In the dead of the night

Ours was one of the three spacious houses within a vast compound in a residential locality called, Salem Extension. Flanking our house on one side was a sprawling kitchen garden awash with a variety of vegetables, tended by my mother. On the other side, there was a circular patch of land with undergrowth. A vast bawn was right opposite our house, providing a grazing field for the cattle. A common driveway from the road led to each of the houses. None of the three houses had electrical connection in the 1940s.

In one of the spacious rooms in my house, there were two big wooden racks groaning with books, two revolving shelves packed with them and some spilt onto a table and chair, besides four steel trunks, each bursting with bundles of dry palm-leaf scripts in Granth, a language unknown to everyone in the family. He was a research assistant at the department of archaeology in the University of Madras where he was staying with one of our relatives.

A boy of nine and the youngest among my siblings, I used to sleep cuddling up to my mother. That day fumbling for my mom in the dead of night I woke up. She whispered to me that a loud swish from outside had disturbed her slumber, focussing a torchlight through the window and asking me sleep. Curious to know what it was I stood behind her and kept peeking outside. The sight of a mongoose hopping from side to side before a big cobra with its broad hood raised high, trying to attack sent a chill down my spine. Probably not so full-grown to stand against the snake in a fight, the mongoose bolted. Fear-stricken I snuggled into my bedsheet.

The very next morning, my mother managed to get a snake charmer at our house. As the guy started playing enchanting music on his bamboo pipe, serpents of different sorts came wriggling towards him from all nooks and crannies around our house. A boy, maybe his assistant quite gingerly trapped them one by one in baskets. A sizeably big cobra appearing to be not less than seven feet long was the last one that came wriggling only to be caught and confined by its captor.

The hissing noise ceased to be heard any more from around our house.