Sorry for this belated posting. Thanx a million for noticing and plodding me to get back. The thing is I get word-weary. Have had too much of words from childhood to a career that grew on the strength of my words. That’s one of the reasons I simply upped and quit a full-time job, and don’t feel inclined to do a column. Imagine churning out 1,000 words week after week not because you have something to say but jabardasti.
Tragically though, I seem to be never able to get out of wordsmithing. Whatever I do revolves around words, words and more words. Sigh! So, I periodically lay off the blog every few days for a breather…now, I feel like new!
Last week, we had an unlikely visitor. It lay coiled like a black rubber band underneath a table in the unused bedroom. I had already turned the entire house upside down looking for him (or was it her? We’ll settle for `him’ in deference to our male-dominated world, as we don’t know) and was acting on the hubby’s advice of sprinkling phenyl (yes, phenyl) all over to get him out of hiding.
I was dousing the bedroom in this super-smelly liquid, spraying near the bedframe when I spotted him. He was tiny and thin. He had spread himself along the skirting and lay there Zen-like. He would have lain there forever, motionless, had I not summoned people for a look. Once he realized he had company, he stirred, very gently, and gave us the much-needed confirmation that it was indeed him.
All hell then broke loose as we screamed, shrieked and scrambled to the phone, and the security van arrived with three men holding a huge flashlight and hockey sticks. They tried to prise him out of his comfort zone. While they managed to coax him onto the hockey sticks, he refused to make the logical progession into a carry bag. Not even when they sprayed phenyl on him. Instead, he simply bared his fangs. The tiny fellow gave a dekko of his small but distinct hood and everybody took a co-ordinated step back.
It was indeed a baby cobra, the security guys confirmed, that had crawled through the non-existent crack in my main door and slithered purposefully to the farthest corner of our reasonably big house. We would never have known, had not our neighbours been around to witness this housebreak. An earlier inspection by the security guys had yielded nothing as he was virtually invisible to spot.
I shudder to think what would have happened the next morning when my maid swept under the table thinking it’s a long earthworm, or even a rubber band?
But then, such is life. You never know how much of it is left even as we spend every moment asking for more.