Living for almost five years in the midst of dense forest is bizarre for any city dweller. And this was in the fifties when there was hardly any electricity, even in inhabited areas. I was living in a cleared-up jungle patch, turned into a mining town, called Barbil.

With that as my base, I also traversed to several difficult-to-reach mining areas. Barbil was in Keonjhar district of Orissa that borders Bihar. Barbil town, if you may call it a town, had then just one main road, a few shops, a police station, a post office, a Dak Bungalow, a noisy ball mill where lumps of iron ores were crushed and a small private hospital. The latter two belonged to the Orissa Mining Development Company (OMD). There were some offices of smaller mining companies besides some residential houses on both sides of the main road. That was the town of Barbil. Barajamda was its nearest railhead and the ore would be loaded on to wagons from here for transport elsewhere.

Roads in mining areas are rudimentary and designed to provide only basic access to places where mining goes on and to carry back the mined ores. Keonjhar has mostly iron and manganese mines with occasional kyanite and quartzite thrown in. Most of these areas have dense forests and are the habitat of many wild animals.

I was working in a trade union of mines and forest workers as its secretary. The job I had was to organise the unorganised. Besides the miners and forest workers, there were drillers, loaders, drivers, mechanics and other men working in these mines and forests. Most of them were tribals from the neighbouring areas except for some babus, drivers, mechanics, etc.

I had joined a mess where a few other Bengalis working in some offices also lived. An Oriya cook made meals for us. Incidentally, he was night blind. He used to make excellent potato fries but unfortunately on a rainy day, he even fried several grasshoppers along with the potato. A kerosene lantern was the source of illumination in the night. Our cook firmly believed that Bengalis could not be Brahmins!

The biggest mining outfit in the area was the OMD. It was then owned by Bird & Company, a British outfit. OMD’s local boss was an English man while the superintendent was an Australian. I came to know later that Amitabh Bachhan had worked in the Calcutta office of Bird & Company in his early days as a clerk.

Bird and Company owned many iron ore and manganese mines in Keonjhar district. Our trade union was “recognised” which meant that we had free access to their mines and could negotiate on behalf of the workers. But there were many other mine owners who did not want to recognise us or allow any union activity in their mines. They were afraid that they would be deprived of the “facility” they have of denying their workers rightful wages and amenities as per law, and forced to abandon the policy of “hire and fire”.

Since these owners would not permit us to enter their mines, the only way out was to go where the workers lived after working hours as there was no night-shift mining then due to lack of electricity.

Most of the workers, by evening, would be drunk with a homemade brew called Handia. It is a sort of fermented rice beer, fairly strong and is believed to help avert sunstroke. Our means of transport was:  jeeps or ore-loaded trucks as well as a military disposal command car. To say the least, the experience was awesome.

I and a couple of union workers carried on undaunted with our meetings with drunken miners. We used to carry with us a 16 mm film projector, a portable generator as also an amplifier with a microphone. A lecture by me and some of my colleagues and if possible a local person exhorting these miners to join our union and derive its benefits. Our exhortation was followed by a film show. This was our regular routine.

The films were brought from various cultural departments of embassies in Calcutta. Some of these were simply propaganda films but some were good feature films too. These were provided free to us.

Normally, we would borrow a jeep with a driver from one of the many private transporters, fill it up with petrol and drive to remote mining areas. We would return the vehicle in the night after coming back to Barbil. But a jeep was not always available.

Our other means of transport were invariably the empty trucks going to that area and loaded trucks coming back. Often the driver’s cabin was packed and we sat on the top of the loaded trucks looking at the star-studded sky and bumping along.

One evening I was waiting at the roadside for a lift after a meeting at Joda mines. There came a lumbering Leyland truck fully loaded with Iron ore. I knew the driver Bhairav well. He saw me and stopped the truck. I got into the driver’s cabin and the fellow began to drive. Within a few minutes I realised that Bhairav was fully drunk. He was swinging the truck dangerously left to right and there was the danger of falling into a roadside gorge.

So, I asked him if he would like me to drive the vehicle. He looked at me askance, stopped the truck and handed over the steering to me. That was my first experience in driving a truck and that a too fully loaded one. While I was trying my best to keep the truck in the middle of the so-called road, both Bhairav and his khalasi went into deep slumber snoring in abandon. I woke them up when I was entering the precincts of Barbil.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

But my truck-ride days in Barbil were not over yet as we had no vehicle as yet of our own. Once while returning from a meeting sitting atop an ore-laden truck, I suddenly felt the truck slow down and stop. It was a wintry moonlit night and there on the middle of the forest road was sitting a big tiger.

Everyone was silent. No one knew if it would jump at us or not. Languidly, it looked at us but did not move. There I saw for the first time what is meant by ‘tiger burning bright’. I had read William Blake’s poem “Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night”, but never understood what it really meant. In the light of truck headlight, the eyes of the tiger were indeed burning bright. After a few minutes, the tiger probably took pity on us and slowly but majestically winded down to the forest, never even once looking back at us.

I had many more adventures during my stay in Barbil. In the next part I will share how I learnt to drive and got my license.