Dead pan

Something unreal and theatrical, about a cobra visiting at 12 on MahaShivratri night.

The last time it was a viper, and the raat-rani creeper had to go; for long I’d laughed it off as an old wives’ tale – this belief that sserpents ssavour ssweet sscents.

This time, the giant paan creeper would have to go. There’s a belief that its hood-like leaves attract the cobra. This time I stopped laughing and called for the axe.

Here’s the thing about this vigorous vine. It grows out of nowhere. I have paved over it once, but that seemed to only encourage it more.

From a crack in the cement, it burgeons, it’s massive stalk snaking up to the top floor, giving out leaves that could feed a hundred betel addicts for a hundred days.

It houses two nests in the winter, and whose they were was a closely guarded secret between it and its tenants. If you stood below it, you’d think it was the leaves that were twittering.

But now it would simply have to be silenced. Hosting birds is one thing, enticing snakes is quite another, I said firmly to it without looking it in the eye.

Every night it haunted me now, as I imagined it sending out come-hither vibes to naags and nagins. It peeped into my bathroom windows, downstairs, upstairs.

It has always done that – what I thought of before as shy peeping. Now it seems like some triffid growth, looking in only to assess what it should grab at next, in its upward march.

Random men examined it and promised to return with an axe and a ladder and bags to take away the betel leaves in. Nobody came.

It’s not easy to pull out something that grasps at your house firmly for 30 feet up with its many tentacles. So I did the thing that comes easiest for someone short and unable to wield an axe.

I simply sawed away across its hard stalk, at a height that was convenient to me. Which would be at about 4 feet or thereabouts.

Nothing happened. Only I knew that there had been a serious severance; that I had gone for its jugular.

In a couple of hours, the shiny green heart leaves began to look tired.

At night, the leaves that peeped in now hung away, and I wondered if they were whispering, parched, ‘paani-paani’; I shut the window tight.

For a day and more I didn’t go to the back of the house. It’s ok, I said, cold and hard, remembering that I was responsible for other living beings too, who didn’t need to confront any more asps and adders.

This afternoon though, I heard a rattle, just outside my kitchen window. No… not another one, I said out loud to no one.

It wasn’t an ominous rattle though. It was the hot summer breeze running through a wall of dead betel leaves that can no more entice anyone, human or otherwise.

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