The Mammaries of the Welfare State Read Online Free Page B

your blue jeans on, otherwise I’d’ve had to smother the entire flat in dust sheets . . . I didn’t notice how you’d fouled up my salwaar till I came home that evening . . . for a while, I couldn’t even figure out what’d happened . . . and then I imagined that you’d done it on purpose, for some perverted reason . . . was it your way of making a pass? . . . I even fancied that you might’ve been a sort of walking ad for a, you know, detergent or something . . . that’d’ve been clever . . . or an anti-depressant . . . Don’t spread the blues . . .’
    A spacious, lamplit living room, French windows at the far end, a veranda beyond. Arty, uncomfortable furniture, bric-à-brac, tribal statuary, richly-coloured rugs on the floor that Agastya kept tripping over and apologising for; white bookshelves with sleek tomes on Modernism, Reductionism,Margaret Mead, The Death of Tragedy, Russians in Exile, Rilke; a colour TV before a settee, on, on the settee a tall, darkish, handsome, hairy, bespectacled, generally groovy man with long, wavy salt-and-pepper hair who rose with a commanding smile to shake his hand.
    ‘Rajani Suroor.’
    ‘How do you do.’
    The telecast was a recording of the inauguration of the Festival of Russia. Gymnastics, the human pyramid business. The camera closed in on one of the saps in the bottom row. It shouldn’t have, the bugger was
dying,
but in the cause of better relations between the two countries.
    ‘So you’re a dope-smoking civil servant. Do you bring to your work a new perspective?’ Groovy Suroor apparently knew a lot about the government. From his kurta pocket, he pulled out a metal cigarette case and a silvery Yin-Yang box and while rolling a joint, dropped names in a well-bred way. Agastya decided to ‘sir’ him while sharing the smoke, to try and discompose him. The camera had abandoned the Russians and zeroed in on the V∞IPs in the front rows, beanbags all in starched, billowy white, a white Gandhi topi atop each like a blob of icing crowning a cake, snugly shapeless in white armchairs and sofas. ‘Ah, our dear, dear Minister-to-be, the Jewel of the Deccan Mafia,’ murmured Groovy as the TV showed bald, bespectacled, obese Member of Parliament Bhanwar Virbhim of the heavy-lidded eyes licking the toenails of Jayati Aflatoon, the wife of a cousin of the Prime Minister.
    ‘That isn’t fair, Rajani,’ objected Daya, handing Agastya a glass of watermelon juice. ‘If you can’t stand even the possibility of his appointment, you should stop sucking up to authority. My favourite commandment from the
Reader’s Digest
goes: If you don’t like what you do for a living, quit. If you can’t quit, shut up.’
    Then folk dancing, by what Agastya presumed wereTaras Bulba and Co. Just watching them tired one out, their never-ending extreme form of the Canadian 5BX, and grinning all the while too, or were those rictuses of agony? Next, Groovy Suroor, after a long drag on the joint: ‘For you, Daya, everything’s always been either black or white. In my world, the pros outweigh the cons, but that doesn’t mean that the cons don’t exist.’ He beamed avuncularly at Agastya. ‘Does this not-so-young man have any opinions on the service of the Welfare State?’
    ‘Yes. I feel weird. I ask myself all the time: How do you survive on your ridiculous salary? And
why
do you survive on your ridiculous salary? At the same time, I feel grossly overpaid for the work that I do. Not the quantity, which on certain days can be alarming, but the quality. In my eight years of service, I haven’t come across a single case in which everybody concerned didn’t try to milk dry the boobs of the Welfare State.’ The dope was first-rate. ‘But I suppose that’s what the boobs are there for.
    ‘In my earlier office, on the ground floor of the Commissionerate, alongside the stairs, stood a kiosk that we’d leased out about a decade ago, for a rupee a month, to a privileged underprivileged. He