Snakes and Fishes
The evening shadows extended and the bonfire surged and leaped towards the sky. Sachi, Preeti and the other children came away from their games and settled around the fire with the neighborhood mothers, and the mothers, sipping tea and scolding the children, began their tales of horrors and loves, scandals and myths, religions and ancestors, fishes and snakes.
Thapa aunty told them about her cousin who had given birth to twins – one baby a boy, the other a she-cobra. “The girl was really not all that beautiful when she was born, very dark skinned, I tell you, but you should have seen her later. They put her body in silk nets, decorated it with bangles and bracelets, and they pierced her nose so that when she went around the house the ring on her nose went chhamchhamchham and was so charming.” One day the she-cobra, hip with gold and jingling like a river, was heading towards the fields where her brothers and her father farmed. She had multiple tiffin boxes of vegetables and bread perfectly balanced upon her head. It was a moment when the world was chaste and stainless, uninvolved with guilt. But then a stranger sprang out from behind a tree and murdered the snake. “Stabbed her, can you believe that? Stabbed her!” He took all the gold, the bracelets and the rings, and left the corpse, bloodied and mutilated, upon the road. “For a while nothing happened,” said Thapa aunty, “but later that villain came down with leprosy and polio. I tell you, no messing with cobras.”
Rajiv’s mother had once left Rajiv on the terrace (“he was so small you know, born only in seven months”) and when she returned with a bowl of mustard oil for Rajiv’s massage there was a cobra at his head, hood spread majestically, protecting the little child. “Ever since then I have known that this boy is special but so far I have seen nothing special. He even failed his spelling dictation test. Who fails their spelling dictation test, you tell me?” And she shook her head.
The mothers shook their heads. The children laughed. Rajiv was to become the goat of all their jokes (“so small, you know”) for almost a season.
Edna’s mother was pleating her saree one day, “many years ago, when I was newlywed,” and just when she flicked her fingers to turn the pleats she felt something cold and slick, something muscular and long, move along the fabric’s length. She shrieked and the chiffon slipped off her hands and fell upon the floor. “And there it was girls! A cobra! A cobra tangled in my saree! I could have been dead, girls, can you imagine!” She shook her saree now, as though the cobra was still jumbled in it.
Asha aunty spoke about what happened the first night she slept in her married house. It was four in the morning and the women were already waking up. “Look at this,” she said. “Four in the morning, dark and warm, and waking up.” She was awake too, counting the stars through the cracks on the roof. It was March and much too early for roof-repair. Roof-repair would start in May. “ The entire roof could come apart and the sky itself could fall upon the bed but no repair before May.” Those were the rules of the village. Asha was tired with the day long journey from her village to her mister’s but she could not sleep. “I was ready to die but was I allowed to sleep? No. All my mothers-in-law, and there were half a dozen of those, were clinging and clanging their bangles so I would know it was time to rise and shine.” And just when Asha was about to get off the bed she heard her mothers-in-law scream into the dark morning. “Look at this, seven mad women screaming. Surpo! Surpo! Snake! Snake! I froze. Look at this, my ducks, my first night here and women screaming snake!” The men were up at once. Asha’s mister sprang out of the bed, “of course, he was sleeping with me,” and in an instance had a stick with him. “I was married a day and there was my mister, ready to get killed.” Then Asha heard the snake on the roof, right above her, moving in and out of the thatch. Her mister ran back and forth in the room, following the snake overhead. At one point they saw its tail. It fell through a small opening and hung there like a little sickle. Then it went away. “My mister and other men chased it off to the fields but they could not kill it. It was so dark they could not see. That is why I say, no use waking up so early, is there?”
Preeti sat with Sachi and was never quite sure if the aunties were joking or were serious. She had her own tales too, of garden snakes that struggled vainly to cross the garden walls and of snakes the boys trapped and caught in polythene bags, but her tales were no match to what the mothers spoke of. She did not know a single snake that talked and danced and went jingling down the ringroad or was chased into the fields by a mister. She looked around nervously, wondering if the dark thing she had just seen gliding away was the shadow of the fire or a black cobra taking its rounds.
Kanchi aunty told more snake stories. Kanchi aunty was not really an aunty. She was more than seventy but because she was not ever married everybody called her aunty and not grandmother. “There are snakes,” Kanchi aunty said, “larger than the earth, blacker than the night, fiercer than rivers. These protect the land and the skies. Lord Vishnu sleeps upon the largest of these. Lord Shiva wears the curliest one around his neck. These snakes protect the gods. They protect cities and they protect nations. They protect those that worship them and they swivel out of the earth to slay those who will not pray and will not bow and will not believe. They kill those who walk in the dark, fearless and full of mockery. There is no place for mockery in the land of snakes. In the land of snakes people put up pictures of the serpent deity upon their doors and offer to it bowls of milk and ghee and rice. In the land of snakes everything is a bargain.”
Preeti had seen more snakes in Ganesh Basti than she had toads and frogs. When she saw a toad, mostly in the monsoons, she immediately thought of the snake, hiding under the water logged fields, ready to open its oval, resilient mouth and swallow whole the toad. She worried about the toad, imagined it suffocating in the tight pocket of the snake-mouth. She thought of the amphibian, its bones cracking and mangling under the snake’s teeth. She imagined it blind inside the belly, hardly able to breathe with pain, alive for many hours, the snake stomach wringing its defeat like a piece of wet cloth, and juices – acidic and pinpointed – piercing the poor toad, hurting it some more for many many days. Preeti hated the snake and she feared it. She felt helpless before its secretive omnipresence. And yet the snake, glowing with stripes and crosses, exhilarated her and she imagined it under the crops, beautiful and easy, swimming like lightning in the murky waters.
Preeti moved closer to Sachi and almost climbed on to her lap. She was afraid of the bare ground. Kanchi aunty was telling them about snakes that were born before the universe. She said the universe sat upon a snake’s head and when the snake shook the universe trembled and quaked. The snake was born before the earth and at the birth of the earth the snake’s body was mixed with dirt so one could not tell where land began and where the snake ended.
Kanchi aunty told them about Kathmandu. “The snake,” said Kanchi aunty, “lived in Kathmandu before people did.” Once upon a time all of Kathmandu was a large lake, a bowl with walls of mountains, and snakes lived in this lake “like noodles in soup”. Then came the demi-gods, those who were not powerful enough to tame the serpents. They slashed the mountains and cut a gorge and drained out the water from the lake. The valley evolved then, fresh and soft, filled with dreams and hardships, and ready to welcome people within it. But the valley belonged too much to the snakes and some of them never left. “They only burrowed deep into the city.”
“Under our feet,” said Kanchi aunty, “is a colony of snakes, at once benevolent and filled with poison. Your job is to keep them happy. You must pray to them on Naag Panchami. You must put their pictures over your main door and stick them to place with cowdung, milk, and vermilion. You must give it flowers, milk, yogurt, and a small plate of rice.”
“The snake,” said Kanchi aunty, “is a cold animal. It takes centuries to warm up to strangers. If you are an outsider it is best to stay away from the snakes.”
Somewhere during the stories, between Kanchi aunty’s shivering tales of cities and galaxies and the few motherly protests against them (“really Kanchi aunty, all superstitions. You are frightening the children”), the sky turned from soft blue to gold. The fire, so far brushing the listeners’ faces with warmth and shades of green and orange, grew smaller and the wind caught up and chilled the skins and the mothers and the children began to leave, one by one.
Ma came exactly at seven to take her home and Preeti retold the stories, speaking quickly to her mother and omitting the boring ones. Ma held Preeti’s hand as they walked home and she told Preeti to be careful, to watch for the hard stubbles of rice stalks, to watch out for the crevices and furrows of the field, to jump neatly over the numerous cakes of dung. Ma told Preeti never to curve her palms to the shape of a cobra’s hood. “It attracts the cobra,” she said. “The cobra is always looking for a mate. And don’t whistle after dark. Better never to whistle at all, it is hooliganism and nothing else. But never whistle at night, the snakes come out then and they might mistake your shrillness for the shrillness of a beena. And don’t ever kill a cobra. They are always in a pair, even if one is away hunting and all. The survivor will click your snap and save your photo in her eye and she will make it her mission to find you and bite you to death, even if it takes her an eternity. A vengeful lot they are.” And then she started to laugh. Preeti looked at her mother, amazed at her lightheartedness. “Were you scared?” Ma asked, laughing. Preeti nodded. “You are a donkey, my sack of sugar. These are all fancy tales and nothing else. Have you seen a snake with nose-rings and silk socks on? Tell? Have you even ever seen a real cobra? Anything people will say. Anything.”
That night Preeti curved her palms and wriggled the shadow of the cobra hood upon the wall. The image swished and swirled and leapt at her, flicking its wire tongue, but cobra – black and moist – never came for the rendezvous.
She went to the terrace and when the sky – boundless and gleaming with stars – filled her blood with a song, she began to first hum then to whistle the tune and in the middle of the whistle she remembered the cobra, now out looking for a mate, and stopped. Then she started again, afraid of my adventures and yet too curious to let go. She whistled tentatively, with her eyes everywhere, ready to run, waiting for her tryst with the deity.
In her dreams she saw snakes mounted upon one another like wrestlers. They fell and slithered upon the ground in big heaps. They turned into stockings and strung from trees. They plopped, noodle-like, upon the floor. The next moment she was walking on a thin wall, a poised tightrope walker. If a snake tried to climb her wall she took out a knife and chopped the nosy, long, juicy cucumber into perfect fifty paisa coins and ate them with salt and pepper. They were delicious, like fish, these snakes.
Smriti Ravindra's stories have appeared in Invision, Of Nepalese Clay, and New Voices of Nepal. Her forthcoming works will appear in The Women of Nepal and Writers at Sea. She writes a monthly column for Nepal's largest selling newspaper The Kathmandu Post, and her book of non-fiction named The Bad Boy's Guide to the Good Indian Girl will be published by Zubaan Publication, New Delhi, in 2011. She is a Fulbright scholar in the US, currently pursuing an MFA at North Carolina State University.
The evening shadows extended and the bonfire surged and leaped towards the sky. Sachi, Preeti and the other children came away from their games and settled around the fire with the neighborhood mothers, and the mothers, sipping tea and scolding the children, began their tales of horrors and loves, scandals and myths, religions and ancestors, fishes and snakes.
Thapa aunty told them about her cousin who had given birth to twins – one baby a boy, the other a she-cobra. “The girl was really not all that beautiful when she was born, very dark skinned, I tell you, but you should have seen her later. They put her body in silk nets, decorated it with bangles and bracelets, and they pierced her nose so that when she went around the house the ring on her nose went chhamchhamchham and was so charming.” One day the she-cobra, hip with gold and jingling like a river, was heading towards the fields where her brothers and her father farmed. She had multiple tiffin boxes of vegetables and bread perfectly balanced upon her head. It was a moment when the world was chaste and stainless, uninvolved with guilt. But then a stranger sprang out from behind a tree and murdered the snake. “Stabbed her, can you believe that? Stabbed her!” He took all the gold, the bracelets and the rings, and left the corpse, bloodied and mutilated, upon the road. “For a while nothing happened,” said Thapa aunty, “but later that villain came down with leprosy and polio. I tell you, no messing with cobras.”
Rajiv’s mother had once left Rajiv on the terrace (“he was so small you know, born only in seven months”) and when she returned with a bowl of mustard oil for Rajiv’s massage there was a cobra at his head, hood spread majestically, protecting the little child. “Ever since then I have known that this boy is special but so far I have seen nothing special. He even failed his spelling dictation test. Who fails their spelling dictation test, you tell me?” And she shook her head.
The mothers shook their heads. The children laughed. Rajiv was to become the goat of all their jokes (“so small, you know”) for almost a season.
Edna’s mother was pleating her saree one day, “many years ago, when I was newlywed,” and just when she flicked her fingers to turn the pleats she felt something cold and slick, something muscular and long, move along the fabric’s length. She shrieked and the chiffon slipped off her hands and fell upon the floor. “And there it was girls! A cobra! A cobra tangled in my saree! I could have been dead, girls, can you imagine!” She shook her saree now, as though the cobra was still jumbled in it.
Asha aunty spoke about what happened the first night she slept in her married house. It was four in the morning and the women were already waking up. “Look at this,” she said. “Four in the morning, dark and warm, and waking up.” She was awake too, counting the stars through the cracks on the roof. It was March and much too early for roof-repair. Roof-repair would start in May. “ The entire roof could come apart and the sky itself could fall upon the bed but no repair before May.” Those were the rules of the village. Asha was tired with the day long journey from her village to her mister’s but she could not sleep. “I was ready to die but was I allowed to sleep? No. All my mothers-in-law, and there were half a dozen of those, were clinging and clanging their bangles so I would know it was time to rise and shine.” And just when Asha was about to get off the bed she heard her mothers-in-law scream into the dark morning. “Look at this, seven mad women screaming. Surpo! Surpo! Snake! Snake! I froze. Look at this, my ducks, my first night here and women screaming snake!” The men were up at once. Asha’s mister sprang out of the bed, “of course, he was sleeping with me,” and in an instance had a stick with him. “I was married a day and there was my mister, ready to get killed.” Then Asha heard the snake on the roof, right above her, moving in and out of the thatch. Her mister ran back and forth in the room, following the snake overhead. At one point they saw its tail. It fell through a small opening and hung there like a little sickle. Then it went away. “My mister and other men chased it off to the fields but they could not kill it. It was so dark they could not see. That is why I say, no use waking up so early, is there?”
Preeti sat with Sachi and was never quite sure if the aunties were joking or were serious. She had her own tales too, of garden snakes that struggled vainly to cross the garden walls and of snakes the boys trapped and caught in polythene bags, but her tales were no match to what the mothers spoke of. She did not know a single snake that talked and danced and went jingling down the ringroad or was chased into the fields by a mister. She looked around nervously, wondering if the dark thing she had just seen gliding away was the shadow of the fire or a black cobra taking its rounds.
Kanchi aunty told more snake stories. Kanchi aunty was not really an aunty. She was more than seventy but because she was not ever married everybody called her aunty and not grandmother. “There are snakes,” Kanchi aunty said, “larger than the earth, blacker than the night, fiercer than rivers. These protect the land and the skies. Lord Vishnu sleeps upon the largest of these. Lord Shiva wears the curliest one around his neck. These snakes protect the gods. They protect cities and they protect nations. They protect those that worship them and they swivel out of the earth to slay those who will not pray and will not bow and will not believe. They kill those who walk in the dark, fearless and full of mockery. There is no place for mockery in the land of snakes. In the land of snakes people put up pictures of the serpent deity upon their doors and offer to it bowls of milk and ghee and rice. In the land of snakes everything is a bargain.”
Preeti had seen more snakes in Ganesh Basti than she had toads and frogs. When she saw a toad, mostly in the monsoons, she immediately thought of the snake, hiding under the water logged fields, ready to open its oval, resilient mouth and swallow whole the toad. She worried about the toad, imagined it suffocating in the tight pocket of the snake-mouth. She thought of the amphibian, its bones cracking and mangling under the snake’s teeth. She imagined it blind inside the belly, hardly able to breathe with pain, alive for many hours, the snake stomach wringing its defeat like a piece of wet cloth, and juices – acidic and pinpointed – piercing the poor toad, hurting it some more for many many days. Preeti hated the snake and she feared it. She felt helpless before its secretive omnipresence. And yet the snake, glowing with stripes and crosses, exhilarated her and she imagined it under the crops, beautiful and easy, swimming like lightning in the murky waters.
Preeti moved closer to Sachi and almost climbed on to her lap. She was afraid of the bare ground. Kanchi aunty was telling them about snakes that were born before the universe. She said the universe sat upon a snake’s head and when the snake shook the universe trembled and quaked. The snake was born before the earth and at the birth of the earth the snake’s body was mixed with dirt so one could not tell where land began and where the snake ended.
Kanchi aunty told them about Kathmandu. “The snake,” said Kanchi aunty, “lived in Kathmandu before people did.” Once upon a time all of Kathmandu was a large lake, a bowl with walls of mountains, and snakes lived in this lake “like noodles in soup”. Then came the demi-gods, those who were not powerful enough to tame the serpents. They slashed the mountains and cut a gorge and drained out the water from the lake. The valley evolved then, fresh and soft, filled with dreams and hardships, and ready to welcome people within it. But the valley belonged too much to the snakes and some of them never left. “They only burrowed deep into the city.”
“Under our feet,” said Kanchi aunty, “is a colony of snakes, at once benevolent and filled with poison. Your job is to keep them happy. You must pray to them on Naag Panchami. You must put their pictures over your main door and stick them to place with cowdung, milk, and vermilion. You must give it flowers, milk, yogurt, and a small plate of rice.”
“The snake,” said Kanchi aunty, “is a cold animal. It takes centuries to warm up to strangers. If you are an outsider it is best to stay away from the snakes.”
Somewhere during the stories, between Kanchi aunty’s shivering tales of cities and galaxies and the few motherly protests against them (“really Kanchi aunty, all superstitions. You are frightening the children”), the sky turned from soft blue to gold. The fire, so far brushing the listeners’ faces with warmth and shades of green and orange, grew smaller and the wind caught up and chilled the skins and the mothers and the children began to leave, one by one.
Ma came exactly at seven to take her home and Preeti retold the stories, speaking quickly to her mother and omitting the boring ones. Ma held Preeti’s hand as they walked home and she told Preeti to be careful, to watch for the hard stubbles of rice stalks, to watch out for the crevices and furrows of the field, to jump neatly over the numerous cakes of dung. Ma told Preeti never to curve her palms to the shape of a cobra’s hood. “It attracts the cobra,” she said. “The cobra is always looking for a mate. And don’t whistle after dark. Better never to whistle at all, it is hooliganism and nothing else. But never whistle at night, the snakes come out then and they might mistake your shrillness for the shrillness of a beena. And don’t ever kill a cobra. They are always in a pair, even if one is away hunting and all. The survivor will click your snap and save your photo in her eye and she will make it her mission to find you and bite you to death, even if it takes her an eternity. A vengeful lot they are.” And then she started to laugh. Preeti looked at her mother, amazed at her lightheartedness. “Were you scared?” Ma asked, laughing. Preeti nodded. “You are a donkey, my sack of sugar. These are all fancy tales and nothing else. Have you seen a snake with nose-rings and silk socks on? Tell? Have you even ever seen a real cobra? Anything people will say. Anything.”
That night Preeti curved her palms and wriggled the shadow of the cobra hood upon the wall. The image swished and swirled and leapt at her, flicking its wire tongue, but cobra – black and moist – never came for the rendezvous.
She went to the terrace and when the sky – boundless and gleaming with stars – filled her blood with a song, she began to first hum then to whistle the tune and in the middle of the whistle she remembered the cobra, now out looking for a mate, and stopped. Then she started again, afraid of my adventures and yet too curious to let go. She whistled tentatively, with her eyes everywhere, ready to run, waiting for her tryst with the deity.
In her dreams she saw snakes mounted upon one another like wrestlers. They fell and slithered upon the ground in big heaps. They turned into stockings and strung from trees. They plopped, noodle-like, upon the floor. The next moment she was walking on a thin wall, a poised tightrope walker. If a snake tried to climb her wall she took out a knife and chopped the nosy, long, juicy cucumber into perfect fifty paisa coins and ate them with salt and pepper. They were delicious, like fish, these snakes.
Smriti Ravindra's stories have appeared in Invision, Of Nepalese Clay, and New Voices of Nepal. Her forthcoming works will appear in The Women of Nepal and Writers at Sea. She writes a monthly column for Nepal's largest selling newspaper The Kathmandu Post, and her book of non-fiction named The Bad Boy's Guide to the Good Indian Girl will be published by Zubaan Publication, New Delhi, in 2011. She is a Fulbright scholar in the US, currently pursuing an MFA at North Carolina State University.
