The Mammaries of the Welfare State Read Online Free

hundred rupees a day on food. With its thirty-rupee thalis, Krishna Lunch Home suited his budget. So did its atmosphere him. Women, for example, both young and of a certain age, dined singly there without attracting even a second glance, leave alone being harassed by leers, salacious suggestions, obscene gestures or sudden lunges. The waiters too were uniformly pleasant, usually adolescent, with ready smiles. Their shorts, though, tended to be tiny and tight, making them reveal many inches of thigh and strut more than walk.
    Booze was swigged only upstairs at the Lunch Home. The ground floor hall, a forty-by-thirty crush of tables, customers, waiters and food, was for those madly pressed for time—a soup, two idlis, an uthapam, some halwa, a coffee and away. The first floor was smaller, windowless, alwaystubelit and cosier despite the cold white light, quieter, with a quarter bottle of gin or rum on almost every decolam top. Single customers generally shared a table with lone strangers. Conversation was not obligatory, but sharing the pickled onions, chillies and mango was. One could strike up a romance if one wanted to fall in love with, say, a bald fat man with bulldog jowls and yellow teeth who looked as though he planned to drink himself to death, alone.
    Or one could hang about a bit to see whether one got a seat opposite a human being. Thus it was that two evenings in a row, Agastya sat across from a very beautiful, thirtyish woman with open, shoulder-blade-long jet-black hair. He hadn’t known that hair dye could be that black. Throughout both evenings, she pecked at veg chowmein, soaked up rum ’n Pepsi and wept silently. While fashioning her face, God had contemplated shaping a stunning pink pig; seconds before the finishing touches, however, He’d plainly been called away. Ah well. In her jade-green salwaar kameez, she looked like a radiant emcee from an outlandish Zee TV set; she spoke Hinglish too in a charming Zee TV-Puppie way. Agastya’d never piled on in his life before to anyone in Hinglish. It was rather a challenge, like trying to babysit an unfamiliar infant of another race.
    Never before either had he sat in front of anybody who’d snivelled in this manner two evenings running. And he hated food being wasted, particularly in a developing country. On Thursday, therefore, while waiting for his order, he reached over and began helping himself to her chowmein. Quite tasty. Her smallish eyes focused and flickered a bit. Almost mechanically, she pushed the pickled onions across to him.
    ‘No thanks, we’re to utter sweet breath tonight.’ He waved to Thais and, when he strutted over, asked him for cigarettes, Wills Filter Navy Cut.
    He felt stuffed by the time he’d finished with her chowmein and his own chholey-bhaturey, keema dosa and alu-pooris arrived. ‘Developing country,’ he explained to heras he attacked the keema dosa. She smoked a cigarette. ‘As in a marathon, one must pace oneself in life, with people, with food,’ he clarified to her as he pitched into the alu-pooris. ‘Anything is possible at the right speed.’
    She rose unsteadily from the table. He beamed enquiringly at her. ‘Looking at you, I want to vomit,’ she mumbled in Hinglish and lurched off towards the stairs. As her first words, they didn’t augur well for their romance.
    He was torn between her and his chholey-baturey, between sex and food, love of woman and love of country. Hating her for winning, for making him waste both money and nurture, he followed her.
    The world’s largest slum had its virtues. One could, for example, puke anywhere and you couldn’t tell. When he emerged from Krishna, a voided Kamya had her arms wrapped around one of those wizened mongrel trees that abound in the city, that survive against awesome odds, that offer neither shade nor flowers or beauty, the trunks of which are too flinty for the nails of advertisers’ boards, dour, self-centred, enduring without growing.
    ‘Are you all