Once bitten, never shy

WHEN we lived on the estates, my mother inadvertently sat down on a snake. Well, it was not as simple as all that. What she actually did was sit on a sofa in our drawing room, blissfully unaware that the cushion she sat on harboured a rat snake. Rat snakes are non-poisonous reptiles, but are capable of inflicting a rather painful bite, when attacked or alarmed; fortunately, my mother was a small woman who did not weigh very much, so her presence on the cushion probably did not register on the rat snake burrowed deep within. The servants discovered it the next day and I would like to think it was shepherded gently from the room, rather than being summarily dispatched.

The celebrants of Nag Panchami day in interior Maharashtra get down even closer to snakes than my mother did to the rat snake, and in their case, the snakes are deadly cobras - wild cobras that are caught in the countryside by amateurs who, incredibly enough, by and large, escape harm. Jeremy Seal's account of the Nag Panchami celebration in Battis-Shirale, a small town near Sangli, is one of the best stories in his new travelogue, The Snake-bite Survivors' Club (Picador). As with most of our festivals, the intrepid traveller finds that a carnival atmosphere prevails - the mystical is very much a part of the ongoing pageantry. There is a competition in which cobras are tipped out of the clay pots they are carried about in. As they raise their hoods in a fury, the height of the hood is measured. Astonishingly, none of the competitors, onlookers or judges is bitten. In other, more devotional, ceremonies, the cobras are worshipped in the traditional manner by the women of the house, but the highlight of the festivities is a parade through town in which the cobras are the star attraction. Things get out of hand, the celebrants get too casual with snakes and one of them gets bitten. It is an excellent story, and Seal tells it well.

He ends up in Maharashtra, despite being terrified of snakes, because of a morbid fascination with snakes and people who have actually survived a close encounter with them. As he writes, "I was drawn to snakes even as they disgusted me. The fascination was as strong as the fear; a kind of transfixing awe, an infatuation, was the result. The presence of snakes seemed to cast a strange light across the landscape, a light that might attend the end of the world; spare, stark and alive with a crackly energy. A charge pulsed through such moments, and made them among the most compelling of my life ... Just as I could not keep myself from snakes, so I was drawn to survivors of snakebite, that singular clique, that club whose members had been touched by something dark, exotic and preternatural. They were like those who had experienced a shipwreck, a lighting strike or even alien abduction; they wore a badge of otherness that the rest of us could only shiver at even as we asked, our mouths slack with fascination: being bitten: what did it feel like?"

Having been seduced by the idea, Seal decides to track four species of snake (and those who had survived being bitten by them), that especially fascinated him, the (Indian) cobra, the (African) black mamba, the (American) rattlesnake, and the deadliest of them all, the (Australian) taipan. His travels in search of these snakes took him to the four continents they were native to, and a host of stories follow. I liked the Indian and Australian sections the best, especially the author's travels in Australia, for it is a little known fact that the island continent harbours the world's 10 most venomous snakes, and 20 of the world's 23 most venomous species (with the Australian genius for the prosaic, however, these deadly creatures are labelled "brown snake" which is a, well, brown snake and "red bellied black snake" and which is, unsurprisingly, a black snake with a red belly).

The Australian section also contains the second best story in the book, an account of an elderly Australian man's encounter with a taipan on the banks of the idyllic Barron river. He survives, but only just, and his story is memorably reconstructed by Seal.

As are stories by survivors of mamba bites and rattlesnake bites and, of course, cobra bites, Seal is the ideal raconteur for a book of this kind. He is no herpetological gunslinger, but rather someone like us who jumps at a rattle in a pile of dead leaves, and almost dies of fright when he hears a vicious hiss in a garbage dump (it does not come from a taipan, he discovers, but a seagull).

I rather liked The Snakebite Survivors' Club. It is not the greatest travelogue you will read this year, but it is a fun book, and that is more than you can say about most.

DAVID DAVIDAR

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