The Devout Bureaucrat

By Sadhika on

A mid-level government clerk who believes the grind of red tape is holy work, ordained by gods of order. He resents everyone who calls him corrupt, but secretly knows his tiny bribes keep his family alive.

I will tell you something most folk don’t understand: they think the world runs on big men, ministers and bosses and them that shout from podiums. But it don’t. It runs because men like me sit for eight hours under the flickering tube light and push one piece of paper from one tray to another.

I serve the god of order. Yes, laugh if you like, but every file that passes through my desk is a prayer. Every stamp, every signature, every stapled paper, without which the world would stop running. 

I tell you it’s holy work. Without me, without us, everything falls apart in a rush. The flood comes when the gates are pulled wide. My job’s to keep the gates heavy, slow, hard to open. That’s the order of things. The god of order (though maybe it is just the old man in my head) whispers: Hold steady, not so fast. The world must wait its turn.

And you call me corrupt. Let me tell you: my hands are clean. Cleaner than yours. Yes, I do take gifts, small ones only. I never take no big ones. Only a note folded into the crease of a file. Or a packet of sweets slipped into my drawer. Sometimes even a bottle of local whiskey at Diwali. I won’t deny it. Do you think I enjoy it? No! But kids need shoes, wife needs her medicine, the roof leaks in the rains. You tell me what a man’s supposed to do. I do it for them. Everything I’ve done, I’ve always done for them. 

Some days I think people like me are the only ones holding this country up. You may not notice it, but take me away and the whole thing topples. You think I am slow, lazy, an obstacle. But have you considered that slowness is the only shield against chaos? If I moved with the speed you demand, if I approved without delay, if I allowed every impulse of yours to leap across the desk unchecked, the whole nation would collapse in a heap of broken laws and greedy hands. And I’ll tell you, sometimes I take a long look at the man sweating on the other side of the desk, and I let the silence hang a little longer, just to remind him whose hands the hinges turn on. 

Course, every now and then, it strikes me plain — maybe I ain’t serving order or gods or nothing higher. Maybe I’m just a man slowing down other men because it fattens my pocket and makes me feel big. But I don’t sit with it long. No, sir. I push it aside same as I push a file to the next tray. I say no, this is work that holds the world steady, this is duty, this is sacrifice. Makes a man proud, knowing the world don’t move till he say so.

Inspirations:
Franz Kafka's The Trial

Author's Note: This post is the second of a new series I plan to launch in 2025 on my blog, Dregs of Yore. It is not meant to be comfortable, nor is it meant to offer moral lessons or justifications. Instead, it is my attempt to inhabit the minds of characters I might otherwise dismiss, disagree with, or even dislike. 

The posts in this series are not confessions, arguments or endorsements. They are exercises in empathy of form rather than empathy of agreement: acts of listening to voices that do not belong to me, but which might as well exist somewhere in the world. I am not here to prove them right or wrong; I am here to represent them as truthfully as my imagination might permit.

Writing in this way forces me to confront the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable. It demands that I step away from my own convictions and give space to a character’s rawness, even when it jars against my own sense of self. To me, this act of putting oneself aside is not only a writer’s discipline, but also a writer’s responsibility. Through these exercises, I hope to train myself in the ability to give life to characters who are not mirrors of myself nor vehicles for my certainties, but fully formed beings in their own right. 

One day I will write fiction; until then, this series is my apprenticeship. And you, dear Reader, are my witness.

Image source: Montalembert by Honoré Daumier.
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