The Mammaries of the Welfare State Read Online Free PDF

knees could’ve stretched a fecund expanse of pussy, fat, lush, many-coloured. However on earth could Tchaikovsky and Bhanwar Virbhim connect? Fecund pussy was much more Bhanwar’s scene, and yet there he was, furrowed head propped up on forearm, an attentive and discerning member of audience. Unless he too was seeing pussy instead of pantie. ‘I’m dishonest, but not corrupt. I use my office phone to make personal calls—that’s, strictly speaking, being dishonest, but I haven’t yet had my palm greased. I have received a box of mithai at Diwali and a bottle of Scotch at Christmas, though.
    ‘I did try once to milk a lakh or two of rupees out of the Welfare State:—’ Agastya here turned to an intelligently-smiling Suroor—‘it was out of that dairy farm, the Department of Culture and Heritage. It had two mindblowing Twelfth Plan Schemes of doling out lakhs of rupees to any bearded pseud documentary film-maker to shoot Our Endangered Tribal Heritage and The Jewels of the North-East. A friend of mine and I’d mapped everything out—we’d lug a Handycam down to the dhabas by the river, behind the Tibetan Monastery on Mall Road in the University area, and film ourselves smoking dope with the pushers there. But at the last minute, our middle-class pusillanimity and squeamishness spiked our plans.
    ‘Many moons ago, when I was a babe in these woods, I’d imagined that People Like Us—i.e., those who’ve grown up on Richmal Crompton and the Rolling Stones, and who speak English more often than any other Indian language— we just aren’t corrupt, we can’t be, constitutionally. Fortunately, these silly notions evaporated pretty quickly in these woods—as soon as one grew up, really. How worthless one’s upbringing’s been when it’s come to facing one’s own country! Ah well.’
    Daya’d joined them by then; she looked a little alarmed at these confessions but clearly felt that they could still serve as a topic for drawing-room conversation. ‘Why then did you become a civil servant in the first place?’
    ‘Because within the civil service, one is likelier to know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows a cop. Or so I believed eight years ago. Now that I’m wiser, I know that the government can fuck you up bad even if you’re part of it—unless you suck, suck, suck. The civil servant can fellate with the best of them. I say, sir, can we roll another joint?’
    ‘But why don’t you quit, then?’ Daya was correctly puzzled.
    ‘But I like it here! And quit and go where? The more years one spends in the civil service, the more competent one becomes to remain in it.’
    ‘Don’t be silly. I’m sure you could find a job more to your taste. Cynicism is a waste of a life. Why, I could give you a job if you wanted.’
    He glanced at her. She laughed and answered, ‘Because I like you, Peter Pan.’
    Just at that moment, however, on the TV screen a close-up of Suroor himself, looking deadly in a silk kurta, head intelligently bent to peep at the boobs of a gorgeously-painted middle-aged woman who was seemingly tonguing his ear. ‘Ooooh . . . who’s that?’ trilled Daya in theatrical envy.
    ‘Why, that’s me . . . oh, the woman . . . don’t you recognize her? . . . Rani Chandra, the capital’s new Culture Czarina . . . they change every three months . . . she too shed her caste-revealing surname somewhere on the way up the ladder . . . but she’ll learn, sooner or later, that the single factor that works in every corner of this country is caste . . . a Brahmin vibes best with a Brahmin, a Thakur lends a hand most often to a Thakur . . . her surname must’ve been Saxena or Katoch— something simply not arty enough . . . at that point, she was breathing into my ear that coitus these days is totally out of fashion because nobody has the time . . . at best a couple of minutes off for a quick grope and feel . . . the only way in which she unwinds is in her Toyota Lexus, listening