Anil Deshpande

Anil Deshpande joined the Municipal Water Department as a Junior Assistant in 1979, straight out of a commerce degree obtained from an evening college, at a time when a government post of any kind was considered by his family a matter for garlands and sweets distributed to the whole street. He remembers that first week with unusual clarity — the smell of new files, the senior clerk who taught him the correct way to staple an application, the sense that a long and orderly ladder now lay before him.

The desk beside the window that does not open has been his for over two decades, through three departmental reshuffles and one change of building altogether, the section merely packing its files and its furniture into a new address without altering its habits in the slightest. He processes new water-connection applications with a thoroughness that has, by his own repeated observation, never once required a bribe to be either offered or refused.

His colleagues know him as reliable to the point of monotony: 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 assigned to sit near him specifically because he can explain, patiently and at length, exactly which form follows which in the department's considerable paperwork.

Four times in his career a junior colleague has been promoted to a post that, by seniority and by his own accounting, ought to have been his, and each time Anil has produced, within a day or two, a complete explanation — a relative in the head office in one case, a leaked examination paper in another, an officer who happened to share a passion for cricket with the successful candidate in a third. These explanations are delivered not as grievance but as established fact, footnoted with dates and names, and are rarely contradicted aloud.

He reads two newspapers every evening from the first page to the last, including the classifieds, and holds strong and detailed opinions on how the railways ought to 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 appropriate intervals during these recitations, which occur nightly on the balcony after dinner.

In 1994 he was offered a transfer to a more prestigious section dealing with large industrial connections, a post that would have meant considerably more contact with contractors and considerably more opportunity, as the saying goes, but he declined it on the grounds that his current section needed him, a decision he references periodically as proof of a certain kind of integrity that the department, in his telling, has since failed to properly reward.

He has never taken so much as a cup of tea from an applicant seeking a connection, a fact of which he is unfailingly and repeatedly proud, and there is truth to it — thirty years of colleagues, testily or admiringly, confirm as much. Whether this cleanliness 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 apply for a post outside government altogether, and Anil always declines, observing that private companies have no loyalty and no pension, a fact he considers self-evidently true and closes the topic upon stating.

He will retire in a few years' time from the same desk, beside the same sealed window, having filed every water connection application that crossed his table with a scrupulous and unrewarded care, and the department, when the day comes, will very likely mark the occasion with a modest tea and a card signed by everyone, including, no doubt, the four juniors who now outrank him.