Encountering a snake at home

Engrossed in teaching aeronautics to the students in a private engineering college where I was a lecturer post my retirement from Air Force I received a message from the front office of our institution that my missus wanted me at home right away to drive out a snake that had accessed into our house.

Soon ensuring that another member of the faculty stands in for me in the class for the rest of the period I took permission from the Principal and got back home------about three kilometers away from the college------riding my scooter, like a streak across the not-so-dense traffic in the suburb.

Hardly had I opened the gate when my wife who was alone at home came rushing from inside gasping for breath and rapped out that a snake, unnoticed by her landed on her right arm, jumped down and wriggled in a wink into the next room when she was entering the room adjacent to the entrance and sliding the door curtain open.

Sighing deeply, she added that the venomous reptile might be lying holed up under one of the wooden racks or steel trunks in the room when I asked her where it had gone.

Switching quickly over to my boots-issued to me when in Air Force, I entered the room armed with a stout stick and set about launching an out and out shakedown for the venomous creature, gingerly moving the trunks and racks one by one.

All my tedious efforts to find the reptile proving futile, I felt utterly done in and sat in the hall at my wit's end not knowing how to get the dreaded intruder out of the house. Parking myself on the sofa in the hall as I began contemplating the means of either killing or expelling it out of the room it occurred to me that pearls of garlic could do away with serpents.

Rushing straight to the provision shop on the main road about a stone's throw from our house I bought a quarter kilogram of the strong-smelling stuff and scattered them all over the floor in the room. Chilling out on a chair in the hall for about half an hour for the garlic to disseminate its effects around, I picked up the threads of search for the reptile holding the stick aloft and ready to scrag it the moment it came into my sight.

Shocked I stood for a moment at the sight of a thick, black cobra measuring not less than four feet long lying still on the floor within an ace ahead of me as I stirred a big wooden box.

By nothing but a providential interposition the venomous creature that was stirred from its position on the curtain rod spared my missus from a deadly sting when she was sliding the curtain.

The clean environs around our house notwithstanding, how the snake accessed a room and climbed to the top of the door, kept us racking our brains till we turned in at an unearthly hour in the night.