The Vishram was crowded, and Rajaram was waiting nervously on the pavement when they arrived. “Here’s your hair,” Ishvar handed him the package. “So. What will you eat?”
“Nothing, my stomach is full,” said Rajaram, but his mouth betrayed his hunger, masticating phantom food in response to aromas from the Vishram.
“Have something,” said Ishvar, feeling sorry for him. “Try something, it’s our treat.”
“Okay, whatever you two are eating.” He forced a laugh. “A full stomach is only a small obstacle.”
“Three pao-bhajis and three bananas,” Ishvar told the cashier-waiter.
They carried their food to the site of a collapsed building, just down the road, and chose a window ledge in the shade of a half-crumpled wall. A horizontal door served as their table. Its hinges and knobs had been scavenged; the collapse was several weeks old. Four children with gunny sacks were clambering in the rubble, sifting and searching.
“So how’s your work as a Family Planning Motivator?”
Rajaram shook his head, wolfing a large mouthful. “Not good.” He ate as though he hadn’t seen food for days. “They asked me to leave two weeks ago.”
“What happened?”
“They said I wasn’t producing results.”
“Suddenly? After two months?”
“Yes,” he hesitated. “I mean, no, there were problems from the very beginning. After the training course, I was following the procedure they showed me. I visited different neighbourhoods every day. I carefully repeated the things they taught me, using the correct tone, sounding kind and knowledgeable, so no one would get scared. And usually people listened patiently, took the leaflets; sometimes they laughed, and young fellows made dirty jokes. But no one would sign up for the operation.
“A few weeks later, my supervisor called me into his office. He said I wasn’t pursuing the right customers. He said it was a waste of time trying to sell a wedding suit to a naked fakir. I asked him exactly what he meant.”
Rajaram repeated for the tailors the supervisor’s reply — that people in the city were too cynical, they doubted everything, it was difficult to motivate them. Suburban slums were the places to tackle. After all, there lived the ignorant people most in need of the government’s help. The programme, with its free gifts and incentives, was specifically designed for them.
“So I took his advice and went outside the city. And would you believe it? On the very first day my cycle got a puncture.”
“A bad beginning,” said Ishvar, shaking his head.
“Puncture was only a small problem. The real trouble came later.” While the tyre was being fixed at a cycle shop, said Rajaram, he got to talking with an elderly man waiting in a bus shelter, not far from a fire hydrant. The elderly man needed a wash, and was hoping that street urchins would come along and turn on the hydrant.
For the sake of practice, and to see how long he could hold the fellow’s attention, Rajaram began telling him he was a Motivator involved in the good works of the Family Planning Centre. He described the birth-control devices, named the sterilization operations, and the cash inducement for each: a tubectomy was awarded more free gifts than a vasectomy, he explained, because the government preferred intervention that was final and irreversible.
That’s the one I want, interrupted the old man, the expensive one, the tube-whatever one. Rajaram almost fell off his perch on the bus-shelter railing. No no, grandfather, it’s not for you, I was just talking about it for the sake of talking, he said. I insist, said the old man, it’s my right. But tubectomy can only be performed on a woman’s parts, explained Rajaram, for a man’s parts there is vasectomy, and at your age even that is unnecessary. I don’t care about age, I’ll take it, whichever is meant for my parts, persisted the old man.
“Maybe he badly wanted a transistor radio,” said Om.
“That’s exactly what I assumed,” said Rajaram. “I thought to myself, if this grandfather desires it so much, who am I to argue? If music makes him happy, why deny him?”
So he got out the proper form, took a thumbprint, paid the tyre-repairer, and escorted his patient to the clinic. That evening, he received the money for his commission, his very first.
Now he regarded the puncture as the harbinger of good fortune: the pointed finger of fate, flattening his tyre and his bad fortune. The badge of Motivator clung with more honesty to his shirt. Brimming with confidence, he returned to the suburban area, certain that he could round up vasectomies and tubectomies by the score.
A week passed, and his peregrinations took him to his first customer’s neighbourhood. He cycled among the shacks, seeking to motivate the masses, his head overflowing with various ways of saying the same thing, formulating phrases to make sterility acceptable, even desirable, when someone from the old man’s family recognized him and began shouting for help: Motorwaiter is here! Aray, the rascal Motorwaiter has come again!
Rajaram was soon surrounded by an angry crowd threatening to break every bone in his body. In response to his pleas for mercy and his terror-stricken cries of why? why? he learned that something had gone wrong with the operation. The old maris groin had filled up with pus. When the rot began to spread, the clinic was no help, and the old man died.
Ishvar nodded in sympathy as he peeled his banana. He had always felt that the hair-collector’s new job was fraught with danger. “Did they beat you badly?”
Rajaram unbuttoned his shirt and showed them the purple bruises on his back. Across the chest was a gouge, starting to heal, made by some sharp tool. He lowered his head to point out the torn patch of scalp where an attacker had pulled out a clump of hair. “But I was lucky to escape with my life. They told me I should have known better, the only reason their grandfather went for the operation was because of the cash bonus and gifts. The old man had wanted to help with his granddaughter’s dowry.
“I returned straight to my supervisor and made a complaint. How could I produce results, I said, if the doctors killed the patients? But he said the man died because he was old, and the family was simply at all blaming the Family Planning Centre.”
“Goat-fucking bastard,” said Om.
“Exactly. But guess what else the supervisor told me. From now on my job would be easier, he said, because of a policy change.” The new scheme had been explained to Rajaram — it was no longer necessary to sign up individuals for the operation. Instead, they were to be offered a free medical checkup. And it wasn’t to be viewed as lying, just a step towards helping people improve their lives. Once inside the clinic, isolated from the primitive influence of families and friends, they would quickly see the benefits of sterilization.
Rajaram picked the crumbs from his pao-bhaji wrapper, then tossed it in the rubble. “Even though I didn’t like the new system, I agreed to try it. By now, everyone realized that Motivators were giving bogus talk to people. Wherever I went, city or suburb, they insulted me, called me a threat to manhood, a dispenser of napusakta, a castrator, a procurer of eunuchs. And here I was, just doing a government job, trying to make a living. How can you function like this day after day? No, I said, this is not for me.”
He told his employers he was willing to work in the old way, distribute leaflets and explain procedures, but no more deception. They said the old way was no longer an option — quotas had fallen behind badly. Concrete results were needed to justify each Motivator’s food, shelter, and bicycle.
“So last week I lost all three when they threw me out. Now I am desperate. There is nothing to do but go back to my old profession.”
“Hair-collecting?”
“Yes, I’m going to sell these plaits right away,” he indicated the package the tailors had brought from their trunk. “And I am also starting my original trade. Barbering. I’ll have to do both because without storage space, hair-collecting will be limited. But I need eighty-five rupees. For combs, scissors, clippers, razor. Can you lend me the money?”