The Great Downpour

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXV

The Indian common krait was sleeping peacefully under a rock all through the day. The monsoon is a bad time for snakes as their habitat is completely disturbed. This one too was biding its time. In the night, it would emerge from its hiding place and hunt for small snakes and rodents to satisfy its appetite. This particular snake was only eight months old; it had a shiny dark blue skin with double rings of a silver colour over its entire body. Its fangs and its venom were fully developed, and it would be wrong to assume that a young one such as this one did not have the capacity to kill an adult human being.

The group of humans in our story made the area where this krait rested their shelter for the night. They lit a small fire barely five feet away from the rock under which the krait lay. They talked, they cooked, they ate and they kept up a ruckus till late into the night. The krait emerged from its hideout, unseen by anyone, and slipped out on its nightly hunt. By the time it returned, it was late night, and most of the humans had gone to sleep. One of them lay with his head on the very stone that had sheltered the krait the whole day today as well as for the last several days and nights.

Sometime in the night, the human moved: she turned to one side, and in doing so, she shook the rock considerably. The krait was wide awake since it is a nocturnal creature. It slipped out from under the rock; as its head reared out, a hand of the same human fell on its tail. The snake’s inbuilt reflexes of self-preservation counted this as a threat to its survival. The snake whipped its head around and immediately clamped its jaws on to the hand and bit it, discharging its poison glands into the tissues of the hand of the victim. The hand shook and withdrew, and the snake was forced to bite it again before the owner of the hand grabbed it by its head and made it leave the bite. Surprised and scared, the snake rushed off into the dark.

Bhairavi woke up with a sharp, stabbing pain in her right hand. She screamed, waking up everyone except Chand, who did not even stir. All of them came running to where she was sitting up and trying to disengage a biting snake. In the darkness, it was nearly impossible to make out the size and make of the snake, but it was immediately apparent to all that Bhairavi’s hand was oozing blood. There were tiny, multiple fang marks on the back of the hand. Sandesh came up to her and immediately instructed Muhammad to get some clean water (“Get it in a cap, get it anyhow, fast!”). He sat down beside Bhairavi and asked her to lie down while he would try to “take out the poison”.

“How do you plan to do that?” asked Farhad.

“The standard stuff that I learnt in my First-Aid course said that a) I should tie a tourniquet proximal to the bite, b) I should hold the affected extremity below the victim’s heart level, c) … oh, forget it, we have little time. I’ll teach you all this later!” said Sandesh, now busy cleaning the wound with water.

Bhairavi was alarmed.

“Will I die, Sandy?” she asked, sobbing.

“Frankly, Bhairu, let me do my job, please. Guys,” Sandy turned to the others and continued, “See if you can find that bastard snake which bit her … identifying the snake is the key to correct treatment. Look under the rocks around here and in an area of at least 25-30 square metres in all directions. But please be careful, okay. Carry a stick with a two-pronged end and try and immobilize the snake’s head with the pronged end.”

Sandesh asked for a sharp edged item. The only thing they had was the pen-knife key chain that they had found earlier in the morning. He opened it. It looked a bit worn and also somewhat rusted, but he had no choice. He asked Bhairavi to clench her teeth on a piece of cloth (Rati supplied her with a folded dupatta), and then proceeded to make a cross-shaped cut through the fang marks. While he was making the cut, he asked Farhad to take a sturdy dupatta and tie it on Bhairavi’s upper arm as tightly as he could without blocking off her pulse (“I’ll check that, come on, go ahead and tighten it!”).

Once the cruciate cut had been placed, Sandesh began to squeeze out blood from the wound with his own hands. For nearly three to four minutes, blood flowed out from the wound. After this, the flow reduced. Now Sandesh bent down and holding Bhairavi’s hand with one of his own, he applied his mouth over the open wound and began to suck the venom out.

“Aaagh! What are you doing?” asked Bhairavi, whose astonishment was profound, as she had no knowledge of managing a snake-bite.

Muhammad answered for Sandesh. “He is trying to remove the venom that the snake might have injected into you, Bhairu. Keep quiet and do not disturb him.”

Sandesh sucked out a mouthful of foul-tasting, warm liquid, which was a mix of Bhairavi’s blood, tissue fluids and the snake’s venom. He disengaged his mouth from the wound, turned his head around and spat the mouthful into the ground. He turned back to Bhairavi to repeat the procedure. In between, he admonished Farhad to keep a track of the time elapsed since the tourniquet was applied. (“It must remain applied for 15-20 minutes, then you have to loosen it for a minute or less, then re-apply with the same pressure for the next 15-odd minutes and so on.”)

As time passed, Bhairavi began to become agitated from the pain. The hand was just beginning to swell up. The bleeding had stopped, but Sandesh kept at his task for as long as he could. After three or four cycles, he requested someone else to take over.

“I am feeling weak – it is possible some of the poison may have entered my own system though I doubt it since I have no oral cuts or breaks. I want a person who has no oral injuries or cuts, as the poison could get absorbed into their own system through the cuts,” he said.

Rati came forward to take over. Sandesh’s first reaction was to refuse her as he cared for her, but he realized that that would sound foolish. He showed her how to do it. She was eager to begin, and took over in an expert manner. Sandesh rested next to Bhairavi and closely observed her for symptoms and signs of poisoning.

He began to talk in whispers to his friends who sat near him, but out of earshot of Bhairavi, who was screaming in agony with the pain. “It’s like this: since we don’t have the snake, we must assume that anything might happen. A cobra bite consists of two distinct fang marks, so that seems highly unlikely here. It might be a viper or a krait. While a viper’s bite produces disturbances of the clotting mechanism and produces a bleeding that is almost impossible to control, the bite of a krait can cause nervous system problems such as respiratory paralysis, weakness or paralysis of body muscles, severe stomach pain, bleeding in the urine, and …”

His speech was abruptly cut off by the sudden sound of a tiger’s growl.

“Oh my God!” said Seeta. Although the others did not mouth any such expletives or exclamations, they each felt their hearts sink, as if the end of the world as they knew it was around the corner.

Sandesh rounded up everyone. Only Rati continued to be by the side of Bhairavi, sucking and spitting out the poison as frequently as possible.

Sandesh addressed the gang even as Farhad continued to alternately tighten and relax the tourniquet on Bhairavi’s right arm.

“The tiger seems to be coming closer, but don’t worry. I am sure he is at least ten kilometres away. We will all have to be on guard, of course, but he may not even come in our direction. Our immediate priority is to prevent Bhairavi from absorbing the poison. So perk up guys, and help us here!”

“Do you think the snake injected a potentially lethal dose of poison?” asked Nanda.

“It all depends on how old the snake was, and how focused its attention was on biting. The bite might have been half-hearted; on the other hand, it looks as if it bit more than once, so the dose could have increased. It also depends on how full or empty its poison glands were at the time it bit Bhairu. Then again, a younger snake has less poison in its glands, so if this was a young snake, Bhairu has a better chance of pulling through.” Sandesh almost laughed nervously. “To be honest,” he concluded, “I don’t know. We must try and capture it to make sure.”

The growl of the tiger was not heard again. Sandesh’s friends came back from their search with three snakes: one turned out to be a non-poisonous grass snake; one was a dead saw-scaled viper while the third, brought by Gangadin, was not a snake at all, but a cobra skin, shed by its occupant at the time of its most recent moulting. Everyone who was awake laughed when they saw the empty skin. That, alas, did not include Chand. He was still out, cold.

Sandesh declared Bhairavi to be out of danger when, after four hours, she failed to demonstrate any signs or symptoms of snake-bite poisoning. He asked Farhad to release the tourniquet permanently. Rati was also relieved. She got up and ran to the river to wash and rinse the inside of her mouth. However, the site where the snake had bit Bhairavi still looked angry and swollen. Sandesh promised to prepare a salve and apply it to that site as soon as possible in the morning.

Once again, Bhairavi felt a rush of love towards Sandesh. She envied Rati so much she almost wished that bad luck or some catastrophe should visit her and take her away so that she might begin to woo Sandy. She checked her thoughts in time. She is my friend. How can I think like this about her? She lay down after thanking Sandesh. Gradually, everyone went back to their resting places. Most of them tossed and turned throughout the night. Fear of the man-eating tiger ate at their minds. Those who were to stay up and mind the rest of them could see that almost no one was stationary. Sounds of clearing of the throat, a minor coughing and rustling of leaves caused by the movement of their bodies indicated that nobody slept much the rest of the night.