The Mammaries of the Welfare State Read Online Free PDF Page A

was Backward Caste, Depressed Class, Physically Handicapped—his right leg petered out at the knee—Mentally Zonked—his file had a photocopy of an illegible four-line note from some Assistant to the Head of the Department of Psychiatry of the Trimurti Aflatoon Welfare State Hospital—and Utterly Black and Angry. The clerk who used to deal with Handicap’s file would say that the Hospital note merely certified that he, Handicap, periodically needed to have his head examined.
    ‘The kiosk wasn’t that small—about eight-by-eight—and he’d set up a photocopying machine in it. A sound business prospect because the Commissionerate shares its compoundwith the Sessions Court, the Registrar of Births and Deaths and the Deputy Tribal Commissioner. Handicap’s photocopying machine, of course, had been funded by three separate Welfare brainwaves: i) The Rural Poor Self-Employment Generation Scheme, ii) The Physically Handicapped Economic Self-Sufficiency Project, and iii) The Depressed Classes Financial Independence Plan. The three loans had to be repaid over twenty years—it came to a little over four hundred rupees a month.
    ‘A lot, isn’t it? Handicap certainly thought so—particularly after he stopped feeling grateful. To get hold of the loans in the first place, he’d forked out nearly five thousand rupees in bribes—under The Welfare State Public Servant Economic Regeneration Grant, or so he called it. Four years ago, when a new government took over, Handicap petitioned anew the Rehabilitation Minister. Under the Minister’s Discretionary Write-Off Quota for Semi-rural Economic Incentives Programme, Honourable exempted Handicap from the loans— after accepting a contribution of five thousand rupees, of course, to his wife’s Non-Governmental Organization for the Creation of Viable Employment Alternatives for Backward Caste Semi-rural Women.
    ‘Within days of my joining the office, Handicap applied anew for permission to instal in the kiosk a public phone with both National and International Dialling Facilities. He’d been beseeching us for a couple of years and we’d ping-ponged his request about—call for the comments of Telecom, the No Objection of the Municipal Corporation, ascertain the views of the Parent Department, that sort of thing. I don’t think that any of the clerks was specifically angling for a bribe; it was just that nobody knew how to deal with his application because it had no precedent.
    ‘I did a terrible thing. I decided the case. In his favour, but that was secondary. You must know how weird, how spooky it feels to actually—to use officialese—take a decisionin any government matter. Boy. You see, I’d begun swimming by then at the Municipal pool and that very morning, I distinctly remember, I’d finally figured out the leg movement of the breast stroke. Oh what a feeling. Life therefore was a long song—a bit like Julie Andrews screaming and haring around amongst green hills in
The Sound of Music
—by the time I showed up at my desk. I took decisions in several files that day. It was horrible.
    ‘Handicap sub-let the kiosk for two thousand rupees a month to a guy with no legs. Legless wangled the phone through some Scheme or the other. Sometime in the middle of last month, Handicap slipped in a proposal for starting up a Cooperative Society For The Physically Handicapped beneath the stairs; the kiosk will certainly have to be enlarged.’
    ‘May I ask what percentage of our civil service is corrupt? I mean, I know that my ex-husband was—is. But whether
every
public official is dishonest?’ Daya spoke loudly from the kitchen. ‘Or am I being too naïve?’
    Swan Lake
on the telly. The ballet frock, decided Agastya, was the kinkiest, the horniest dress that he’d ever seen.
Swan Lake
would have been even better had the chicks not worn any panties—they could’ve had their frilly frocks start at the nipples and extend fanlike till the navel; from the navel till the