First published in hardback in 2005 by Rupa Publications

7/16 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110002

This edition published in 2024 by Hachette India

(Registered name: Hachette Book Publishing India Pvt. Ltd)

An Hachette UK company

www.hachetteindia.com

This ebook published in 2024

Text Copyright © 2024 Zai Whitaker

Illustrations Copyright © Suddhasattwa Basu

‘Kali and the Rat Snake’ and ‘What Happened to the Reptiles’ (in Sorry Best Friend) first published by Tulika Books, 305, Manickam Avenue, TTK Road, Alwarpet, Chennai 600018, Tamil Nadu, India.

‘The Big Four’ and ‘Termite Safari’ (titled ‘On Safari’) first published in Chatterbox magazine by Wheitstone Productions (P) Ltd., Bengaluru, India.

‘The Zoo Tiger’ first published in the PC Magazine for Children; ‘How Scientists Can Affect the Crocodile’s Love Life’ first published in the Indian Review of Books; ‘How to Fool Birdwatchers’ adapted from Zai Whitaker’s article first published in the Birdwatcher’s Newsletter.

Zai Whitaker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system (including but not limited to computers, disks, external drives, electronic or digital devices, e-readers, websites), or transmitted in any form or by any means (including but not limited to cyclostyling, photocopying, docutech or other reprographic reproductions, mechanical, recording, electronic, digital versions) without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Old place names such as Calcutta, Bangalore, Trivandrum and Ooty, among others, have been used to preserve the historicity and historical authenticity of the text.

The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by her and have been verified to the extent possible. The publishers are not in any way liable for the same.

Cover concept and illustrations by Ambika Karandikar

Cover design and typography by Sharanya Kunnath

Print edition ISBN 978-93-5731-737-5

Ebook edition ISBN 978-93-5731-969-0

Hachette Book Publishing India Pvt. Ltd

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Cobra in My Kitchen

It was a rather hungry and foodless day, because there was a cobra in my kitchen. I wasn’t keen on spending too much time there until it was removed…because it wasn’t an ordinary, normal cobra – though that would have been bad enough – but a king cobra, one of the most dangerous snakes in the world. The fact that it was a baby, hatched that very day, didn’t make it any better. Venomous snakes are venomous from birth, and to make it even more uncomfortable, there was no king cobra antivenom in India then. (Even now, the only king cobra antivenom one can get is from Thailand, and more suitable against the king cobras there.)

This one had hatched, along with its 20 brothers and sisters, in a large bread box with holes for air, and a cushioning of soil and leaf humus. The eggs had been collected from a wild nest in the Andaman Islands. The bread box had been sitting on the bookshelf in our living room for a month. We’d woken up to find that they’d hatched…and several had managed to squeeze through the holes and were happily roaming around the house. All the others had been caught, but this kitchen one obviously liked it there, and had found a good hiding place.

How, and why, on earth was I in this ridiculous situation? How did I end up in this snaky sort of life? All through school and college I’d dreamed of various careers I wanted for myself: teaching, journalism, dressmaking and cooking, among others. And, oh yes, most of all I wanted to be a translator or interpreter. I liked the idea of sitting importantly in those United Nations conferences with earphones draped over my head. Once, I even had a brief ambition to be a doctor, but it quickly left me when I discovered that it meant five years of serious study.

In the middle of all this, while I was studying German to start my great United Nations career, I met and married Rom Whitaker. I moved to Chennai (then Madras) and began working with him at the Snake Park, which he had started some years earlier. And that’s why there was a king cobra in my kitchen. It was only the next morning that it was discovered in a mixing bowl and taken away to the park in disgrace.

For the next eight or nine years, the Snake Park was the centre of my life. It was very different from what it is today. There were fewer buildings, and more greenery and open space. The office was a small, thatched house with a tree growing in the courtyard. The large central ‘pit’ or open enclosure had three or four hundred snakes and lizards of many different species. Visitors loved walking slowly round it, spotting snakes in the low bushes, or in the pools of water, or on the ground. Sometimes there would be large rat snakes curled up in the branches of a tree, or a monitor lizard sitting on a log, calmly looking around for a frog to snack on. Often a bunch of 20 or 30 watersnakes would get together for a soak in the pool, only their heads sticking out like the hydra of Greek mythology. A visitor would jump back in fright as a cobra flashed its hood in defence, expanding its ribs to display the spectacle markings. You could hear the calls of toads and frogs as they were caught by a snake. Visitors often spent an hour or more here, watching the activities of these beautiful creatures.

The most popular, of course, were the cobras and large rat snakes, some of them over two metres long. The bright green vine snakes with their pointed heads and strange eyes, and the fast bronzeback tree snakes, were also favourites. Snake Park staff would get into the pit now and then, pick up a harmless keelback or vine snake, and let visitors hold it.

There were large, landscaped, glass-fronted cages with interesting and famous snakes from India as well as abroad – African puff adders, American rattlesnakes and Japanese habus. There was a display of the Big Four dangerous snakes of India, about which I have written in a separate chapter (‘The Big Four’) in this book. A family of marsh crocodiles, a pair of giant tortoises from the Seychelles islands, sea snakes and a group of big water monitor lizards, were also residents of the park. The location was beautiful, as it was a part of Guindy Deer Park, with evergreen shrubs, beautiful old trees, and cheetal and blackbuck wandering around.

Our job at the Snake Park was to make people feel a little more friendly towards snakes. In India, snakes are often killed on sight. All snakes are considered dangerous. Strange and frightening stories are told and retold (and believed!) about how monstrous snakes can be. People go to great trouble and expense to clear the land around their homes to keep snakes away. Some feel ill, and even develop a fever, when they see a snake.

I had always known about this general fear of snakes (I myself was not too happy in the presence of snakes), but working at the Snake Park opened my eyes to the national hysteria about these poor reptiles. My special job was to write and distribute factual information about snakes and snakebite.

How do you fill a snake park with snakes? And frogs and rats for them to eat? It’s not an easy business, and it was possible only because of the Irular tribe of snake catchers, which lives on the outskirts of Chennai. The Irular are hunter-gatherers famous for their snake tracking and catching skills. They were the main suppliers of animals to the park, and soon after coming to Chennai I saw their jungle talents at work. We went on a cobra-finding mission with Natesan, an old hunter with the long, tangled hair and sun-beaten face of true jungle people.

The rains had started, and the soft ground made tracking easy. Tracking snakes, however, requires extraterrestrial vision of some sort. Being light and fast, snakes leave almost invisible scrapes on the ground, which only the Irular are able to spot and ‘read’.

Leaving the jeep near a small Irular hamlet about 30 kilometres from the city, we followed Natesan through a patch of scrub forest and out into bright green rice fields. We must have walked for about 15 minutes when Natesan slowed down, pointed to an invisible (to us) mark in the soil, and followed the track to a nice big rat hole partly hidden by a thorn bush.

‘Cobra,’ he announced briefly.

‘How do you know?’ we asked, feeling quite foolish as we always did when out with the Irular.

Natesan just smiled and squatted by the hole. This hole, he explained after some time, was the home of a gerbil, a pretty, acrobatic rodent that the Irular eat. Yes, rats are often on the menu and a curry made of clean field rats is tasty and full of protein. Snakes, he said, often moved into rat holes (after eating the occupant), as this one obviously had.

Natesan started working at the hole with his crowbar, alternately digging and scooping away the soil. Every now and then he would stop to read signs that told him which way the tunnel turned. At one point he reached out to a bush, snapped off a green twig, and pushed it into the tunnel, watching it carefully. It didn’t move; which meant it hadn’t touched the snake, which meant the snake was deeper down and more digging was to be done. It was jungle technology at its best. Dig, dig, dig, a little to the left, then to the right, then straight down, and the twig is inserted again. Wow, it gives a big jerk, as if a cobra had nudged it in irritation.

Two or three more thrusts of the powerful muscle-propelled tool and the cobra springs out, taking all of us by surprise. It was over a metre long, fat and shiny and full of pep. Wild or freshly caught cobras look very different from the sick, de-fanged animals which snake charmers use. This one had shed its skin recently and its colours were bright and fresh, as if newly painted.

After admiring it for a while, Natesan ‘pinned’ the head: he used his crowbar to gently press the head to the ground and controlled the thrashing body with his foot. Quickly grabbing the neck with one hand and the tail with the other, Natesan stood there calmly, as if catching a cobra was an everyday matter. Depositing the snake in a cotton ‘snake bag’ – about the size of a pillowcase – he knotted the top and tucked it into the waist of his veshti. Many an Irular has been bitten this way, because snake fangs can easily penetrate the thin cotton layers, but it’s a convenient way of transporting snakes, and old habits die hard!

By midday Natesan had quite a collection: striped keelbacks, vine snakes, two cobras and a young monitor lizard. Now, he said, he was hungry and would concentrate on rats for a while. And he was lucky, because under a low, scrubby bush he spotted the burrow of a family of gerbils. This species of rodent lives in a veritable maze of burrows, one leading into another, providing many good hiding places in case of a predator attack. The ground area of the entire ‘compound’ could be up to five or six square metres!

With this kind of architecture, digging was out of the question and Natesan fell back on the ‘smoking’ technique. Getting out a small earthen pot that Irular often carry with them, he filled it with dry twigs, and lit it. Natesan placed the mouth of this blazing inferno over one of the burrow entrances and blew into a small hole on the other side. Smoke billowed into the network of tunnels, suffocating the inhabitants. A few managed to escape, though Natesan had armed us with sticks and instructions to whack any runaways. But chasing a bouncing gerbil through thorny scrub forest isn’t easy.

We were soon chomping on our prey, delicately roasted on an open fire. Not something I would choose to have every day, but pretty good when you’re starving and it’s the only item on the menu. I was the only one picking at it hesitantly. The others were gorging themselves as if they were at Kentucky Fried Chicken. I might have done the same if I hadn’t known what I was eating.

The Snake Park was becoming a popular tourist attraction. It was also a meeting point for scientists and naturalists – or just ordinary people interested in reptiles. We received letters from all over the country, giving us information or asking questions. Through our many correspondents we learned facts new to science: for example, a particular snake was found in a previously unknown habitat, or the food of a snake or lizard included an unrecorded item. To keep these friends and well-wishers of the Snake Park informed about the goings-on there, I started a little newsletter called Hamadryad, which is another name for the king cobra. Now our cobweb of communication grew even bigger; there were reptile people in Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and other neighbouring countries who wrote to us regularly. Opening the mail every morning was an exciting business; sometimes, a bulky envelope would turn out to have a shed snakeskin, or, once, even the dried faeces of some reptile!

We were also finding out how little was known about Indian reptiles, and how much work needed to be done in this field. The research wing of the Snake Park grew, concentrating on endangered species like king cobras, various turtles and tortoises, and crocodiles. I was able to take part in some of the studies and surveys, and there were many adventures, both good and bad.

One year, we took a motorbike on a boat across to Sri Lanka, and criss-crossed the southern part of that country looking for crocodiles. We camped on the River Karnali in Nepal, observing the gharial. We visited a temple tank in Tripura where turtles are considered holy, and are fed and cared for. Some of these experiences are written about in this book.

Come along with me!