching a play in progress had swamped the road. The rickshaw put-putted to a halt against a row of b.u.ms and tooted a couple of times to try and budge them before giving up.

To force their way to a ringside seat, Durga came in handy. From the tool box of the auto rickshaw, Raichur fished up a box of incense sticks, a tiny bra.s.s bell and a half- mask, the last of which he fitted over Dambhas head. It came down to his nose. Around the holes for the eyes-and stretching up to the ears-had been painted the long-lashed outlines of even larger eyes. To the mask was attached a wig of black, luxuriant, hip-length hair. With a lighter, Raichur lit an incense stick and wedged it between the fingers of one of the stuffed hands. The bell he slung over another padded pinkie. In his new avatar, the driver, listlessly chanting: Mother, Mother, Your mothers here.

Do not, Brother, Quake in fear.

Its only my mask of a face That makes me look a basket case.

Only the sinful and no other Feel guilty before a mother sliced a route through to the centre of the crowd.

The players of Vyatha all wore off-white shirts-and-trousers, or kurta pyjamas. Two of them, to form a door, stood erect three feet apart balancing a wooden slat on their heads. Before them on the pavement squatted an actor playing a peon. About him were strewn some used government envelopes. He was engaged in tearing open their gummed edges, turning them inside out and with a tube of glue, repasting their three sides. The hideous end-products he had stacked on his left. Now and then, rhythmically and without quite pausing in his labours, he would raise a hand to receive from a visitor his card or a slip of paper with his name and purpose of visit on it. Those chits accompanied by bribes he would pa.s.s on to one of the doorposts behind him, tucking into his own shirt pocket the currency notes. Those without he would simply slip into the oblivion of one of the remade envelopes.

Only the bribers, of course, crossed the threshold-after, that is, folding into the pockets of one of the doorposts a second currency note. The honest, stupid and persevering turned away, trudged a few steps, wheeled round, retraced their paces and rejoined the queue before the peon to hand him once more their name slips. As long as they didnt add the cash, they didnt step out of the circle, through the door and into the chamber. Where lolled a fat actor in a chair before a desk. His callers addressed him as 'Respected Private Secretary, sir. When Dr Chakki and Raichur tuned in, he was on the phone swinging a deal, that is to say, the stretched thumb of his left hand was at his left ear, he was delivering his dialogue into the mouthpiece formed by his pinkie, and the intervening three fingers were fisted.

Tuning in to the play was not easy. The hubbub of the street and the laughter and comments of the spectators blocked out most lines; they in turn were totally drowned out by the stentorian, off-and-on, rapidfire commentary of the narrator-persona-tubby, with the hooded eyelids and flared nostrils of a dragon-and the thunderous drumrolls that preceded and followed each of his proclamations. Hence-and because of the inadequacy of his Hindi as well-it took Dr Chakki a while to grasp that the Private Secretary, on behalf of his unnamed Minister, was chatting to a foreign supplier of paper while the suppliant before his desk was a native manufacturer of the same commodity.

Suppliant (briefcase in hand): I beg to remind you, sir, that I offer you the same quant.i.ty and quality at fifty crores-virtually half the price, esteemed sir.

Private Secretary (into the phone): Minister would be rather taken aback at anything less than two point five per cent.

Peon (without stopping either his a.s.sault on used envelopes or his pocketing of cash): The same c.r.a.ppy paper at the top end of the ladder too-so why bother to climb?

Suppliant (to Private Secretary): Our percentages too, sir, are more attractive. As an added incentive, theres a percentage of the percentage exclusively for you. Consider it akin to a festival bonus.

Private Secretary (chuckling suavely into the phone): Come come-in dollars US of course. Minister has always been very pro the open society and human rights. He would feel like a traitor with any other currency.

Peon (musingly): Honourable Ministers cut alone could buy us several billion envelopes-but of a quality far superior to our needs. Whod use a sack of silk to throw his garbage out in?

Dr Chakki was distracted from the play at that point by the sudden appearance at Durgas elbow (at one of his eight, more accurately speaking) of a long-haired, bespectacled, groovy-looking man. 'What an interesting idea, murmured Rajani Suroor half to himself, as he examined Dambhas getup with intense curiosity, 'Look, Mother Durga, dear, he cooed as, gripping the young mans shoulder, he began gently to propel him towards the actors, 'Why dont you join the queue that wants to meet the Minister?

Dambha smiled beneath his mask. 'Yes, why not? I could ask him to save my sisters face.

Durga in single file triggered off more than one appreciative laugh amongst the audience. The sentinel peon added his share by demanding from the G.o.ddess a considerably larger entry fee. 'Youve so many more hands, revered Mother, with which to give.

'Or take. Dambha swayed and writhed so that the fingers of one of his padded arms could graze and try to fish for the money in the peons shirt pocket.

Rajani Suroor was in near-ecstasy. 'Ive picked a natural. Almost all the spectators were in agreement with him. A handful who werent had just arrived in a white Amba.s.sador. They carried bicycle chains, bamboo lathis and hockey sticks. Beginning with the fringe of the crowd, they started, with a shove and a curse here, a lunge and a threatening gesture there, to encourage the audience to disperse. After they had thus cleaved a pa.s.sage through to the performance, they attacked the players with their weapons.

Exclaiming incredulously, Rajani Suroor had moved forward towards the hoodlums. Two of them pitched into him. The thwack of a hockey stick on his skull was sharp like a rifle shot. A second blow as he toppled altogether stilled him.

Dr Chakki watched them scramble into the car and it squeal away. Its number plate read: Something Something JB 007.

The Prime Minister Visits.

The December of the plague scare, continued. Agastya Sen believed that one of the many important duties of the Collector of Madna was to swamp his subordinates with paper. Typical of his correspondence with his staff would be his demi-official letter of December 12 asking the tehsildars and Sub-Divisional Officers of the district to pay more attention to his demi-official letters. They didnt.

So in his memo of December 17, he beseeched them to ensure only one thing when they submitted any information to him, that it should not absurdly contradict the information that theyd given him on the same subject the week before. To his mind, his request was simple and reasonable. He failed to understand, therefore, why they all found it so difficult to comply with.

Of course, there had been times when he hadnt had to refer to the previous weeks report to feel totally foxed. One could take as an instance the last statement of the Resident Tehsildar: There are no cases pending for regularization under Section 31AA of the BP of FC on H Act, 1947. Hence the information called for by the Department for the quarter ending June 30 may be treated as Nil.

He had sent the file back with a question for the tehsildar. What does the BP of FC, etc., stand for? As he had suspected, the tehsildar did not know. The Collector had suggested to him that it might well be the Beastly Practice of Effing Criminals on Housetops Act, 1947, and that the tehsildar could consider writing thus to the Department. He did.

More to the point was the last report of the Leave Reserve Deputy Collector on the position of borewells in the district on July 31: Total Number of Borewells in the District as on June 30 : 854 Number of Borewells Constructed in July : 8 Total Number of Borewells in the District as on July 31 : 858 Total Number of Functioning Borewells in the District as on July 31 : 72 Number of Functioning Borewells Constructed in July : 6 Total Number of Borewells repaired in the District in July : 84 Total Number of Borewells Yet to be Repaired : Figures not available The statement went every month to the Commissioner, the Departments of Rural Development, Water Supply, Agriculture, Planning, Revenue, Relief and Rehabilitation, and to the Geological Survey. At least they had stopped sending-or rather, itd be more correct to say that Agastya had stopped signing-totally illegible copies of such statements. Some of his subordinates would recall that that-the incredible nonchalance with which illegible junk was being put up for his signature-had been the subject of his circular of December 15. Very early in his tenure, he had sent dozens of files back with the following note, in place of his signature, on each one of the letters or statements placed for issue in them: I will not sign something that I cannot read. None of those files had ever returned to him. When he had enquired, hed learnt that-why, those letters and statements have been dispatched, sir.

How, hed asked.

Youd signed them all.

I wrote a little note of protest, you fool, I signed nothing. Cant you read?

Many Departments have replied, sir.

On that occasion, the Cla.s.s III Employees Union and the Dainik raised a big fuss against the Collectors having used unparliamentary language against a clerk. To make amends, he had agreed thenceforth to call the concerned clerk a spade.

The stenographers and typists of the Collectorate excused their idleness and lack of typing skills by squarely blaming the poor quality of carbon paper that was supplied to them by the Commissioner of Printing. It was a poor pretext and did not hold water with Agastya. For, he felt, even the most vocal of its detractors would not deny that the Office of the Commissioner of Printing and Paper was-and had always been-consistent. Its carbon paper was much like its other paper-grey and smudged, the tint of the sky at twilight over a soot-belching power station.

Bhootnath Gaitonde was imposing in a Mujibur Rehman kind of way. He strode into the office with a handful of his vaguos. Public life had made him taller and fairer since his days in Bhayankar, had deepened his voice and added resonance to his chuckle. As per Department of Personnel and General Administration Office Memorandum No. 25/19/ 64-Ests (A), dated 8.10.1974, on the subject of Proper Procedure to Be Observed in Official Dealings With MPs/MLAs, Agastya rose from his chair to receive the Member of Parliament. The circular specifically mentions that 'an officer should rise in his seat to receive the member, which to Agastya had always sounded a bit p.o.r.nographic. He loved it, this whole thing.

The Madna seat had fallen vacant when Bhanwar Virbhim, with an eye on that wider canvas, had decided to become a Member of Parliament. Naturally, the Legislative a.s.sembly seat was his patrimony for his son, to be nurtured by the family well into the next millennium. Bhootnath Gaitonde, then a potential rival, had been simply bought off and encouraged instead to try for Parliament from neighbouring Jompanna South.

Pleasantries for a few minutes, before the sparring; tea, coffee or cola? . . . Shri Sen politely pointed out to one vaguo that for the hoi polloi, chewing paan was not allowed on office premises, so would he go out pretty far away please . . . Eventually, Bhootnath Gaitonde got down to taking guard . . . there are so many issues that we need to clarify, Collector Saab . . . how do we begin? . . .

Item Number One was the hunger strike of A.C. Raichur, except that it had now transformed itself into a threat of self-immolation. 'Ah! beamed Shri Sen, happiest when refusing with reason on his side, 'thats out of our hands. Weve forwarded his representation to Home Affairs, copy to the Kansal Commission. Our people have met him to try and dissuade him-the press has been totally irresponsible. He isnt really an emergency, not like Rajani Suroor. Raichur isnt going to cop it for a few months yet-in fact, Im told that hes put on weight because of the amounts that he eats at night . . . what exactly are you after in his case? . . . ahhh, human interest! . . . why dont you raise the subject in Parliament? . . .

A.C. Raichur had been forced to heighten the level of his protest because of the utterly unexpected way in which, during the past week, Rajani Suroor had hogged all the spotlight. Not merely the local press, but the national dailies too-and radio and TV as well. Why, even the devious means by which Makhmal Bagai had managed to get bail had gone almost unnoticed in the papers. Raichur had been enviously impressed by the importance of being a friend of the PM.

In a specially constructed, air-conditioned cabin in the Madna Civil Hospital, the friend lay in coma and was thus several laps ahead of Raichur in the race for immortality, an aspect of his hunger strike that had irked the latter not a little. It seemed to him that Rajani Suroor had received-and continued to receive-far too much attention. Hed even been on the front page of The State of the Times for the first couple of days. With him had been catapulted into the spotlight the unlikeliest and least deserving of this unfair world-slugs like Alagh the Civil Surgeon, for example, wrenched out of pre-retirement torpor by the pin-p.r.i.c.k questioning of hard-boiled, big-city, English-speaking journalists.

'In reply to an earlier question, Dr Alagh, youd stated that Suroors condition was "mysterious, not serious." Wed be glad if you could elaborate.

'Between you and me, that comment was off the record, you know, made just within these four walls and for their ears only.

'Well, for the ears only of this press conference, Dr Alagh, did you mean that Suroors unconscious state has confounded some of the finest medical minds of the country-mainly because they cant explain it away? That all we need to do is to call in some even finer?

'Yes, contusion worse confounded, so to speak-off the record, of course. Not many chuckled, most being unsure whether Dr Alagh had been inopportunely witty or was just plain nervous. Alagh himself would have been at a loss to understand his own remarks, so unsettled had he felt ever since the Thursday of the attack on Suroor. Not an hours respite had he enjoyed since that afternoon-first the fl.u.s.tered junior doctor on duty to him at home, and after that youngster, at the hospital, the deluge: the Police Superintendent, the Commissioner, the Collector baying on the phone from Rameri, the Surgeon-General from Navi Chipra, the Deputy Secretary (Health), the Joint Secretary (Home Affairs), the Resident Under Secretary to the Chief Secretary, and the morning after, three experts in person from the capital, tense, taciturn and balding, a team organized and packed off to Madna at the behest of the Prime Minister, and instructed by him personally and simply to save Suroor.

Which had been achieved, felt the experts dissatisfiedly, by the local Civil Surgeon himself. He seemed all right-a bit lazy, but fortunately no fool. His report of Thursday afternoon clearly showed that he had taken the crucial first few steps in the right direction, thank Heavens.

. . . Patients pupils, pulse, blood pressure, reflexes and breathing checked and found to be normal. No signs of vomiting. External wounds on scalp, not skull. Bruises on body but no broken bones. All indications of severe concussion but no deep internal haemorrhage. Cerebral angiography was called for and done. Confirmed the absence of internal bleeding. Patient definitely unconscious and definitely alive. By this time, anxious enquiries from very senior district officials made clear the VIP status of Patient, so Undersigned telephoned the Surgeon-General before he could phone him. Thereafter, through the night, Undersigned was more on the telephone than with Patient. He, Undersigned, was instructed to await the team of experts rushing down from the capital and till then to do the essentials and not anything silly. Accordingly, he readied the operation theatre and ordered his staff to check Patients pulse and blood pressure every fifteen minutes. To prevent bedsores, Patient was to be shifted about every six hours. Needless to add, Patients head has been shaved and his superficial wounds treated. A catheter has been inserted for his urine. He has been changed into regulation hospital clothes, that is, our standard off-white pyjama and top.

Over Friday and Sat.u.r.day, the experts suggested the expected: that two tubes be pushed down through Suroors nose, one to his stomach for food, the other to his lungs for extra oxygen (an oxygen cylinder on a trolley took up a fair amount of room beside the bed); that he should be immediately attached to a cardioscope and a drip, and that the nearest water bed ought to be procured at the earliest. Naturally, enemas would have to be administered as and when required. If his condition continued to be stable, shifting Suroor by helicopter to a-well, better-equipped-hospital or medical centre could be considered after three or four days. Meanwhile, it was the wish of the Highest Level that the patient be provided with an air-conditioned cabin. Since they didnt exist in the Madna Civil Hospital, perhaps the simplest would be to construct one around Suroor. On a war footing, please.

It was obvious to Agastya that Bhootnath Gaitonde hoped to use the crisis of A.C. Raichur to embarra.s.s Bhanwar Virbhim but, unfortunately for him-Gaitonde-the crisis, by Welfare State standards, just wasnt critical enough. When faced with a crisis, what all civil servants longed for was a bigger crisis. In the bureaucratic mind, the tensions of a demonstration, for example, were easily resolved by an outbreak of the plague, which in turn could be totally wiped out by the worst calamity of all, the visit of a Prime Minister. It was a bit like the ancient law of Matsyanyaya, of the Big Fish gobbling up the Little Fish, and of being gobbled up in turn by even Bigger Fish. What with the a.s.sault on Rajani Suroor and the subsequent decision of the PM to drop in to see his friend at the Madna Civil Hospital, poor Raichur had lost the race within metres from the start.

Exasperatingly small crises like Raichur, or the persistent telephone calls of the District Minister for a favour disguised as an order, Shri Sen defused by simply going away on a tour. The district of Madna covered 17,000 square kilometres and one could always find a hundred reasons-cases, inspections, enquiries-for driving out into it. Out there in the landscape, time moved like a bullock-cart. It didnt matter that the telephone didnt work and everyone seemed to wait in the shade all day only for the sun to set. Routinely, he returned to headquarters calmed, refreshed to the point of being zonked, because hed forgotten the crisis that had sent him away, so had the office. Or it-the office-had been overwhelmed by a graver emergency and had therefore abandoned the preceding crisis, that is to say, considered it resolved.

And Commissioner Raghupati, too sated by cynicism to be upset at the legitimate absence of a key official from the scene of a flap of the magnitude of the Suroor incident, yet perennially alert to the possibilities of exploiting any turn of events to unexpected advantage, found time, even in that first confusing week after the attack, to direct a series of letters both to the central and regional governments on the subject of impressing upon National Telecom the urgent need of arranging for the mobile phone network to fan out across the length and breadth of the country, and of providing official portable sets to key district officials for better governance in general and more effective disaster management in particular.

Agastya had a longish note on Matsyanyaya in the February section of his black diary, except that he called it Nutsyanyaya. He could find an example of lunacy wherever he looked in the Welfare State, but no one else seemed to bother, most found it funny or pleasantly incomprehensible. He was compelled to believe that everyone recognized the madness but accepted it as law-Item Number Two on the agenda of Bhootnath Gaitonde, for instance, the visit of the Prime Minister to Madna a week later, would certainly qualify as an example of Nutsyanyaya. Why was he coming? Did he know that his forty-five-minute-long visit would cost the government over six crores of rupees? Of course, he couldnt very well declare to the world that he was flying down fourteen hundred kilometres from the capital at state expense only to look in on a friend, so his party and the regional government, to justify his appearance, had organized a public meeting for him in Aflatoon Maidan and, to quote from the official Top Secret Circular, 'a personal inspection of the supposedly-plague-stricken areas. When he zipped to the capitals airport from wherever he was to board his plane, eight other steel-grey, bullet-proof, opaque-gla.s.sed, souped-up Hindustan Contessa cars, wailing and squealing, would zip with him. Someone was paying for all that zipping about. All along the route that the Prime Minister would take to the airport, and all along a decoy route that he wouldnt take, constables would be posted fifty metres apart for two hours before the zipping and for half-an-hour after. That was seven hundred man-hours of the police force. Along those two routes, traffic would be stopped by stressed-out policemen for seventy-five minutes before and fifteen minutes after the Contessas. One could thus add to the costs of the Prime Ministerial visit the value, of one hour in each of the lives of at least five thousand people. Agastya firmly believed that a survey ought to be undertaken of the opinions of those citizens fretting away in one of the traffic jams created by the Prime Minister. Hed quite willingly have pa.s.sed the questionnaires around himself. He could in fact see himself in the role-miraculously a boy again, in white shorts, red tee-shirt and red-n-white baseball cap, teeth gleaming white against a skin blackened by the sun, thrusting sheaves through open car windows, madly happy at being on the move with a purpose and at being paid for it, enjoying the sweating, unhappy enervated faces within and outside the cars, flinging into the confusion these questions that had so much topspin in them.

i) Do you vote?

ii) The Welfare State has used your money to lead you up to this jam. Does that bother you?

iii) Would you be very upset if the Prime Minister is blown up at this moment? Of course, that would lead, among other things, to the mother of all traffic jams.

iv) Do you care for the official view that the Prime Ministers journey is more important than yours? His time too?

v) At such moments in your life, are you reminded of the New Vision Partys a.s.sessment of our Prime Minister? To quote from their last election pamphlet: 'By temperament, looks, bearing, demeanour, intelligence, wit and character, Bhuvan Aflatoon is well-suited to be Lobby Manager of Claridges Hotel in the capital.

vi) Why have we allowed our present statesmen and bureaucrats to mess things up completely?

That they had Agastya did not doubt in the least. It seemed to him that he could cite without pause a million examples. On the 7th, 14th and 26th of the previous month, for instance, Dr Onorari Kansal, the Chairman of the eponymous Commission, was summoned to the Centre for talks, i.e., to discuss routine palace intrigues. On each occasion, he travelled from the regional capital to the Centre by the State Government helicopter. Being a man with many things on his mind, on each occasion, he forgot back home his favourite sleeping suit, an off-white kurta-pyjama set that had been gifted to him by his astrologer, erstwhile Chief Secretary (and present Cabinet Secretary) Shri Manorath Shukl. He sent the helicopter back each time. Thus at least one State Government made, at the common expense, at least three extra return trips in the preceding month from one regional capital to the Centre to ferry a favourite sleeping suit.

In contrast, in the district of Madna, Agastya himself had found concrete evidence of at least eighteen cases in which poverty had forced families in the block of Jompanna to sell themselves, literally body and soul, as bonded labourers for seventy-five rupees per year, that is, for the price of three litres of petrol for a car idling in a traffic jam, per year, year after year after year. Every day, in other words, those families woke up and, in return for some sc.r.a.ps of food and water, worked in the fields and homes of their masters till they died, after which their heirs inherited their burden. At the end of the year, that seventy-five rupees of course wasnt made over to them. Their masters paid themselves back-that is, wrote off for the amount a part of some mythic, ancestral debt.

Now, felt Agastya, were the Prime Minister to announce that he was rushing down to Madna to meet face to face the bottom of the pile-the families that starved to death, the parents who sold their daughters to pay off their debts, the villagers who trudged four hours a day to ferry five litres of muddy water, the poor who, tortured and beaten, lost their lives because of some incomprehensible caste offence, the G.o.dforsaken who were burnt and mutilated so that they could beg at the traffic intersections of the cities-were the Prime Minister to decide to encounter, face to face, without a single, interfering intermediary of the Welfare State, some of the millions who were truly in need of welfare, that would be an occasion worth commemorating, the event of the millennium.

vii) Why dont you-sweating, overweight, bespectacled, fretting, moustached-get out of your car and take over from our present statesmen and bureaucrats?

viii) Why do you want the Welfare State to leave you alone?

Because all its representatives that one encountered spelt trouble, thats why. The bribe-gobbling cop and telephone linesman, the venal Corporation clerk and electricity-metre reader.

ix) Or is the cause within you-the frightening, limitless greed of the middle cla.s.ses? Youve fattened monstrously in the last fifty years, but youd like to be left alone, wouldnt you, to get on with your gormandizing and navel-gazing?

And so the questions had run on in Agastyas head for weeks, months and years. With a craftsmans skill and a cops doggedness, hed returned to them a dozen times a day, to chisel, polish and hone them in the hope that their subject would at last catch the light.

(x) Do you want the most capable men and women of your country to a) sell wearunders, bags of cement and sunflower cooking oil, b) run a newspaper, c) or a hotel, d) or a Market Research Bureau, e) or the country?

To him, the issues and solutions seemed eternally important; yet, Nutsyanyaya reigned all around him-an office of the Commissioner of Stationery the size of a city, for example, that couldnt produce simple white paper, or a Deputy Secretary, Administrative Reform, for instance, who, as part of some Renewed Economy Drive, was being paid a salary to circulate instructions to peons to make new envelopes out of used ones.

xi) What scares you most about government? Is it Nutsyanyaya?

xii) Would you then say that its more frightening to be outside the Welfare State than within it?

Agastya himself didnt think so. Nutsyanyaya was truly everywhere and n.o.body could escape it. He hadnt, for example, that February afternoon after the Collectors Conference summoned by the Prime Minister at the TFIN Complex had got over.

For a variety of reasons, Agastyad cycled down to the Aflatoon Tiffin Box from his uncles house, a bare ten minutes away: a) Lutyenss City was one of the few places left in the country where one could still cycle; b) An office car from the Liaison Commissioners office required enormous amounts of wheedling with the lower orders; c) No civil servant ever travelled in a taxi-that would be like asking him to clean an office toilet or to carry his own files.

Of course, no civil servant ever travelled on a bike either. So must have thought the cop who had come upon Agastya unlocking his cycle from the fence of the canteen lawns of the Tiffin Box. Hey, you, etc. He couldnt have liked very much Agastyas face or his manner of answering back, because he actually roughed him up quite a bit in the few seconds that he had before some others turned up. Of course, as a consequence, the policeman landed himself in temporary but deep s.h.i.t.

So did Agastya, As a fallout of the constables a.s.sault, but without the necessary permissions from the intervening rungs, he wrote a letter to none other than the Prime Minister on the subject of Nutsyanyaya.

. . . Sir, may I officially be allowed to keep a gun to protect myself from the police? As the District Magistrate, I may be relied on to use it judiciously. Certainly, necessary training in the use of firearms would have to be imparted to us during office hours. I have made unofficial enquiries with the extremely cooperative Superintendent of Police of Madna and he has a.s.sured me that procuring a firearm, even a rocket launcher if need be, would pose no problem . . .

. . . The question that begs to be asked, sir, is: why are we whittling down the generalist administrators executive control over our police force? In ones youth, one used to naively believe that one should join the service of the State because once within, one was safer from our police force than when one was without. What a dangerously foolish notion! I am reminded in this connection of what a dear colleague and an old friend of mine, Mr Dhrubo Jyoti Ghosh Dastidar, tells me that he told the Selection Board of Eminent Bureaucrats at his job interview. The Magi asked him: Mr Dastidar, why do you want to join the Civil Service?

Mr Dastidar: Because within the Civil Service, one is likelier to have a peon, a Personal a.s.sistant, and an Amba.s.sador car as buffers between ones good self and the rest of the government.

Mr Dastidar still holds the record for the lowest marks ever scored by any civil servant at his entrance interview. I have already written to him describing in detail my misadventure at the Aflatoon TFIN Complex and underscoring my conclusion: No One Is Safe from Them Anywhere, Boy! He naturally sympathized with me body and soul and suggested to me what in fact is my next proposal to you. Sir, Give Us Uniforms. Exactly like the cops have, threatening to explode around the belly and b.u.m like terrycot covers stretched beyond endurance over bags of cement and twin ghatams, the navel visible like a hairy Peeping Toms eye at a keyhole. However, our uniforms, though of the same colour as those of the policemen, should be a couple of shades lighter to make it clear to all that we are above them and their dealings. Mr Dastidar disagrees with me on this point. He would prefer that our uniforms be a couple of shades darker to indicate that we can be more menacing when we want to be. The image that he has, he tells me, is that of the thundercloud.

May I share with you my thoughts of those dreadful moments when the cop was beating me up on the perfect lawns of the Tiffin Box?

i) However could this be happening to me? To me! I can recite almost all of J. Alfred Prufrock from memory! I sang back-up vocals on Knockin on Heavens Door on Yuva Vani in my college days! Ive bought the poems of Rilke and that too with plastic! Ive holidayed in Majorca, Madrid and Lile Maurice! You cant touch me! I speak English at home, all the time! I have white American friends! I am to have dinner this evening, in three hours time, with the Prime Minister, where Jayati Aflatoon and Rani Chandra, people like that, will be present!

ii) How to explain all this to this frightful ape with these fists of stone?

iii) This is the stuff of counter-revolutions. Just you wait, you f.u.c.ker of the lower orders, and Ill show you how the Steel Frame snaps back.

I have taken the liberty, sir, of retaining the original swear-word to give you a sense of the extent of my outrage. 'We are truly lucky that we are so far above the cla.s.ses whose welfare is our headache, opined my colleague Mr Dastidar, when I tried to explain to him on the phone my feelings about the cop who beat me up. 'Imagine-had we been like them, wed have been envying people like us. Ugh. And then again I think, since we ourselves arent so hot, our disgust and fear of the Great Unwashed are the only proof we have that we arent like them. Its time now for our revolution, as usual two hundred years behind Europe.

This surely, sir, is the heart of the matter, the core of the problem. How many thousand rungs beneath the cop in question does one have to descend to be able to see at last, face to face, the-if you permit-etiolated worms beneath the pavements, the most squashed of the downtrodden, the starvelings who inhabit the other side of the Welfare Line? Surely the Kansal Commission couldve reached out to them, couldve declared its goal to be to locate and uplift the millions who have no clout whatsoever, who are the wretched of the earth whove never sucked at the mammae of the Welfare State.

Instead, mused Shri Sen in wonder, they didnt mind spending over six crores of rupees on the Prime Ministers forty-five-minute-long visit to Madna. Didnt anyone have any sense of priorities, of right and wrong? I mean, dash it, this wasnt the Army-vast, secretive about the unimportant, tyrannical and insane. This was the open society where thousands claimed to know what was going on. Yet, every time the Prime Minister left the capital, his entire Cabinet zoomed off to the airport to see him off. That was forty-two Ministers, one hundred and sixty-eight Black Guard Commando bodyguards, forty-two Private Secretaries, forty- two Officers on Special Duty, eighty-four Personal a.s.sistants and eighty-four peons, give or take a few dozen, away from the parking lots, the corridors and the desks of power for four hours each.

How nonplussed, how rudderless, the whole jingbang, the entire white Amba.s.sadocracy, had felt, like chicks being abandoned by the mother hen, when the upwardly-mobile Prime Minister had switched, all of a sudden, to steel-grey Contessas for his motorcade. The twenty-first-century men in his Cabinet, after a few weeks of chin-stroking indecision, had followed suit, but the shrewd nationalists-Bhanwar Virbhim, for example-had retained their white Amba.s.sadors-with, however, 1800 c.c. Contessa engines under their bonnets.

The overriding virtue of the Amba.s.sador is that, though its descended from the British Morris Oxford, its nevertheless a tremendously indigenous car. Lots of character. When one travels about in it, one can never be accused of not having the nations interest foremost in ones heart. For forty years, the Welfare State has bought mainly Amba.s.sadors for itself, some thousands a year, and has thus kept them in the forefront of the industry. The Prime Ministers infidelity is therefore cataclysmic; it is also the first step towards G.o.d knows where. The Maruti Suzuki Esteem? The PAL Peugeot 309? The Ford Escort? The Daewoo Cielo? The Mitsubishi Lancer? The Tata Mercedes? It was all quite upsetting, Agastya concluded, and truly made one feel that one was losing ones ident.i.ty. However could one remain a servant of the Welfare State while sitting in a car that actually effectively chilled ones brow, that glided and purred, that while moving didnt sound like a body-repair wing of an automobile workshop?

'Our agenda for the Prime Ministers visit, Collector Saab, p.r.o.nounced Bhootnath Gaitonde, leaning back in his chair and eyeing Agastya with grave doubt, 'will include A.C. Raichur setting fire to himself in public, in protest against the conclusions of the Kansal Commission. The event will be quite dramatic because we hope to synchronize it with the precise moment when the PMs motorcade enters Aflatoon Maidan. Raichur will rise from his hunger strike only to douse himself with kerosene and light up. My party has of course formally written to you and the police on this subject, giving sufficient advance notice and so on. It is incredible that the government has accepted the recommendations of the Commission without examining the implications for the inst.i.tutionalization of the inequalities of caste. Bhootnath Gaitonde waited for Shri Sen to react; he in turn waited for his visitor to continue.

'My party will also raise two issues of finance with the Prime Minister. One: that since the district of Madna didnt have a helipad, one had to be built just for his visit. Does that bother him or not? Two: Twenty lakhs has been given to the Madna Civil Hospital to clean itself up for his visit. Our Civil Surgeon is mentally not equipped to handle such a vast sum of money. Cynics at the hospital have suggested to him that on that day, he should issue himself a certificate of illness. Ive been told that youve officially disclaimed all responsibility for the PMs visit to the hospital.

'No, no, not at all, laughed Agastya with innocent joy, 'I merely wrote to the Department of Public Health that our Civil Hospital was one of the filthiest places that Ive ever seen in my life and that a sight of it might upset the Prime Minister no end. Which is why Id suggested that Rajani Suroor be moved out of there while the going is good. I dont give him any chance if he floats up out of his coma while hes with Dr Alagh and actually sees what hes been lying in now for almost two weeks. If you ask me, he comes to every morning, struggles up into consciousness, eyes his surroundings and shocked, relapses into a deeper swoon. Then the nurse on her rounds notes that hes slipping.

'And Chamundi?

'Whats that? A new G.o.ddess?

Bhootnath Gaitonde chuckled politely for a nanosecond and elaborated, ' . . . The boy has simply disappeared from the Commissioners house. About a fortnight ago, the Commissioner was interrupted during his afternoon ma.s.sage by a telephone call from you. When, after a couple of minutes, the Commissioner returned to the ma.s.sage room, Chamundi had vanished without a trace. Odd, but due to the pressure of office work, Commissioner Raghupati had absolutely no time to think of it then. n.o.body has seen Chamundi since. This is his brother here, Dambha. Gaitonde indicated one of the vaguos, more red-eyed than the rest. Like a well-rehea.r.s.ed exit in a play, at that point, the others rose and quietly left the room. ' . . . Chamundis relations tell me that the Commissioner was-is-greatly attached to the boy. They want to register an FIR with the police but have been unable to so far. They then of course came to me. The police and the Commissioner believe that the boy simply went home into the forests of Jompanna. He succ.u.mbed to a typical tribal instinct, they maintain, that all of a sudden revolts against order, routine, discipline, work and all the other indicators of our notions of the civilized life. He was fed up, in short, and needed a break.

'It is not improbable.

'Chamundis family thinks differently.

Agastya waited for Bhootnath Gaitonde to get to the point. He was curious to hear exactly how the other would phrase it. Some beating about the bush, then finally in English, 'h.o.m.os.e.xual a.s.sault, like a Latin legalistic term, 'in situ, or 'pro rata.

'Oh dear. Sodomy and suspected murder. In the circ.u.mstances, it isnt surprising that the police want to wait for a body to turn up, dead or alive. So should you, at least till the Prime Minister departs. Think of how much youll hurt the Commissioner with your accusations.