by M Krishnan
1938
26
Death of a Snake
This morning we felled a tree in our backyard—an ancient Dak tree (Pithecalobium saman) that had stood timelessly in a corner of the compound, casting a dense, unwanted shade on the roof of the outhouse. But it is not of the Dak tree, or of trees at all, that I am writing. It is about something else: something slim and dark and sinuous that came down from this tree, before the tree itself came down, filling the backyard with its spread of boughs and leaves.
I was squatting cross-legged like a Buddha on the compound wall, supervising the coolies at their work. It was almost through; a few more strokes of those unwilling axes and the old tree would have been felled. Then something long and slack, like a length of rope, slid down from a bough on to the tiles of the outhouse and slowly down the wall to the ground. At once there was pandemonium—shouts and yells and flying feet on all sides. From my point of vantage I could see quite clearly what it was—a dark-brown snake with yellow mottlings, well over a yard in length. It raised its head a little and looked around in a vague, dreamy sort of way, as if it wondered what all this fuss and noise and sprinting was about. And being quite unable to understand this panic, it slowly lowered its head again, coiled round and went to sleep. I have never seen a more bored and tired snake. Looking at it seemed to me that this snake, and not the dove, was the true symbol of Peace.
Some of the men had clambered on to the wall and joined me in my lofty security. We held a council of war and it was decided that the snake should die. I wanted to know if it was poisonous—it seemed so innocent to me. Yes, I was assured that it was exceptionally poisonous. It was a cobra. It was a viper. It was a krait and king cobra all in one. I said it looked like some sort of a harmless tree-snake; I said it must be a harmless tree-snake since it had come from a tree. It was no good, the men would not listen to my logic. After all, what did the Young Master know about snakes? Perhaps he had read about them in books, but his experience went no farther. And one of them had actually been bitten by a rat snake in his youth and had survived it! And so they killed it with stones and long bamboo poles, beating it till it became a broken, bloody mess. And even then the tail kept twitching on in a queer, convulsive way. I was still curious. I wanted to open its mouth to see if it had any poison fangs. It was dead and I was sure that even while it was alive it had wanted to bite no one. But here too the men were against me. It seems snakes never die, not till they are burnt to ashes. It was true that they had beaten this one to a pulp, but it was alive all the same, waiting for just such a foolish Young Master to put his hand in its mouth. Some people would do well to be less foolish and curious. And so on. They became so insufferably patronizing that I went away, leaving them to do what they liked with the snake. The last I saw of it was as they carried it off, dangling at the end of a long pole, still feebly twitching its tail in protest against being murdered violently in sleep.
Thinking of this snake I wonder—what is the true hallmark of a poisonous snake? The cobra has its spectacled hood, but then the cobra is not the only venomous snake in creation. ‘The Russell’s viper or daboia,’ the zoologist will tell you, ‘has a squat, diamond-shaped head and a heavy, thick body.’ Not that you need to observe its ‘diamond-shaped’ head and bloated body and dull pig’s eyes to know that it is poisonous. You know it somehow the moment you see it: it ‘looks’ poisonous. Looking at some men you know at once that they are unpleasant. It is not any particular feature that convinces you of this but a general air of unpleasantness—they seem to exude it. Naturally you do not tell them so, for you are civilized and being civilized, hypocritical and polite. With the Russell’s viper, however, you are under no such disadvantage—you may kill it on sight without wasting politeness on it. But that is not the point. There are snakes, besides the Russell’s viper and cobra, which are quite deadly and you cannot say, by merely looking at them, whether they are venomous or not. Major Wall has developed an excellent system of identifying snakes by a detailed examination of the scales of their body, but this system is only for the savant—it requires an expert anatomical knowledge of the scales of snakes. Moreover it requires that the snake should be dead, for no live snake will wait for anyone to scrutinize its scales: not even for men like Major Wall. What is the obvious hallmark of a poisonous snake, then? The effect of its bite, of course, but this is not a very satisfactory method of finding it out. The truth is there is no practical way of distinguishing every venomous snake at sight. Perhaps the wisest attitude to adopt towards snakes is that of the coolie: an attitude of grave and impartial distrust.
There may be men learned in the ways of snakes who can tell each breed apart a glance, but I once came across something that would have baffled even those experts. It was a snake’s egg, uneven, oblong and with a yellow, leathery shell—in fact it looked more like a ball of old parchment than an egg. Snakes are puzzling enough, but their eggs are positive mysteries. How can you say what sort of a serpent such an egg might hatch? Of course there were some obvious points about this egg. For instance it could not have been the egg of a Russell’s viper, for this monstrous snake is viviparous: it brings forth its children matured and alive into the world. And anyway it was a snake’s egg: the egg of a bird would have been defined and shelly and a lizard’s egg much smaller. Moreover the man who gave me the egg assured me that it was a snake’s egg, and why should this man have told me a lie? But that’s all I knew about this egg. I kept it in a wooden box in the hope that it would hatch and reveal its secret, but the next morning I found that the ants were having snake’s egg for breakfast and so I threw it away. It must have been a very dead egg.
Just think, there are all sorts of deadly serpents everywhere: in villages and in towns, in gardens and in ant heaps, perhaps even in the dusty, overfed waste-paper basket that you always mean to clean up next week? Not a pleasant thought, but unfortunately true. Only the other day we had a graphic proof of this when an old gentleman whom I know drew on his shoes. He felt something moving inside his shoe and hastily withdrew his foot, and the something darted out of the shoe and into the garden before any one could observe exactly what it was. The old gentleman swears that he clearly saw the spectacles on the hood of the brute and nothing on earth will induce him to change this view—not even the independent evidence of the three other people who saw the ‘brute’ and who are almost certain that it was only a mink! And again the cobra–krait–viper we slew this morning. Well, well. The land just bristles with these deadly reptiles, girl,’ as the O.G. said.
Not only the land. If you watch the fishermen haul their nets in of an evening, you will see a flat, ribbon-shaped snake that sometimes gets caught in their meshes. Very like an eel it looks, and as you watch it flopping weakly on the sands and note the carelessness with which the fishermen chuck it about you begin to lose your respect for the sea-serpent. And yet the bite of this snake is more fatal than the dreaded cobra’s. Only, it loses all desire and power to bite once it is out of the sea—it gasps and flounders around the sands and dies, a Samson shorn of his hair.
And they say that in the sandy suburbs of Ramnad, in south India, there lives a snake thrice as deadly as the king cobra, that flies around at dusk looking for poor, ignorant villagers who may be about with their scalps exposed. For this curious snake will bite only the very top of the head: in this respect it is more particular than the most fastidious of Red Indian scalp hunters. You and I, we may smile and shake our heads over this, but the villager will remain unaffected by our scepticism. Why else do the people of these parts go about with their heads swathed in ponderous turbans long after the sun and heat are gone?
1938
27
Bommakka
When first I set eyes on Bommakka she was in a newly cut field of millet, tethered to a stake. Along with the country schoolmaster who owned her, I had walked two miles to see her: and I could see little in the massive, slate-grey beast to justify my friend’s pride in ownership. On the way to tha
t field he had extolled the courage, the great strength and the noble disposition of his pet—and there was this old buffalo cow, disappointingly commonplace in her looks.
Yes, she was bigger than most village buffaloes, bigger and darker, and no doubt she was in splendid condition. But I had expected something more mettlesome than this placid, elderly, cud-chewing creature that allowed me to stroke her Roman nose, and nuzzled closer when I stopped stroking. It was then that I noticed that the poor thing was quite blind in one eye.
However, I summoned a tone of surprise and envy and spoke admiringly of the beast: I know how strong, how strangely uncritical and sensitive, the bond between a man and his buffalo can be. My friend insisted on our crossing and recrossing four spiky fields of stubble to fetch Bommakka an armful of green bean plants, pods and all. And all the way home he regaled me with rambling stories of her prowess.
No doubt I had noticed that she was in an interesting condition—she was getting on in years and this time, at least, he hoped she would bear a cow-calf—unfortunately, on both the previous occasions, in his five years of ownership, she had presented him with bull-calves. Well, to come back to what he was saying, very soon he would have to send her up to the hilltop, nine miles away, where there was lush grass to be had for nothing, and the herdsmen there would welcome Bommakka with joy. For once she was with the herd, the heifers and dry milch cows were safe from raiding leopards. A full-grown buffalo, of course, is too much for any leopard to tackle, but I should realize that most buffaloes, grazing in the jungles with milch cattle, would be content with making off by themselves when the killer seized a calf. Bommakka was not like that: she understood her responsibilities by the weak. The minute she scented the enemy she would charge him fiercely, and no leopard dared face her onslaught. My friend went on to tell me of the rescues she had effected, and I listened politely, pondering over the amount of imagination that went to make any heroic figure.
Next week I was in the hilltop jungles, along with a shikar party. What took us there was news of tiger—of a tiger that had crossed over into our territory from an adjoining range. We found his pug marks in the sand of a pool’s edge, enormous in their splayed-out spread, but footprints on hard earth told us that he was full-grown, though not perhaps of record proportions—two months later, when that tiger was shot, our estimate was proved right, for though he taped only 9' 9" between pegs, he was in his prime and very heavily built. A deputation from the hilltop cattle pen met the guns with an urgent request to save them from this new menace. The tiger had already accounted for a cow from their herd as also for a big, red Sindhi bullock belonging to the tobacco company at the foot of the hill. As we turned home after assuring the herdsmen of our keenness, I remember thinking idly that Bommakka was probably in that cattle pen, and that even her credulous master could not expect her to deal with a tiger!
A few evenings later, in answer to a frantic message from the schoolmaster, the local medico and I rushed off to a field, where a group of gesticulating men stood well away from an excited buffalo. The herdsmen who had brought a very lame Bommakka down from the hill gave us a vivid account of the incident. That morning, as the herd was being driven into the jungle, the tiger had leaped out from ambush with loud roars, and the cattle and men had dispersed in terror. But as they ran for dear life to the shelter of a nearby shrine, the men had seen Bommakka turn and charge the great cat. Naturally, they could not see what followed. But for a few minutes they had heard the sounds of battle, the snorts of the gallant buffalo and the roars of the tiger, and then the tiger had gone away, the fainter and fainter tone of his occasional voice telling of his retreat. When they had gathered courage at last to go back to the spot, they found the old buffalo in a trampled clearing, raging with pain and anger and covered with blood. Beside a bush was the victim, a young heifer that the tiger had killed instantly, with hardly a mark on its white coat.
Some sort of cleaning of the wounds had been attempted, but the men were afraid to go too near the excited buffalo, and blood was still flowing from the deep gashes. The wounds told their own tale. There were four deep, long, parallel gashes down the left hip and thigh, and the right hock was severely bitten and swollen to twice its normal size. Apparently the tiger had tried to hamstring his huge adversary from behind, leaping in from her blind right side and getting a purchase over her left hip with his grappling-hook claws.
Veterinary aid was non-existent where we were, and Bommakka’s restive mood complicated matters. She was in obvious pain, but there was no hint of shock or fear: she cropped the fresh, short grass at her feet with fierce relish and glared out of her single eye at us; her nostrils were distended and when we tried to approach her, she tossed her head and snorted low in warning: the four long ropes that had been used to lead her home trailed the earth besides her—I was sure those ropes would have been useless had she not wanted to come home.
Finally, the schoolmaster sent us away, and after a while the great beast suffered him to lead her, limping painfully, to the ramshackle shed behind his cottage. Once she was there, it was possible to syringe out the wounds gently with an antiseptic lotion, and apply the liquid white paste that the medical practitioner provided. No doubt the gashes required stitches, but this was out of the question.
In a couple of days the gashes over her hip and thigh had begun to heal marvellously, but the hock was as bad as ever, and the animal had lost weight alarmingly. The big ribs stood out clearly beneath the hide, and there were deep hollows between and behind them. The trouble was that the great beast could get no sleep or rest for the pain and stiffness of her swollen hock—a buffalo that cannot lie down will waste away, however carefully it may be fed. Some half a dozen of us thought furiously of some plan by which the heavy weight of Bommakka’s body could be eased off her stiff, injured hock—one of us even went to the extent of devising a sling for the body from gunny bags—but all our thought was futile. The schoolmaster feared that the fact that Bommakka was far gone in calf would complicate things further—however, the immediate problem was to provide her with rest.
This is a true story. I can vouch for every word of it. I state this here because on the third day a miracle happened—the buffalo found the solution that had escaped all of us. She snapped her tether with a casual flick of her head and limped, painfully but with determination, to the watercourse nearby. She waded into the murky, green depth of a pool there, deeper and deeper in till only the nostrils, the eyes and the bump of her forehead showed above water. And at last with buoyancy doing the trick that all our cunning had failed to achieve and her weight off her legs, she closed her one eye and went to sleep. It was a job to get her out of the pool and lead her home as darkness fell, and early next day she was back in the water for sleep.
Being apprehensive humans we continued to fear for her for a while. We thought that the dirty water coming into such prolonged contact with the wounds might result in sepsis, but in a week’s time Bommakka’s wounds had healed completely and in a fortnight she was her old self, with only the raised scars to bear witness to her adventure. Nor did the experience affect her condition as her master had feared. In due season she presented him with a robust, beautifully pink calf. Need I add that it was a bull-calf?
1952
28
Freebooters of the Air
Watching India’s first historic Test victory over England, along with a huge holiday crowd, were a dozen kites. They had followed the game with unrelaxing eyes over the previous three days, and I knew some of them by the close of the opening day.
One had two forward primaries missing from each wing, one had a squarish tail, one was exceptionally light in colour, a bleached golden brown, another was almost black in its swarthy new plumage, and there was a bird that had lost the entire tail quite recently. I was amused by the vigilance of these birds, patrolling the sky above the ground. Whenever drinks were brought out to the players, the air overhead was suddenly thick with kites, swooping and circling low for a mi
nute before sailing away disappointed. During the breaks for lunch and tea there were opportunist scrambles, some birds alighting on the grass to consume scraps thrown aside by the crowd, others flying away with the booty. Quite a few of the spectators, discussing the happenings and prospects excitedly, had the hurried morsel expertly plucked from their hands. Especially was I amused by a sandwich-eater who laughed uproariously at his neighbour’s loss, only to have his own bread snatched the next moment—the sheepish smile on his face was worth going a long way to see.
Looting kites are quite a feature of our bazaars and city markets and I know a restaurant in a park, in the heart of a big city, where these birds have grown so audaciously slick that habitues prefer the dull tile-roofed verandah to the charm of repast in the open with colourful shrubs around and grass underfoot. These freebooters of the air come a close second after crows in the list of urban fauna, but there are kites in the country too.
There, with no meat stalls and crowded eating houses, kites work harder for their living, and are far less offensively familiar. They take to scavenging for their food, a more strenuous and less fashionable profession than picking pockets in cities. And in the remote countryside I have known kites that actually hunt their prey.
I know a lake in such a place where I have seen kites fishing. They sail low over the water and clutch at the slippery prey on the surface with their talons, often without success. Here they are awkward apprentices in comparison to the many expert fishermen around, birds equipped with long, stabbing beaks or long, wading legs, other specialized features or at least the boldness to plunge headlong into the water. Elsewhere, I have seen kites chasing maimed quarry or flapping heavily among swarming termites, which they seized ponderously in their grappling-hook feet.
