Text 1: The woman who catches cobras, by Dev Malhotra

An original contemporary online feature.

Meera Joshi’s phone rings, on average, eleven times a day during the monsoon. When the rains flood the fields and drains around the city, the snakes move into the dry places, and the dry places are people’s homes. Meera is a volunteer snake rescuer. She has caught more than four thousand snakes, and been bitten, she says cheerfully, only twice, ‘both times by snakes that were not dangerous, and both times my own fault’.

The call I go with her to comes from a ground-floor flat. A spectacled cobra has been seen going under the kitchen cupboards, and the family of six are waiting on the landing, the grandmother still holding a wooden spoon. Meera goes in with a hook, a long pair of tongs and a cloth bag. I am allowed to stand in the doorway, which is closer than I want to be.

For ten minutes nothing happens. Meera lies on the kitchen floor shining a torch into the gap beneath the cupboards, talking quietly to herself, or possibly to the snake. Then she gently lifts out a section of kickboard, and there it is: a thick, dark coil the colour of wet slate. It rises at once, a third of its body lifted off the floor, and spreads its hood. The marks on the back of the hood really do look like a pair of spectacles. It hisses, a sound like air escaping from a tyre, and my legs decide on their own to take a step backwards.

Meera does not step backwards. She works with her rescue equipment, keeping clear of the cobra’s head, and in a movement so smooth I almost miss it secures the animal in its transport container. It is over in under a minute.

Outside, the grandmother wants to know if the snake will be killed. ‘No,’ says Meera. ‘It was only looking for somewhere dry, like you.’ That evening she releases it in scrubland at an approved release site away from homes. It pours out of the bag and away into the grass, and she watches it go with something very like affection.

Text 2: A visitor in the night, by Louisa Farrant

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1867, an Englishwoman living in a bungalow in India writes to her sister.

My dearest Sophy,

I promised that I would not frighten you with tales of this country, but I must tell you what happened on Tuesday night, for I have thought of nothing else since.

It was very hot, and I had risen at about two in the morning to fetch water for little Osric, who was restless. I took up the lamp and went into the bathing room, and there, upon the floor, not two yards from my bare feet, lay a cobra. I had seen them before in the baskets of the snake men in the bazaar, but never one at liberty, and I can tell you, Sophy, they are a very different thing when there is no basket.

It raised itself up as I looked at it, higher and higher, until its head was level with my knee, and spread out its hood, and swayed a little from side to side as if it were considering me. I could not move. I could not even scream. I stood holding the lamp, with the light shaking on the walls, for what seemed an age, while it looked at me with its small, bright, unwinking eyes, and I thought of nothing in the world except that Osric was asleep in the next room with the door open.

At length I found my voice and called for Ram Das, our bearer, who came running with a stout bamboo. He bade me stand quite still, and I did, and with one blow he struck it across the back and a second across the head, and it was dead. It measured, when Edward came to look at it in the morning, very nearly five feet.

The servants say that a cobra’s mate will come looking for it. Edward laughs at this. I do not. I have had the bathing room door closed up and I now carry a lamp into every room in the house before I enter it, and I sleep, when I sleep at all, very badly.

Your loving sister, Louisa

Both of these texts are about finding venomous snakes inside people’s homes.

Compare:

• what the writers say about their encounters with the snakes
• how the writers present these encounters to readers

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