But Lucky’s really conflicted about his work. On the one hand, he says, he can do good; as district magistrate he has real power here.
On the other hand, he says he’s frequently disillusioned with the cynicism he sees around him in government, especially the corruption. A lot of his colleagues are on the take — official salaries are modest, and the way they see it, since all their college classmates are busy making money as businessmen, engineers, whatever, why shouldn’t the smarter ones, the guys clever enough to get into the IAS, make money too? India’s so full of rules and regulations that government officials can make a fortune from the way they exercise their power to permit — the building of a factory here, the grant of a loan there. And then there’s the political interference, from the local legislator, the MLA, or from ministers higher up in the state capital, Lucknow. Some of it is for petty favors — hire this person, authorize this action, expedite that approval — and he does it as part of the way things are. But when the politicians ask him to favor a dubious contractor or promote an undeserving officer or improperly allocate government funds, he refuses, and then they make their displeasure clear, even start threatening to transfer him. That’s one good thing about his job: he can’t be fired, the worst they can do is transfer him if he won’t do their bidding. He doesn’t, of course, and so one day he may really get to be too much of a pain for the bigwigs in Lucknow and might find himself suddenly made Deputy Commissioner of Inland Waterways or whatever. I can’t bear the thought.
Neither can his wife, of course. Lucky tells me that she keeps asking him why he makes such a point of his principles, why can’t he just let well enough alone? Why rock the boat? Doesn’t he care about her convenience, and the child’s? Lucky says rather bitterly that the rank, the house, the car, the servants are all she cares about. “The supreme vice,” he quotes Wilde again, the disillusioned Wilde of “De Profundis” (go on, look it up, Cin!), “is shallowness.” And Geetha is irremediably shallow. Lucky thinks she should have married the batchmate who drank himself into oblivion the day he got his IAS results, singing “Meri zindagi ban gayee!” (“I’m made for life!”) at the top of his voice in the street. There are eight million civil servants in India, if Lucky’s right (and he usually is!). The few hundred members of the IAS are the top of that heap, and in places like Zalilgarh they ARE the government. Ordinary people are so dependent on the government here for everything — from food rations to maintaining law and order — that Lucky really has power over the terms of their daily survival. He gave me a sardonic little poem about his own elitism:
I Am an Indian
I am an Indian, dressed in a suit and tie;
The words roll off my lucid tongue in accents long gone by;
I rule, I charm, protest, explain, know every how and why.
What kind of an Indian am I?
I am an Indian, with a roof above my head;
When I’ve had enough of the working day, I fall upon my bed;
My walls are hard, my carpets soft, my sofa cushions red.
What kind of an Indian? you said.
I am an Indian, with my belly round and full;
When my kid gets up in the morning she is driven to her school;
And if she’s hot, the a/c’s on, or she’ll splash into the pool.
What kind of an Indian, fool?
I am an Indian, with friends where friends should be;
Wide are the branches of my extensive family tree;
Big businessmen and bureaucrats all went to school with me.
I’m the best kind of Indian, you see.
from Katharine Hart’s diary
October 12, 1989
The HELP-US extension worker, Kadambari — I didn’t get the rest of her name, a rather plain woman with a dark sallow face, wearing a white cotton sari with a navy-blue border, her hair severely pulled back and plaited — took us to Priscilla’s place today.
Zalilgarh is just as bad as I feared. The heat radiates toward you in waves, as if some celestial oven is being opened and stoked in your face. The traffic is a torrent, raging rivers of vehicles and bodies in constant motion, streams of bicycles wending their way past thin cows, their ribs showing through their dirty skin, carts creaking past drawn by skeletal buffaloes, clangorous buses blaring their horns as they rattle and belch their way across town. And everywhere, people: half-dressed beggars with open sores clamoring for money, ash-smeared sadhus in saffron waist-cloths and matted hair, men in dhotis and men in pants and men in kurta-pajamas, and most strikingly the women, in multicolored saris of cotton and nylon, glittering with golden bangles and silver anklets. Vendors hawk their wares on the street — savories served on dried palm leaves, peanuts in cone-shaped packets made of old newspapers, sugarcane juice pressed into grimy tumblers — as flies buzz around everything. A listless gust of air blows a couple of sheets of paper at us from a hawker’s basket, and they turn out to be exam papers, still unread and unmarked, sold by impoverished teachers for the few pennies they will bring, the dreams of schoolchildren reduced to encasing a few grams of spicy fried lentils. Everything is recycled in India, even dreams. Street urchins gambol amid the refuse; a man relieves himself against a wall daubed with the campaign slogans and election symbols of two competing political parties. Above us, a vision of the infinite, as a murder of crows, cawing and wheeling in the brilliantly blue sky, points our way to Priscilla’s last home.
We had to walk down a narrow side-street, a gully they call it, to get there. The sidewalk was strewn with moldering rubbish and it was all we could do to avoid stepping on the trash. The stench was unbearable. Stray dogs nibbled at the scattered refuse. The road was no better, its paving cracked and pitted. Dust rose from every passing vehicle, mainly bicycles and reckless yellow-and-black auto-rickshaws, though a couple of bullock carts rolled past too, their riders idly flogging the tired beasts who were pulling them. Loud noise constantly assailed us, the jangling of bicycle bells, the shouting of male voices, the phut-phut-phut of the auto-rickshaw engines, the blaring of Hindi film music from various storefronts. We walked past groceries, their spices impregnating the air; provision shops, with brightly colored plastic buckets on display; photo developers, testimony to Zalilgarh’s ascent to modernity. At the entrance to what had been Priscilla’s building, Kadambari stopped at a tiny tin shed housing a paan counter, where a grimy little man sat cross-legged in front of an aluminum table as flies buzzed around his wares. He seemed to recognize her, and without much ado expertly daubed lime paste on a bright green leaf before dropping betel nuts and multicolored supari masalas onto it while Rudyard and I watched. The paanwallah folded the bursting leaf into a triangle that Kadambari wedged into her cheek. I refused her offer to have one too, and we trudged up an exterior staircase behind her.