Night Train to Jamalpur(30)

‘A king cobra?’

‘The king yes,’ said Deo. ‘Very long, much poisonous.’

The kid, dancing in the dust a hundred yards off, was laughing fit to bust. The king cobra was in a hole in the ground in a patch of grass a hundred yards from the red house. It wanted to hide, you could tell that, but it couldn’t hide because it was too long to fit into the hole, and its back end stuck out. As the kid laughed and pointed, the snake kept wriggling to try and fit a little deeper in. It turned out that one of the snake men – not the governor – had some English because, indicating the snake, he said, ‘He is great rascal!’ but it seemed to me the snake was perfectly blameless so far. As for the top man, he was crouching down and rubbing his hands in the ash. I realised I had seen something similar done before . . . prior to a performance . . . the strongman at the circus as he prepared to lift the heaviest dumbbell. The top snake man approached the snake, and his English-speaking comrade stood behind, holding a stick that I now saw was forked. He saw me eyeing it. ‘Hold neck,’ he said, grinning and gesturing with the stick. He seemed confident that things would go according to plan.

The snake man was bending down over the twitching tail of the king cobra. Then he began pulling, hauling it in like a bloody sailor on a hawser, and with six feet of snake out of the hole, he was still hauling. At twelve feet he was still hauling, and I had dropped back from the snake gang, so that I was standing twenty yards away from them and contemplating a dash to safety. The English-speaking one, with stick poised, turned to me and called, ‘You are afraid of the worm of the earth?’

‘Yes,’ I called back, and then the head came out, and he leaped at it with his stick.

The boy was jumping about, shouting ‘Wah-wah!’ The snake’s mouth was wide open, showing the pink interior that looked like I don’t know what. Behind the trapped base of the head, the hood swelled out and shrank back repeatedly, like a pair of bellows. The snake was growling like a bloody dog. The snake man had grabbed its neck, and was bending low over its head, speaking to it. The one who spoke English said, ‘He will soon be our friend.’

The governor had lifted the snake by its neck, and the others got hold of the rest of it, and they carried it at shoulder height, like men carrying a roll of carpet, towards the trainlighting office. I followed at a distance. Deo Rana, who liked snakes, was walking by the side of the governor, and they were talking about the beast in their own language. As we reached the red house, Deo, indicating the snake, said, ‘He destroy a man in thirty . . . forty seconds.’

Indicating the governor, I said, ‘Will he kill it?’ and the English-speaking one said, ‘Nay, huzoor, we do love it.’

The governor continued speaking to Deo as we entered the trainlighting office. Deo turned to me, saying, ‘It is against his dharm to kill snake.’ I think I knew what that meant. The universe would be put out of balance, and he would lose points, lose merit.

The trainlighting office was dark and smelt of piss. I saw a wooden crate stamped ‘Burn & Co.’ and there was wire mesh nailed over the top. It held living rats. Alongside it against the wall stood a row of baskets of various sizes, all in the shape of urns. All had lids, and one of the lids was roped down. Also in the gloom I saw a snake charmer’s pipe, firewood, a canteen of water, a shotgun, and a tea caddy decorated with a picture of a fox hunt going through pretty English countryside. The governor knocked the lid off the endmost basket, and with a co-ordinated heave, the men tossed the king cobra inside. The boy then clamped the lid down and sat on top of it. The governor had picked up the tea caddy. He was again speaking to Deo Rana, who said to me, ‘They have another snake. Same.’

‘Oh Christ.’

‘They show you,’ said Deo, and he was pointing, of course, to the roped-down basket.

But the governor was brandishing the tea caddy.

Deo asked, ‘You take one tea?’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I mean thanks. And then will they tell me about the train snakes?’

The English-speaking one had heard.

‘That we know,’ he said, ‘we say.’


III

This time the tea had condensed milk in it, and a spice of some kind. There were chapattis as well, brought over from the Black Town by the boy, and filled with soft cheese. We ate and drank sitting on the platform. Again, the snake men offered their black tobacco for hand-rolled cigarettes, and I was starting to think I might be getting my money’s worth as a sort of excursionist even if I had not so far uncovered any new data touching on the snake attacks. But then Deo Rana, who had been speaking to the governor, turned to me, saying, ‘Baksheesh, sahib.’