Invincible Naga

Chapter 1 The Weird Dream

Senan startled himself awake and leaped out of bed. His rapid breath, which erupted out of fear, was worse than his usual wild snoring. Although the pitch-dark night made him almost blind, he could not help moving ahead and slamming into the wall. His scared fingers flipped through many projections on the wall until he could get to an age-old small wooden switchboard, and he pressed the switch many times.

As the dim yellow light partially revealed all the unsightly aspects of the room, he painstakingly observed every nook and corner and the piles of ragged clothes hanging from a thin, rusted iron clothesline stretched across the room. In the blurry light, he rummaged through all belongings, kept either piled up as unnecessary or hidden as essentials somewhere indoors. Nevertheless, nothing was found. It must have been just a dream anyway. Pointless fears. His frantic breathing slowed temporarily as a feeling of relief took over him.

He rose from the floor in a wild cat stretch, struggling to stand on his toes. Elongating his hands high, he twisted himself into a thick overcoat and yawned loudly. While opening his mouth widely, he suffered severe stretching pain in his parched throat. Fear had guzzled every drop of water in his mouth. He picked up the earthen pot in the corner of the room, poured cold water into his dry thirsty gullet, and yet struggled to gulp it. As soon as he reclined on the bed, the cot made an uncomfortable scratching sound on the floor. The whining of the dog tied up outdoors followed it.

The dog was brought for the laborers, who had occupied the farmhouse before. It used to accompany them whenever 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. But Senan had no such experience to account for it. Moreover, he condemned it for shattering the serene solitude and increasing anxieties the wild forest imparted to his life.

During the sleepless nights, whenever he turned over in his bed, the feeble termite-bitten legs of his cot would whine, unable to hold his toxic thoughts. The dog would then instantly follow it in a long fox-like howl, not out of emotion but as a voluntary act to alert Senan to its presence. This time, it irritated him. He decided to open the door and kick the dog in the back. His usual way of showing rejection.

Although he was about to get up from the bed, a second thought pulled him back. The puffy cloudlets of snow perched on the roofs of stark midnight chilled him to the bone. Above that, the weird dream, and the fear it aroused lay entangled, weakening his every intention.

Unlocking the wooden window latches cautiously, he pushed them open and peeped out anxiously. The smoky snow had been descending heavily as clusters of white clouds. Right behind the farmhouse, the shadows of the rubber trees on the sloping hillside had fused to form a massive black rock and took the stance to roll down to the land as an imminent threat to fall onto the roof. He narrowed his eyes to focus on the natural mud wall, made of rigid red soil and almost covered with greenery, that surrounded the immediate premises of the farmhouse on three sides as if vertically carved around. However, nothing was readily apparent to him.

He grabbed a big torch from below the pillow and swung its light through the window, particularly to the mud wall that stood as high as the roof. When the torchlight fell on the mud wall, the dog barked. It pulled the chain that tied it to a fixed big palm tree pole, got up from the untidy sackcloth spread on the floor, shook its body to shoo away the fleas around it, and barked loudly again. As usual, Senan disregarded it.

Yet he could not help crying at the dog, as he could not stand its untimely involvement. 'What the heck! Lie down there, you b*tch. Uff! Again, those hated whines, groans, and barks! Who wants it here?'

The abused dog lay down curled up, yet holding its ears perked up, and gazed at the mud wall, anticipating some scary creature would creep in. Senan again swung the torchlight at the mud wall to realize the mystery behind the nightmare.

Still, he could not imagine that he had slid down the steep mud wall, scraping his chest against it, and crashed down to the backyard. He gently stroked his chest, which had developed painful, reddish blisters. He could hardly believe that a nightmare could leave him with such physical marks.

Through another termite-bitten window opening to the backyard, lifting its sackcloth curtain a little bit, he again glanced at the mud wall, lighting up its potholes of diverse shapes and sizes with his torch. He was taken aback for a while. In some places, the greenery, covered the red soil as vines, mosses, and molds, were swept away as if someone had slipped down the mud wall. A tiny mound of red soil and plant debris lay at the bottom of the wall as remnants of the fall.

He screamed inside to be stone-confident and stand dead against fear. But the dream haunted him with an intense life, making him so terrified that his hair strands stood stiff. He kept on gulping water. Even though he poured a river from the earthen pot into his mouth, it frequently turned into heavy stones and got caught in his chest, harming him.

The dog somehow sniffed his panic and kept on barking. Senan grabbed something heavy off the floor, threw it at the door, and shouted, causing a loud clamor. The moment the dog was quieted, it curled up a ball, went back to its posture, almost falling out of the sackcloth, and kept itself aloof from Senan, gravely pondering over the same.

He took out the country liquor bottle kept under the bed last night and observed it closely. He had not consumed even a drop of it. The unopened liquor bottle assured him that his weird experiences had not evolved out of intoxication. He had ceased carousing for a couple of days since the Dhani, the so-called landowner, asked Senan to go through the woods and inspect the plantation to the boundary.

Once again, he slightly opened the window to the mud wall. With bated breath, pressing the torch button so hard for it to produce more intense light, he swung out the torchlight through the undergrowth on the slopes of the rubber plantation site, well beyond the backyard. Something was there. That could be the snake. For a split second, all he could see was its tail. As soon as the light fell on it, it vanished.

Abruptly, he stayed back, sticking to the wall for a while. The next moment, he leaned to one side, drew the double-barrel rifle from the top of the almirah, and dashed out through the door. The torchlight fell voraciously on everything around him but could not feed his eyes with any snake. For a while, he stood motionless and then looked up. The darkness of the sky has started to fade away little by little. Still, the day had not turned bright and sunny.

He pulled a coarse cigar packet out of the pocket of his trousers, lit one from it, spun it in the air, looked at its tip to see the flame glowing evenly, held it firmly between his lips, blew on it, puffed it up to fill his mouth with the flavor of tobacco smoke, and slowly released it through his mouth and nostrils alternately, as some great smoker could only do. Along with the smoke, his concerns used to vanish thin into the air.

Unfortunately, the fear still defiled his veins. His eyes frequently reached out to the open-mouthed, dark potholes that stared back at him from the mud wall. He knew bandicoot rats build and reside there. He had seen them at the waste pits in the backyard at night.

All the while, the dog had been whining gently. The curses about to creep out of his tongue were shut in his mouth. The dog might have smelled the breath, tactic, or hiss of the snake. He again fell for uncertainty. He slumped down on the rusted chair in the sit-out, lowered the rifle to the ground, and bowed his head in despair. Moreover, he was scared that the snake would be somewhere in his immediate surroundings. There had been none within miles to hear his call.

As time passed, more suspicious thoughts about the potential physical harm gripped him. He exposed his limbs to the torchlight. In the meantime, to his shudder, he noticed his right foot was swollen and had turned reddish, with two clear, wide puncture marks that went deep into the skin yet had not left any bruise. The venomous teeth were not broken through. His heart began to beat rapidly and heavily, and it slowly crept up to his throat to choke him. A violent tremor spread from the floor and ran all over his body. In a shudder, he pulled his foot off the floor.

While stroking the snake's fang mark on his feet, Senan closed his eyes, dove deep in, and reached his core. He found snakes everywhere, entwined in spines and sinews. He fervently believed that he had been deeply affected by snakes, though not by venom. Sweat had been dripping off him even when the farmhouse stood covered in smoky snow.                                                                              

(to be continued...)