Growing up near the foothills of the Eastern Ghats, my childhood home was always surrounded by the feel of nature… the lush green paddy fields, the dark jungle in the far distance and the rocky hills that rose up behind the millet fields miles away.
It was probably 1990 and I was in high school.
On weekends, I’d normally take a Ruskin Bond book up to the terrace overlooking my Grandmother’s flower courtyard and read his Himalayan stories under the Jacaranda tree.
I also had a couple of school text books to ease my conscience because I was supposed to be studying during the weekends.
But there was a reluctance to open textbooks on a beautiful day filled with wispy clouds drifting across the sky.
And I’d usually end up listening to my favorite hard rock on my Sharp Walkman with its X-bass and graphic equalizer sliders, which I loved for the deep sound, close my eyes and wander into an imaginary world…
Sometimes, I wondered about the lives of the secretive animals that lived within those ancient forests of the Eastern ghats.
The music provided a mental soundtrack for the scenes that went through my mind.
I’d imagine the tread of the majestic Bengal tiger that stalked stealthily through the shadowy glades in search of prey. Its big furry paws. The eyes that glow like bright lanterns in the dark. The beautiful pattern of stripes and its lovely fur.
Sometimes, unpleasant images would intrude as I thought of the dark forest glades. That creature of nightmares, the king cobra, as it silently slithered its scary fifteen-foot length through the dark forests in search of other cobras to eat. But I never liked cold-blooded creeping reptiles.
I mentally rejected it immediately and went back to the gorgeous big cats, the trees, the wind, the beauty of the hills.
The hidden ambush of the powerful leopard, one of the stealthiest and strongest apex predators as it waited, camouflaged behind the innocuous green leaves that danced in the monsoon winds dripping with rain...
It was peaceful up there under the Jacaranda, petting one of my tabby cats that had spread out across my lap while thinking of the gorgeous tigers deep in those hilly jungles.
But on that particular day, my Grandmother was supervising the gardening around the chapel, which was a few hundred meters away from the main house with a thick coconut grove and guava plantation in between. She called to me to join her as she left and I put away my books and music.
I didn’t know that I was leaving behind the safety of my dramatic jungle daydreaming under the Jacaranda tree for the actual danger that awaited me in the plantation behind my house.
Silent peril in the peaceful coconut grove
On that eventful day, I decided to take a shortcut down a water channel that ran through the coconut and guava grove, instead of the main cleared path that my Grandmother took.
It was a concrete channel supported by a foundation of small and uneven rocks that had been piled up and roughly mortared together. It ran from the house up to the chapel. On one side of it, there was the grove filled with neat rows of trees, while the other side was covered with a dense border of culinary leaves and herbs which separated the edge of my grandparent’s land from the highway on the other side.
This channel was used to pump water to the trees every morning and evening. The early morning watering had already been done and it had dried up in the mid-morning heat with small puddles of water here and there as I splashed through them. I was wearing a pair of red ballet flats with hard soles. And maybe that was one of the things that saved my life that day.
Two other kids were following behind me as I led the way down the concrete channel completely unaware of the peril that lay in wait.
I never saw it lying there.
I don’t even know how it happened. I don’t remember if the ground felt uneven beneath my feet or if there was any sound or texture that accompanied that moment in time.
I don’t recall the exact moment I stepped on the Russell’s Viper that lay coiled in the middle of that water channel.
There was nothing out of the ordinary until someone screamed behind me.
The sound cut through the quiet morning and the gentle swish of the wind blowing through the coconut fronds overhead.
The kids who had been walking behind me were pointing at the ground and yelling.
I turned and saw a sickening sight.
A writhing snake covered with scales. Its head was completely crushed and its body was twisting grotesquely in the throes of its death.
I lifted my feet and checked the underside of the soles and found a disgusting patch of slime and mess under a one and a half square inch of heel.
Somehow, I didn’t react hysterically or scream like the others. What I felt was a creeped-out feeling of utter repulsion and disgust. I immediately washed those shoes under a tap near the chapel.
I guess the significance of it didn’t really sink in at that moment.
Years later, I came to understand these facts.
The Russell’s Viper is one of the most deadly, dangerous and venomous snakes in the world because it’s responsible for a high number of human fatalities, almost more than any other type. It belongs to the notorious “Big Four” group of snakes (Cobra, Russell’s Viper, Krait and the Saw-Scaled Viper) in South Asia that cause the most human deaths.
As I write this story now, I’m doing a little research and this came up.
“The venom itself is incredibly destructive, acting as a hemotoxin and cytotoxin. A bite causes severe pain, massive internal tissue damage, acute kidney failure, and interferes heavily with blood clotting, leading to severe hemorrhaging.”
In the local Tamil language, it’s called a Kannadi Viriyan because of its pattern of scales that look like shiny oval mirrors or glass. Some call it a Ratha Viriyan or Blood Viper because of what its venom does to the victim. It’s also called "eight-step viper", which stems from an old folk lore story (may not be accurate but that’s the local reputation if somewhat exaggerated) that a person bitten by it could only take eight steps before collapsing.
My grandmother was so shocked that she looked at me as if I had walked straight through the valley of death and emerged unscathed.
She quoted the verse from Psalm 91 about how God protects his people even if they step on serpents and keep them unharmed.
I’ve wondered about this for years. My conscious mind did not see the snake or register the danger. This particular variety is known for a lightning fast strike but it could not strike.
And how did that highly accurate step exactly on the snake’s head happen? What if I had stepped an inch to the right or left?
That’s the strangest thing about the whole encounter. I don’t think it was blind luck. I do believe that it was God’s protection. It had been a literal serpent crushing moment. My guardian angel had been working hard.
Unexpected danger in the fragrant courtyard garden
But that was not the only time I encountered snakes in my childhood. I’m not sure if this incident happened earlier or later than the other.
My grandparents would always warn me and others to stamp hard on the ground while walking through grass or areas covered with plants. This would create ground vibrations that the snakes could feel so that they would have warning and slither away from any approaching humans.
But this encounter happened right outside the door.
We had an inner courtyard filled with climbing red button roses, pink and white roses in pots, and different varieties of jasmine and lilies.
The air was heavily fragrant with the scent of lilies of the valley, the night-flowering coral jasmine and Spanish jasmine.
The house was built in a U-shape enclosing this courtyard while the front faced a driveway bordered by bamboo and bougainvillea.
The fourth side of this courtyard was bordered by a water trough that fed the channel to the trees. The coconut grove lay behind it. And there was an open staircase leading up to my room.
One night, the sky over the open courtyard was filled with bright stars. I looked up at the heavens with a sense of poetry as I came down the stairs humming a song.
A faint night breeze blew the heavy fragrance of the Spanish jasmine from its trellis and everything seemed as it should be.
It was then that I heard a sound that instantly set my senses on alert.
It was around 9 or 10 PM, the place was dark except for two lights on either side of the courtyard and whatever it was that I had heard didn’t belong in that place at that time of night.
It sounded like someone was letting the air out of a tire. It was the sound of a high-pressure release of air. And I immediately thought of my own bicycle because I sometimes enjoyed pushing the pin to deflate it just to hear the sound and pump it up with air again.
But I had put my bicycle away in the shed which was nowhere near the courtyard.
Who was letting air out of a tire at night? There was no one around.
At one side of the courtyard, my grandparents had a raised granite stone flower bed filled with white and yellow thunder lilies. They are called rain or thunder lilies because they tend to blossom whenever there is a thunderstorm.
Maybe that was symbolic. Who knows?
My little calico cat Spidey was sitting beside the thunder lilies completely absorbed in something that looked like a dark coil on the concrete plastered ground. And I realized that the sound came from that coil.
I saw it but I was a kid of probably around ten and didn’t know what it was. I thought it was a scorpion but that didn’t account for the sound.
I called out to Spidey but she wouldn’t leave it. My grandfather’s room was at the corner of the courtyard and he always kept a couple of long bamboo poles right outside his door. He had lived many years in this region and knew what to expect.
I picked up one and tapped the ground on the other side away from Spidey so she could move away but she wouldn’t go. She was fascinated with that coil of whatever it was.
I called to my grandfather through the window that opened into the courtyard and told him that there was something on the floor that sounded like an air vent.
He was a veteran at handling snakes and other wildlife and immediately recognized the sound as soon as I pointed it out.
I sensed the tension in him as he picked up a powerful torch he had on his desk, told me to stand on the steps well away from it and direct the beam at the coiled sound.
Under the bright beam, I could see that it was a snake all coiled up with its head sticking out towards my cat who had been trying to pat it.
Swiftly, he picked up the other bamboo pole. I went forward to push Spidey out of harm’s way but he urgently shouted that I should go back up the stairs and hold the light.
He used the pole to sweep Spidey out of the way and immediately pivoted to land heavy blows on the hissing coil. It was a viper and it uncoiled and thrashed around violently as he hit it.
My heart was beating so hard as I grabbed Spidey. She was trembling with fear and had realized by now that she should stay away from this creature.
The hissing finally stopped and my grandfather prodded it to make sure he had neutralized the threat. I watched him examining it to make sure that it could not do any harm.
After a while, he picked it up with the pole and threw it over the low wall into the coconut grove, which was probably where it had come from.
Evening walks in the fields
My grandfather had retired from his position as the Director of an agricultural institute and he bought a few acres of land. Both my grandparents enjoyed planting trees and crops all over the land. We even had some livestock. Chickens, a rather clueless goat, rabbits and other animals.
One year, my grandfather decided to grow lentils on a few acres. The tractors had dug up the soil earlier that day before the sowing.
I was walking around with a basket picking up pretty stones for my crafts projects. I found a shiny white stone with specks of silver and thin red veins running through it.
Happy with the find, I climbed up on to a large granite rock beside my grandfather who was sitting there overseeing the field work when I saw a strange sight.
The heroic warrior of the fields
It was a little grey animal which looked rather like an oversized squirrel. It had a bushy tail and I recalled that I had seen a similar one a couple of years ago at a mango grove.
It was a mongoose with a furry tail. But something was unusual about the scene. The mongoose had thick coils of something wrapped around its midsection. The mongoose was fiercely fighting the creature.
His movements were so quick. As I watched, my grandfather followed the direction of my gaze.
“That’s a cobra,” he said as he recognized the colors and pattern of the snake that had coiled itself around the mongoose.
People in that region usually killed cobras by breaking their spines because it was difficult to hit the flexible head once it opened its hood and began its creepy dance.
I felt a stab of fear for the mongoose. He was so small, cute and furry. How could he handle that predatory cobra?
But I soon saw that the little warrior was winning the battle. He was so bold. So fierce. So quick.
Within minutes, he had established a decisive victory. He bit the creature through the neck and paralyzed it.
The mongoose then grabbed the dead cobra in his mouth and carried it off victoriously.
My grandfather informed me that mongooses hunt snakes when he saw my surprise.
I watched with awe and admiration as the tiny furry victor dragged his evening meal away to his burrow. He was keeping the world safe in his own way.
What a brave little hero he was!
I’ve always admired mongooses ever since that day when I witnessed the battle.
In the city too…
I thought those encounters would end when I left the small town for a crowded city for work, but that was not to be.
Many years later, I was living in a crowded big city while working for IBM. It was a rental on the ground floor and my cat Biscuitus (who was a kitten then) seemed to be engrossed with something under the bookshelf.
I was lying on the sofa beside the bookshelf reading but my cat’s behavior warned me that something was not right. He was trembling but wouldn’t move from that spot. He was clearly afraid. I pulled him away, knelt by the bookshelf and shone a flashlight under it.
All I could see was something that looked like a slanted stick and a sound of something hitting the wooden bookshelf.
It had to be a snake but… how could there be one in a busy neighborhood like this? Didn’t they belong in the jungle?
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have my grandfather’s skills and prowess with wildlife.
Fortunately, there were some construction workers on the street outside and they came in, and used a broom to drag it out. The uninvited visitor turned out to be a small juvenile cobra with its hood flared. I held Biscuitus and watched with horror as the men pushed it into a paper bag and carried it away.
Biscuitus had warned me of the danger and saved us both.
It was a shocking moment to realize that venomous snakes could prowl even busy residential streets. There was a small patch of vegetation with a coconut tree in the front yard of a house next door and the landlady said that she had seen a cobra in it.
Strangely enough, she was superstitious about the whole thing. Apparently, she believed that it was good luck to be visited by a cobra. And then another neighbor joined in and told a tall tale about how she had seen two cobras mating by moonlight and how it had frightened her. She had a strong belief that she would be struck with blindness for watching a scene like that.
I wanted to tell her that her eyesight was working perfectly well. And also, that it was impossible to witness a scene like that under dim moonlight.
And that I’d rather have a mongoose visit me. After all, doesn’t a mongoose make more practical sense because it can kill snakes that are dangerous to humans?
Would the landlady have welcomed the snake into her living room if the construction workers had taken it to her?
What is lucky about a dangerous snake coming into your safe space? I couldn't see the logic in their statements.
But they actually believed in myths like that because they had grown up rooted in superstition. Maybe it was a comforting coping mechanism to consider it good luck instead of acknowledging how close they had come to death. They chose to deny the real danger to human lives and compromise human safety.
Some older and middle aged people and especially housewives in that place had never completed a high school education. Their upbringing had focused only on the main goal for girls from rural families - enter into an arranged marriage, keep the house, cook and clean for your family. Their social lives had revolved only around their immediate circles of people with similar ways of thinking.
They had no scientific knowledge about snakes. They had no exposure to any other way of life than the one they had been taught by their families since childhood. They had no proper education or even public safety awareness. And they repeated these rural beliefs.
So, I kept my thoughts to myself. My grandfather with his actual lifetime experience around such things would have been quite amused at their ways of viewing the world.
But snakes are a hazard for people and their numbers multiply when there are no restraints. Natural biological predators like the mongoose keep people safe. But unfortunately, people hunt that brave little warrior for its fur, to make things like paint brushes.
I was thinking of the story of Rikki Tikki Tavi by Rudyard Kipling.
I love this story.
This is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed, through the bath-rooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment. Darzee, the Tailorbird, helped him, and Chuchundra, the muskrat, who never comes out into the middle of the floor, but always creeps round by the wall, gave him advice, but Rikki-tikki did the real fighting.
He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and his habits. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink. He could scratch himself anywhere he pleased with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use. He could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bottle brush, and his war cry as he scuttled through the long grass was: “Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!”
Awww, I’d love a Rikki Tikki Tavi…
Realistically, in 2026, one cannot keep mongoose as pets because poachers still hunt them for their fur (which is used to make paintbrushes). And so, the government banned anyone from keeping mongooses. Also, they aren’t easy pets like cats or dogs.
But I do wish people would show more common sense and kindness and actively refuse to buy anything made with mongoose fur like paint brushes or shaving brushes.
It saddened me to see YouTube channels for artists promoting mongoose hair brushes. Encouraging that market makes the world a more cruel and dangerous place. Mongooses are captured and brutally killed for their fur. For artists, do check that the label on your brushes says "100% synthetic".
If you buy a brush that says "pure mongoose" or "natural mongoose," you will be responsible for creating the market that kills these brave little heroes of the world.
Guinea fowl alarms
Ever since those snake encounters, I don’t even like to recall it. Even now, I don’t really want to dig up these old stories out of the vault of icky memories. It comes with a sense of innate repulsion. But I’ve been thinking about this topic recently because we’re planning to move to a small town and a residential neighborhood that has had several snake sightings.
I’ve been researching methods to minimize the danger of any ever coming into my house. The best advice seems to be to create a barricade that they cannot scale like smooth compound walls, mesh fencing and gates with no space for them to crawl through.
I’ve also considered the idea of keeping a flock of guinea fowl in the yard. They operate as a kind of alarm system and set up a loud squawking if they see a snake and that alerts people. They also clean up the yard by eating all the insects that snakes typically come after.
But apparently, they are effective only in the daytime and must be protected at night as they cannot see. And I have never done any kind of poultry rearing and that would be something new to learn. It could be fun.
I wonder what Biscuitus would think if we did keep guinea fowl in the area around the house. He would probably enjoy the mental stimulation and company of some strange new feathered friends.
And back to the writing life…
The takeaway from all these old stories?
Reliving and writing them out is a good exercise because the past turns into an accessible reservoir of old memories and provides inspiration to create new scenes.
The symbolism found in these encounters can translate well into world-building for fiction. For instance, the contrast between the fragrant, flowered courtyard and the venomous, hissing snake is rife with meaning.
Animal archetypes also serve exceptionally well to craft realistic human characters.
Perhaps the worst characteristics in humans are the need to control, manipulate or dominate others. Some do this by deliberate posturing.
They go the extra mile to convince others that they are good, powerful and on the right side. But the excessive effort to create and maintain this image reveals that they recognize its usefulness as camouflage. And where’s there a carefully maintained external front, there’s usually a much less benign motive hiding behind it.
Politicians do it all the time. Religious leaders do it. Even family members do it. They are actively practicing that very reptilian coldness and manipulation of distorting the reality of their victims to suit their agenda.
But no matter how much a person shows off a "good" public image, it’s the actions that speak louder than words.
The ones whose actions are truly trustworthy don’t put so much energy into this show.
Does this match the nature of cold blooded reptiles and their deliberate or stealthy methods of manipulation much like the cobra’s creepy hood movements? Do they lie and manipulate with the flat, expressionless gaze of reptiles?
A literary villain who carefully performs goodness as a form of predatory camouflage is far more sinister than an overt one.
Translating these exact traits into fiction makes for chilling villains, gullible innocents and believable characters.
The natural world also has its heroes.
What about the characteristics of the heroic mongoose?
It’s a small but fast and intelligent animal with its natural instinct to disarm the cobra. The mongoose ignores the dancing, attention-grabbing head but bites it on the neck to instantly paralyze it.
Narcissistic or manipulative people love creating a creepy dance of drama, gaslighting, and confusion to keep their victims off-balance.
The mongoose-inspired character doesn’t engage with the distraction. The mongoose doesn’t care for the cobra’s theatrics, deliberate posturing and attempts to distract it. It sees right through the drama, identifies the core truth hiding behind it and goes straight for the spine to utterly disarm the manipulator's power.
And how about the characteristics of a cat?
Cats have the innate ability to be independent, curious, and observant yet detached. Cats are also quite selective. They offer their affection only to those who have earned their trust unlike dogs that are more openly affectionate with an “innocent until proven guilty” generosity.
Are cats more heroic or wise in that aspect? Are dogs more likely to be easily victimized?
Do most people go through this dog to cat progression in a story or even in real life? From trusting innocence, to betrayal and learning wisdom.
Sometimes, staying indifferent, distant and detached from the drama of a toxic person is the ultimate way to strip the power of the manipulators who seek to control or dominate others.
Drawing on these traits and characteristics of animals can colorfully illustrate fictional characters.
I also plan to repurpose some of these old memories and change the context and setting for my stories.
It was easy to write these 4000+ words today because it came from memories of my real life.
