Invincible Naga

Chapter 1 The Weird Dream

During the early 1990s,

On a vast farm in the deep woods of Devagiri,

A remote village in the Western Ghats,

Dakshina Kannada, Karnataka, South India

Chapter 1

Startled, Senan got up and leaped out of bed with a shriek. His heart began to pound heavily. His rapid breath was louder and worse than his usual snoring. Since the pitch-dark night had blinded him, he slammed into the wall while moving ahead. He scrabbled hurriedly among the projections on the wall. When he got hold of a worn-out wooden switchboard, he pressed a switch multiple times, lighting the room in foggy yellow.

Panicked, he peered at everything the light revealed. He flipped through the ragged clothes on the rusty clothesline stretched across the room. He kneeled and crawled on the floor, observing every nook and cranny. He rummaged through the piles of unwanted stuff and hidden essentials. Nevertheless, the scary wild snake was not there. It must have been a nightmare. Groundless fear. As he sighed in relief, his frantic breaths calmed down.

Stretching like a wild cat, he rose from the floor. He twisted himself into a thick coat and yawned loudly. Meanwhile, he felt a stretching pain in his parched throat. Fear had dried his mouth. From an earthen pot, he poured water into his dry throat, yet struggled to gulp it. He reclined on the bed, and the cot creaked uncomfortably. Following the noise, the dog whined.

The dog belonged to the laborers who previously occupied the farmhouse. It used to accompany them when they set out to tap rubber trees in the early morning. Despite being a country dog, it has shown much bravery and brilliance in the many life-threatening situations the laborers encountered with the slyly emerging wild animals. Senan never had such an experience with dogs. Moreover, he condemned it for shattering the serene solitude and increasing his anxiety about the wild forest.

During his sleepless nights, he would turn over in his bed a thousand times, making the cot's termite-bitten legs creak. Usually, the dog would follow it in a long fox-like howl, not out of emotion but as a voluntary act to alert Senan to its presence.

Senan was so irritated that he was about to kick the dog in the back. But a second thought held him back. The heavy snow chilled him to the bone. Above that, the weird nightmare, and the fear it aroused whirled around him, weakening his every intention.

He unlocked the latches cautiously, pushed the wooden window open, and peeped out anxiously. Behind the farmhouse, the shadows of the rubber trees on the hillside appeared like a massive black rock about to roll down as an imminent threat. He tried to focus on the red mud wall that surrounded the farmhouse and its immediate premises. It stood, covering the three sides of the farmhouse, as if carved around vertically. However, nothing was readily apparent to him.

He pulled a large torch from beneath the pillow and swung its light to the mud wall through the window. When the torchlight lit the mud wall, the dog barked. Pulling the metal leash tied to a sturdy palm tree pole, the dog rose from its unkempt sackcloth bed, shook its body to ward off the fleas, and barked loudly.

Irritated by its unwanted involvement, Senan hollered, 'What the heck! Lie down. Uff! Again, groans and barks! Who wants it here?'

The dog curled up and held its ears sharp. It gazed at the mud wall and anticipated the emergence of a scary wild creature.

Senan disbelieved that he had slid down the mud wall, scraping his chest, and crashed into the backyard. He gently stroked his chest, which had recently developed reddish blisters. He hardly grasped that a nightmare could cause physical injuries.

Raising the sackcloth curtain from the window, Senan illuminated the holes in the mud wall with the torchlight. He was dismayed. The greenery had been scraped away, forming a flowing path of red soil on the mud wall. It seemed as if someone had slipped or rainwater had flowed down. A small pile of red soil and plant remnants lay at the base of the wall as evidence of a fall.

He screamed in his mind to be stone-confident and to stand dead against fear. The nightmare haunted him terribly, and he kept on gulping water. Although he poured a river into his mouth, it frequently turned into stumbling blocks in his chest, obstructing his breathing and harming him.

Sniffing his fear, the dog kept on barking. Senan grabbed something from the floor and threw it at the door, causing a clamor to scare the dog. The dog was quiet on the sackcloth, pondering gravely and keeping a safe distance from Senan.

He closely observed the country liquor bottle that was kept below the cot. He had not consumed even a drop of it. The unopened bottle assured him that he was not intoxicated during his nightmare. He had ceased carousing when Dhani, the so-called landowner, asked Senan to patrol the plantation site at night until the boundary.

Senan partially peeped through the window to the mud wall. With bated breath, he directed the torchlight to the undergrowth and trees on the hillside beyond the backyard. He felt that something had moved there. That could be the snake. For a split second, he saw its tail turning away. As soon as the torchlight fell on it, it vanished.

He stuck to the wall for a while. Then he drew the double-barrel rifle from the almirah and dashed through the front door. The torchlight fell voraciously on everything around him, but not on the snake. The night was fading away little by little.

He seized a coarse cigar packet out of his loose, shabby trousers. He lit a cigar, spun it in the air, checked to see if the flame was burning evenly, held it firmly between his lips, blew on it, puffed it up until his mouth was filled with tobacco smoke, and slowly released it alternately through his mouth and nostrils. His worries and concerns used to vanish into the air with the smoke.

Unfortunately, they hadn't vanished since fear had defiled his veins. His eyes frequented large holes on the mud wall with wide-open mouths, built by bandicoot rats that frequent the waste pit in the backyard.

All the while, the dog had been whining as if predicting some ill-omen. Senan concluded that the dog might have sensed the breath, tactic, or hiss of some snakes. He slumped down on the rusty chair in the sit-out, lowered the rifle to the ground, and bowed his head in despair. However, he stayed alert to the snake's presence in his immediate surroundings.

As time passed, suspicious thoughts about physical harm began to grip him. To clarify it, he exposed his limbs to light. In a shudder, he noticed that his right foot was swollen and reddish, with two wide fang marks. His heartbeat slowly crept up to his throat to choke him. A violent tremor spread all over his body. Sweat dripped off him while he gently touched the fang mark, on his feet, which did neither bleed, nor hurt him.                                                                  

(to be continued...)