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Bureaucratic Tales

And tales of vanished reptiles continue

The more one writes for The Tribune, the more one is made to realize how widespread and persistent its readership happens to be.

And tales of vanished reptiles continue

Maninder Singh



By Maninder Singh

The more one writes for The Tribune, the more one is made to realize how widespread and persistent its readership happens to be. In the unlikeliest of places, such as in the middle of the Sukhna Lake, a casual acquaintance rowing by tells you that he read a certain article of yours and was not entirely displeased by it. When the unvarnished tale of a vanished venomous reptile was published, it resulted in the narration of several similar stories by avid readers. 

A long-working Commissioner, in one of the picturesque Divisons, told me that a cobra had once effected an entry through a window in his office. Disappearing quickly thereafter, in a warren of files, the snake charmer who was summoned managed to unravel not one but four deadly snakes from the infested room.

Justice Ranjan Gogoi, now in the Supreme Court, shifted his residence as Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court in Chandigarh due to a pestilential influx of snakes in his official bungalow. Every blessed day, a snake charmer would be called, who would recover an irascible reptile and, perhaps, embed another in the substantial lawns, to be recovered a day later. All for an inconsequential fee for an hour’s work. This repetitive sequence of the capture of dangerous snakes having gone on for far too long, the Chief Justice made the prudent and judicious decision of relocating his residence altogether.

Fearsome cobra

In Karimganj district in the tumble-down Barak valley of the North-east, the Deputy Commissioner’s house is located on a knoll. In that house, and, indeed, even in the bedroom, the appearance of snakes was a diurnal phenomenon, akin to the rise and set of stars. One of the brave occupants of that house got so used to these fleeting manifestations that he would simply squash with his boots, whatever snake happened to be passing by in the immediate vicinity and let the others endure, multiply and prosper. 

One memorable day, as a wireless operator came up the steps to the bungalow, with an urgent situation report, he was taken aback by a stately cobra, all poised and perched to strike, just below the steps of the main door. Managing to see the fearsome cobra only at the last moment, with only a few feet separating him from the coiled body and raised hood, the helpless messenger lost his balance and rolled all the way down the knoll, with no life left to ascend again.

A few snakes having been seen in the Circuit House one weekend, casually sunning themselves, the snake charmers were summoned. Flinging grains of rice, they strolled around the densest thickets of shrubbery, and we saw a sight that we have never seen before or since.

A dozen snakes emerged out of the grasses and water channels, writhing and convulsing with unseemly haste, desperately endeavoring to escape, while the snake catchers ran after them, pulling them by their tails into capacious tea-sacks, in which the golden brew had once been transported to markets.

With the reptiles flailing and squirming to get away, we stood transfixed on the safe vantage viewpoint of the first storey of the building. It seemed to us, in our fear and trepidation, that the snakes would fly onto our first floor safe haven any minute.

Glowing testimonials

The great snake hunt being over, the catchers and charmers came in for congratulations. After all the snakes had been secreted in sacks and boxes, the leader of the group came forward and sought a testimonial attesting to their magical skills.

I asked him if any other officer had ever supplied such a document. Out of a cloth shoulder bag tumbled out scores of glowing testimonials. Placed in chronological sequence, they were an unending record of DCs, SPs, IGPs and Commissioners, who had spent a life time in these enchanted valleys and hills. 

There were some photographs as well. One of the most arresting was that of KPS Gill as a middle-aged officer, more corpulent than one had even seen him to be, with his pair of moustaches as ablaze as ever, standing on a sunny spring day with the same snake-charmers, perhaps two decades ago.

In the poem entitled The Snake, DH Lawrence wrote about a snake that came to a water-trough on a hot day in July, to drink there, with the smoke of Mt Etna curling into the blue Sicilian sky. After much thought, a log was thrown at the snake, which made it vanish into the bowels of the earth.

‘And immediately, I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education…
And so I missed my chance with one of the lords of life
And I’ve something to expiate: a pettiness’ 

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