An uninvited guest

 

However sweet your ringtone is, however lovely you think it is, you will have a moment of quiet introspection when your mobile starts ringing while you are having a nice sleep.

Now I certainly do.

"Hey, you there??"

"Yea.. ah," I replied, not having fully recovered from sleep.

"What were you doing? I have been trying your number for a while."

"Sleeping," I said sheepishly.

"What? It is just 8, man!!!"

"Oh.."

Pause.. I checked my watch, it was just 8.

"I fell asleep."

"OK. I will be there in ten, fifteen minutes.. Don't go anywhere."

"OK.."

I put the phone down and tried to sleep. Sleeping further was pointless. He would be here any moment to wake me up again.

I got up, put on my slippers, and went outside. It had rained while I slept. The air was still cool. I felt a gush of refreshing cold breeze on my face and a chill running through my spine. But it wasn't just the cold breeze. The origin was somewhere else, under my feet if I am not mistaken, giving a tickling sensation now and then.

When you touch a burning object or get pricked by a sharp substance, you make an involuntary movement. That is ‘response to stimuli', I remember my biology teacher trying to teach us in high school. Know it or not, without it, lazy, sluggish people like me would end up dead more than once on a daily basis.

Response to tickling it was. Somehow I got my feet detached from the slippers and, with it, a small reptile, black with prominent white bands all over its body, took its leave. It wasn't hard to recognize: Velli kattan, shankhu varayan, or ettadi veeran. You might know it as the common krait (a member of the "big four", including cobra and two types of viper—species inflicting the most snakebites in India).

My body had made its maximum reflex possible and was reluctant to make any move. I was transfixed. But my uninvited guest had realized he was unwelcome, made no fuss, and took his leave.

"Why are you standing there like that???"

I could lift my head and make a feeble sound. "Snake."

"What??? Where?"

"It left the way you came in."

He started jumping around like Tigger from Winnie the Pooh.

"Why didn't you kill it??"

He was already on top of one of the chairs.

I didn't say anything.

"Where did you find it?"

"Under my feet.. over my slippers.."

"What the... and did it bite you???"

That was when it struck me. Did it bite me?? Does the bite leave marks? I went back to my room, sat on my bed, decided a bite should leave some marks, and started checking my feet.

After several minutes of inspection, I shortlisted several probable bite marks which had an appeal. Moreover, I started having pain from more than one of those.

My friend was still on top of the chair.

"Did you find any?? Hey, don't panic. If it had bitten, you would have been long gone by now."

I didn't say anything. I was trying to see if I could find more bite marks.

"And common krait is a decent snake."

He had opted for science in his plus two.

"It doesn't bite much unless provoked."

Does standing on top of it meet that criteria? Who knows.. I didn't ask.

"Even if it does, death is less violent as compared to a viper bite. Their venom is neurotoxin. It causes paralysis. You know, if it bites you in your sleep, you will die peacefully in your sleep and you won't even know."

He then went on giving lectures till midnight about several ‘to-know' things about snakes, several folklore stories from his village, and more. Whether it was paralysis seeping in or just fear, I didn't have any energy left to pay much attention to his lecture. I slept at some point.

In the morning, I checked the mirror, just to be sure I hadn't turned blue like someone from Avatar.