The Land of Snakes

Perhaps only a God-man could explicate who this land belonged to.
Ramesh Kartik Nayak A Land of Snakes 2 Cover
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A Land of Snakes: Part 2

I was expecting the old man to arrive by that time. But he didn’t come. I considered the idea that he might have been bitten by a snake or perhaps metamorphosed into one. Unwillingly, I sat beside the lad. He gave me a twig. I nodded my head as I didn’t quite like eating those fruits. He huddled all the twigs into his lap from his hand, plucking each fruit, sucking it pleasurably. Then he blew the seeds forcibly from the mouth, a funny little game each time he ate one.

“Anna, does your family also catch snakes?”

“We catch porcupines, monitor lizards, rabbits, peacocks, and stag-like creatures.”

“Do your people work with the circus people?” The lad questioned me with a surprised face.

“No, we don’t. Not a single person from our hamlet has ever seen a circus, they have just heard the word.”

“Then why do you catch all those creatures?”

“We catch them for our food. We eat them.” I said.

“So, your ancestors were devils. Weren’t they?!”

“No,” I laughed at the lad’s innocence and continued, “Our ancestors were human beings like us. Okay, enough about me, tell me about your ancestors.” I said.

“I don’t have any ancestors.” He replied. And continued, “We were searching for a place to settle like birds do. As far as I know, we shifted base from two places until now and made our shelter in the barren lands near the city outskirts. Our ancestors disappeared. When and where I don’t know, I hear that every ancestor who feels exhausted by god or nature will disappear into the air. No one even finds the traces of their disappearance.”

“Oh, you people are gypsies like us?”

“No, we are not lambada.” He said it as if this nomadic state should not be compared.

“What do you know about the lambada people?” I asked him to know what was on his mind.

“They lure the people and exploit them. They are thieves. They are opportunists. And they are intelligent.”

I don’t know from where he had gathered these ideas. As far as I was concerned, others lured us and exploited our strength and energy. We didn’t steal anything from anyone. Once a group of people came to the hamlet and said they were police. They demanded ornaments from our people pointing guns to their heads. They were the thieves. We were victims.

“Who said all of this to you?” I asked him.

“The whole world knows about you.” He remarked.

I didn’t understand what he was trying to say. Why does the world have its explanations for everything? Unable to accept his words or to give any response, I kept quiet. He finished the Ankola fruits from the twigs.

“What do your parents do?” He asked me with curiosity.

“My mother was a surrogate.”

“What is a surrogate?” He asked as he was hearing the word for the first time.

“It is a process of producing a baby with the help of a stranger.”

He looked at my face as if I was joking. His glance disturbed me considerably. I did not really want to say anything, but these words had just tumbled off my mouth unwittingly. To divert the topic, I asked him about his parents.

“My mother was killed by a group of men. They bit my mother as if they were stray dogs. My father used to wander into the streets carrying a snake on his shoulder with a pungi. One day, he was found dead in a street. His pungi was found crushed to pieces. His snake lay dead beside him. No one likes us. Some people look at us as if we don’t belong to this place….”

Both the old man and the snake-bit man came out of the forest. 

The two of us stood up. The old man didn’t say anything to us. He just kept walking ahead with the bitten man. The lad held the sack up. He left twigs on the ground and gestured me to follow him. I followed him as he followed his grandfather.

We reached a place with a few tents and huts. It reminded me of my childhood when we wandered from town to town and village to village for work. And set up the same temporary tents and huts, same as these refugees had. The land seemed like some cursed one. The houses were ready to blow away with the fierce winds.

The old man and the other man were almost a kilometer away from us. The lad and I were walking slowly.

Indistinctly, I heard the voice of the old man summoning someone from those tents and huts. A man rushed to the old man and took the sick man inside a tent. The old man turned back and looked at us. He might have thought something. He walked into a hut. The two of us followed.

The environment inside the hut really terrified me, though. The odor in the hut churned inside my stomach. I rushed out of the place. Sour water welled up inside my mouth. I knew I would vomit. So, I squatted down and pressed my head from both sides, closing my ears tightly. I vomited. My eyes watered.

Someone put his hand on my shoulder and pressed gently, the touch light and soft. I turned aside to see who he was. He was a young boy. And behind him, there was another younger boy cuddling snakes all over his body. He looked about eight years old. He was giggling while he gazed at me.

Also Read: A Land of Snakes Part 1

I stood up and stepped back a few feet. When a snake moved slowly on the boy’s body, he clutched it, held it in one of his hands and coiled it as a rope. The lad came there and asked the boy to leave, who walked away immediately. He looked like a magician to me. I peered at the movements of snakes on his bare body.

Thatha rammantunnadu“, the lad said and waited for me to go along with him. I bent down and rubbed my palm to the earth, then massaged my palm to my bare feet, after which I sniffed my palm. After inhaling this way thrice, I decided to follow the lad again.

A sweet smell assailed my nose as I got near the entrance of the hut. I entered and saw a coconut shell placed upside down. Incense sticks were kept in the plugged pores of a coconut shell. The thin smoke rose like spirits from the burning incense sticks.

The old man pointed his index finger toward the chair and asked me to sit. It was an old iron chair with a wooden plank-like object. A few broken plastic strands hung below the wooden plank. I huddled myself in the chair. It wasn’t too uncomfortable to sit.

The old man opened a trunk lying under a pile of snake skin. Beside the trunk were some glass jars, knives, and scissors. He was searching for something inside the box. I turned my face and craned my neck in all possible directions to observe what the place was preserving. The hut gave me a strange inexplicable sensation as soon as I entered it.

The oldman opened the box and took out a bundle of paper and walked to me. Placing the bundle in my hand, the old man said,

E kaigithala emani rasi undo chadivi cheppu.” I opened the bundle and flipped through the fragile papers one by one. They seemed like some land documents. I could see the word ‘bhoomi’ written in Telugu. But the remaining script was dull, faded and illegible, the pages a yellowish-brown. .

“What do you want me to read here?” I asked him incredulously. The old man peered into the papers. The lad also moved near me to look into the papers. The old man took the papers back from my hands, knotting them into a bundle. He placed the bundle inside the box. And looked at me with disdain, probably thinking that I was acting smart because I knew how to read. Whatever he thought of me, there were no words left on the paper that were legible. At least, they had these papers, I thought to myself.

The Banjaras don’t even have a paper to claim their belongingness to this land, everyone always asking us to leave although six generations have taken birth on this land and died here. Perhaps only a God-man could explicate who this land belonged to.

The old man gave me a hundred rupee note and asked me to stay with them for the night. I refused, “No, my mother would be worried.” I stood up from the chair to leave the hut.

Etu povali?” he asked.

“Towards Hitech city.”

“Oh, memu atu nunde potham. Matho ra ninnu akkada vadilipedatham, we are going the same way, will drop you somewhere.”

The old man wore a good shirt and dressed his grandson in good clothes. He took a polythene bag. He placed the crystal jar inside the polythene bag. The jar had a yellowish liquid and snake venom. He stuffed the snakeskin into the same bag. We walked out of the hut. Outside I saw the boy again. This time there were fewer snakes on his body. He moved to one side when he saw the old man.

The old man walked fast holding the bag firmly while the lad and I trailed behind..

“Where are we going now?” I asked the lad.

“Nearby there is a Hamlet, where the Lambadi people dwell. We are going to them. Most of the men work now as taxi and auto drivers. A few even have their own auto rickshaws. We regularly travel in their auto rickshaw.” He explained.

I was excited to see the Lambadi people. But I saw snakes nailed by their heads on the surfaces of trees. The snakes were skinned. I understood then that the snakeskin with the old man was not naturally shed. It was skinned out by nailing the snake’s head to the tree’s body. As we stepped forward, I saw two men who were squeezing a snake from its tail to its mouth. A white substance was frothing out from its mouth.

“What is that white substance?” I asked the lad.

“Milk.” He replied.

“Why are they squeezing out the milk?”

“To create hunger in the snakes.”

I realized that these snake charmers created hunger and then fed them the milk offered by devotees while they wandered from one house to another.

I followed the lad. He was walking tenderly as if the slightest pressure would wound the earth. We were about to reach the hamlet. But the old man found an auto on his way. Once huddled inside the auto, I looked outside. The cool breeze touched me like a newborn. My eyes welled with tears. I felt nervous and kept pressing my forehead to control an onsetting headache. I thought of taking a nap for some time and forcibly closed my eyes.

Mosquitoes swarmed around my head, buzzing in my ears. I tried to get a nap, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how each time the milk was forced out of the snake’s belly. I put out my head to vomit without opening my eyes. I stumbled upon the surroundings around me as I opened my eyes.

I turned to see the lad and the old man. Both were missing as was the auto driver. In his place, there was a skeleton driving the auto on a path that looked like a gigantic snake stretching its body into the ever-darkening sky. Beneath the snake, on both sides of its body, a dark-red fluid moved. The air filled with the unbearable stench of blood.

***

Image Courtesy: Pinterest

Author Ramesh Kartik Nayak

Ramesh Karthik Nayak is the winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in Telugu in 2024 for his short story collection, “Dhavlo” . He is the first tribal and the youngest Telugu author to receive this honour at the age of 26. He is a bilingual poet and short- story writer from Telangana. He has four books to his credit, three in Telugu - Balder Bandi, Dhaavlo and Kesula; and a poetry collection in English, Chakmak. He is one of the first writers in Telugu to depict the lifestyle of the Banjaras. His poems have appeared in Poetry at Sangam, Indian Periodical, Live Wire, Outlook India, Nether Quarterly, Borderless Journal, The Riveraine, Ethos literary Journal and Indian Literature, and have been translated into Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali and Assamese. A translation of his short story "The Story of Birth" was published in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, University of IOWA. He has received Kalahamsa Kavitha Puraskaram,; Tribal Young Achievers Award from Telangana state government; Banjara Youth Icon Award; Ravi Sastri Katha Puraskaram among others. Some of his poems are part of higher education syllabus in Telugu literature in both Telugu states.

Ramesh Karthik Nayak is the winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in Telugu in 2024 for his short story collection, “Dhavlo” . He is the first tribal and the youngest Telugu author to receive this honour at the age of 26. He is a bilingual poet and short- story writer from Telangana. He has four books to his credit, three in Telugu – Balder Bandi, Dhaavlo and Kesula; and a poetry collection in English, Chakmak. He is one of the first writers in Telugu to depict the lifestyle of the Banjaras. His poems have appeared in Poetry at Sangam, Indian Periodical, Live Wire, Outlook India, Nether Quarterly, Borderless Journal, The Riveraine, Ethos literary Journal and Indian Literature, and have been translated into Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali and Assamese. A translation of his short story “The Story of Birth” was published in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, University of IOWA. He has received Kalahamsa Kavitha Puraskaram,; Tribal Young Achievers Award from Telangana state government; Banjara Youth Icon Award; Ravi Sastri Katha Puraskaram among others. Some of his poems are part of higher education syllabus in Telugu literature in both Telugu states.

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