After many aborted attempts we were finally trying to tackle all the papers and bills that had accumulated over the months. We had just started sorting them into piles when there was a knock at the door. Days at home are always punctuated by unwanted intruders at the gate. My husband went out to investigate. It was the EB man come to calculate the electricity consumption. The electricity board was beneath the staircase and the stairs could be accessed both from the outside of the house and from the inside. My husband unlocked the wooden door and then the grille gate and went down two steps and bent down to look into the meter. The next second he was back in the hall, pale and rattled. But he hadn’t lost his cool. I heard him tell the EB man that there was a snake down there, coiled around the meter box. The EB man went down to have a look, but the snake had vanished. Nevertheless, we asked him to come back in the evening and closed the wooden door that led into the hall from the staircase. Then we took turns keeping watch at the other entrance from the outside while my husband called the fire department for help. The fire department in turn gave us the velachery forest dept number and asked us to contact them. The forest dept was very obliging. They told us to make sure that the snake did not leave the premises until they arrived. The official arrived within an hour of our calling. During the intervening one hour that we were keeping vigil the snake did try coming out a few times. We saw it poking its head out, surveying the terrain outside to make good its escape. But we made noises and shooed it back in. Let alone it might have found its way out and escaped. But we wanted it caught for we had seen it too often within the house premises. Each time we sighted it, we never ventured into the narrow strips of garden around the house for at least a week. Even when we had to out of compulsion it was with a lot of trepidation. It was only two weeks earlier that we had seen a very long grayish black snake. Our pom Brownie sighted it first, went chasing it, and at one point they were both confronting each other near the well. The snake reared its head and hissed venomously at Brownie. Brownie retreated a step and in the meantime the snake climbed up the well and onto the compound wall and made a clean jump into the house beyond.

This time the snake was of average length, but it was doubtless a cobra as its dirty yellow colour and its slow gait indicated. The forest official examined the area beneath the staircase, high and low, but couldn’t find the snake. It certainly had not left the staircase, so the only place it could have gone into was a deep hole beneath the electricity board. It was through this hole that the main cable came into the house from the road. The rats had made this a bigger hole. So finally we had this hole packed with a lot of sand and cement and dug the snake’s grave in the process.

The next day was another day of heavy cleaning, removing all scraps and rubbish and rat hideouts all around the house, making sure that there was no place that any other snake could be tempted to come to.

However fascinating snakes may be, at close range they are still terrifying aren’t they?

However many books I may read by James Herriott I don’t think I can ever bring myself to love reptiles, let alone suffer them; and snakes top the list. Ugh!