Anil Deshpande

Anil Deshpande joined the Municipal Water Department as a Junior Assistant in 1979, straight out of a commerce degree from an evening college, at a time when landing any government job at all was considered by his family reason enough for garlands and sweets for the whole street. He remembers that first week clearly — the smell of new files, the senior clerk who taught him the correct way to staple an application, and the feeling that a long, orderly career ladder now lay ahead of him.

The desk beside the window that doesn't open has been his for over two decades, surviving three departmental reshuffles and one entire change of building, the section simply packing up its files and furniture into a new address without changing its habits one bit. He processes new water-connection applications with a thoroughness that, by his own frequent telling, has never once required a bribe to be offered or refused.

His colleagues know him as reliable to the point of being predictable: tea at eleven, tea again at four, lunch from the same tiffin box his wife has packed for twenty years, and a signature so small and careful it looks almost apologetic on the page. New recruits are sometimes seated near him specifically because he can explain, patiently and at length, exactly which form follows which in the department's mountain of paperwork.

Four times in his career, a junior colleague has been promoted to a post that, by seniority and his own reckoning, should have been his, and each time Anil has come up with, within a day or two, a full explanation — a relative in the head office in one case, a leaked exam paper in another, an officer who happened to share a love of cricket with the successful candidate in a third. These explanations are delivered not as complaints but as established fact, complete with dates and names, and are rarely argued with out loud.

He reads two newspapers every evening from front to back, including the classifieds, and holds strong, detailed opinions on how the railways should be run, how the water department itself ought to be reorganised, and which minister has never done an honest day's work in his life. His wife has learned to nod at the right moments during these nightly speeches, which take place on the balcony after dinner.

In 1994 he was offered a transfer to a more prestigious section handling large industrial connections, a post that would have meant much more contact with contractors and much more opportunity, as people say, but he turned it down, saying his current section needed him — a decision he still brings up now and then as proof of a kind of integrity that, in his telling, the department has since failed to properly reward.

He has never taken so much as a cup of tea from an applicant seeking a water connection, a fact he is endlessly and proudly quick to mention, and there is truth to it — thirty years of colleagues, whether teasing or admiring, confirm as much. Whether this strict honesty has cost him more than it has earned him is a question nobody in Section III has ever thought to ask him directly.

His son, now an engineer in Pune, occasionally suggests his father look for work outside government altogether, and Anil always refuses, pointing out that private companies offer no loyalty and no pension, a fact he considers obviously true and treats as closing the subject.

He will retire in a few years from that same desk, beside that same sealed window, having processed every water-connection application that crossed his table with careful, unrewarded diligence. When the day comes, the department will very likely mark it with a modest tea and a card signed by everyone — including, no doubt, the four juniors who now outrank him.