But this habit can occasionally work miracles. When the Chief Commissioner referred to earlier handed in his pail in the fulness of time, his widow could not find his Will, which posed a problem in probating his considerable estate. When she had just about given up, the old gentleman appeared in her dream one night and told her to look in the pages of John Grisham’s book The Testament in his library. A bureaucrat is like a bottle of medicine: he comes with an expiry date. He knows, right from his first day in office, the exact day and year on which he has to hang up his boots, and yet most of them are caught unprepared on the appointed day, scrambling to adjust to the changed realities.
On one occasion, when I moved into a house being vacated by a senior who had just retired, I found him in his pyjamas, furiously packing mounds of “raddi”- three years’ worth of old newspapers (he was entitled to five every day), a pile as imposing as any in the National Archives. Seeing the perplexed look on my face he sheepishly explained: “Just to tide me over till the pension starts coming, you see…”. Bureaucrats don’t retire, they are filed away and become a PPO (Pension Payment Order) number in the AG office. The smarter ones among them refuse to accept the expiry date and consider it the “best by” date at most, and adopt various Yogic postures in an attempt to get five more years, one reason why Yoga has proved to be so popular with civil servants. The most practised asana is the “Sirnamaskar”, a variation of the “Suryanamaskar”- the posture is the same, only the God has changed. It’s nothing but old wine in new bottles, but it usually works.
Retirement is, of course, the great equaliser, as I’m now finding out in my village of Puranikoti. I may have retired in the apex scale, but I have to bow and scrape before the IPH key man or the Electricity Board lineman every time I have a water or power supply problem. They are the new VVIPs for me, along with the Patwari, the driver of the single HRTC bus that serves my village and the postman who comes once a week if you are still in his good books. Our “Acche Din” depends on them and not a distant Prime Minister expounding on Atmanirbharta.
This was very well explained to me one day by my good friend and IPS batchmate, Heimant Sarin: “A retired babu is like a fused bulb, Shuks, it doesn’t matter whether the bulb was of 120 watts or 10 watts- once fused, all bulbs are similar.” Had he studied English literature in Delhi University instead of guzzling “chhang” at Tib Dhabs, Heimant would perhaps have couched this wisdom in more poetic language:
“Scepter and crown shall tumble down
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade….”
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