Dull days & wild boar at Podger’s house

Nehchal Sandhu

The history of British India is replete with accounts of middle-class Englishmen with limited education and few prospects for betterment at home, travelling to the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ to seek their fortunes. Many such Brits ended up as taipans following lucrative trading in opium, tea and minerals, amongst other commodities or as moderately wealthy ‘Boxwallahs’ in Calcutta.

John Podger was one such entrepreneur, one of the early pioneers of Bihar’s mica industry in Koderma district (now in Jharkhand). After acquiring mica mines, this doughty Englishman bought a mango orchard off the road at Chhatarbar village and built a grand bungalow. A shed full of batteries powered his bungalow that lighted up his evenings, in addition to pumping up water from a nearby well.

Anecdotal history revealed that the bungalow’s privacy presented him with ample opportunity for dalliances with native women from the mining community. Decades later, however, no evidence of his fabled carnality is visible on the streets of Koderma in the form of fair, blue-eyed progeny.

In 1975, Podger’s house became my home and office, when I was appointed ASP at Jhumri Telaiya. Under classic police ‘persuasion’, the owners were cajoled into carrying out basic repairs to the house, which led to its imposing Burma teak doors and windows regaining their subtle, deep brown hues.

Tiles were replaced and hessian cloth used to create an artificial ceiling as the roofs were unusually high. The latter, however, proved to be a noisy obstacle course with lizards and other reptiles falling onto it frequently. This sparked panic for my wife and her maid from Madras. Their nocturnal existence, to say the least, was arduous.

After we had settled in, we sowed pulses and potatoes in the surrounding compound. But that presented another hazard in the form of wild boar, who dug them up. These assaults turned into a blessing, thanks to my shotgun that I used against these nightly marauders, much like the Bwana hunters in Africa. Friends and colleagues appreciated the meat that ensued from these shootings. Personally, it evoked a taste for pork jerky that, even today, I nostalgically relish.

Social life, however, was a handicap.

Our nearest neighbour was Ratanjit Samonta, a mica baron and his Calcutta convent-educated wife, rarely permitted to stray beyond its confines. Several months after, Ratanjit hesitatingly accepted my proposition that we meet every Friday for beer, while our wives chatted with nimboo pani!

Ratanjit would buy the beer one week and I the next; but we were always abstemious, never exceeding 650 ml. This, sadly, was pretty much the limit, until my gregarious mother-in-law arrived and assembled a group of families that would mingle twice a week over lavish high tea, enabled effortlessly by an army of household staff.

At the time, I often wondered whether Podger was sardonically looking down upon us simple folk with our mundane lives.