Snakes as a poem from R.K. Ramanujan reminds us of Lawrence’s Snake as well as his grappling with the same psychologically. How have we taken to snakes? How do we shudder at the image of? How do they come to? How to explain the horror and terror of coming across a snake by chance, how to find the dragon sitting coiled? Sometimes we thank God as for saving indirectly from placing the foot on a snake lying in green grass or in muddy places. Snakes, when do they come out? Where are they found? Where do they live ?

How the fear lurking within, gripping and hair standing on the body? Mark the style of Ramanujan even if he sees a snake, he will describe it with humor and comicality as if someone were throwing a leather belt or rope to frighten. Sometimes the rubber toy snakes looking alike and waving frighten us badly.

What is a snake like? The poet sees images of snakes. How do shiny and spiral things sometimes frighten us? 

But while discussing the snakes, he tales a double-forked medium of analysis. On the one hand he takes to the horror and terror of seeing a snake unaware on the other he talks of the charm of the snakes which is but very risky and requires guts and confidence. He also speaks of the poor people working and living in poverty, warning off fear.

Dark is beautiful. Kali is dark. The Hindus, if they see the nightmares making them befallen with cobras unawares take it for as the call and worship of Shiva or the Naga Devata in the next morning to ward off the evil if it be any. We do not know if it is for absolving sins or to come across the fear lurking within. Whatever be that the black lingam is light-emitting no doubt, so mythical and mystical indeed.

The poem reminds us of the snake-charmer singing the song of Bihula-Lakhinder and Shiva-stuti in a folk-tale version and the cobras playing to the tunes of the songs and the movement of hands and knees. How do people free the tamed snakes into the small Manasa temples on the eve of Manasa Puja?

One can also relate to Naga Panchami on which the snakes are offered milk. At many places Naga Devata, with a metallic Naga is worshipped, just the raised platform fulfilling the purpose.

Many aghora sadhakas, Naga sadhus can be seen during the Kumbh Mela with the snakes rounded around the necks reminding us of Nilkantha Mahadeva. 

The snake coming into the nightly dream or seen through the nightmare too calls for worship after a bath without taking food during the morning seconded by a visit to some Shiva temple or Naga worship for to be cleansed from some dosha or a chance extended to or given. The dreaded too can be auspicious. Do the illusory snakes not take the test of Shiva-sadhakas? 

Sometimes blind faith betrays it, sometimes overconfidence. Where is nagamani, none can say it.  The black Shivalingam three white-lined and with the black cobra coiled around as a sign or motif make us opine it otherwise. Light emits it from the dark. The womb of creation is as such.

The author’s mother too calls in the charmer with the cobras to be anointed or fed milk on the auspicious occasion of that type of festivity. How risky and hazardous is it for those who keep and rear them? Let us think about two characters one is the charmer and the other the mother, if the former is poor, the latter rich.

Dark is beautiful. Is the creational aspect awesome, shrouded in mystery? How to see Shiva in me, in you? How to see matted, rudraksha-wearing Siva into the tiger-loincloth as a charming image so magical, mystical and mythical?

How to feel about Vishnu, Shaligram? What about Shyam, Ghanashyam? Whose shadow is it in the hills? Who is the upholder of Govardhana? How is the story of Kaliyanaga? Side by side Nagavamsas and Nagakanyas too engage us differently with different spheres of meaning to be laid bare of.

A snake-charmer kissing a cobra, have you seen the people loving the dragon and the dreaded? The tattoos on the arms can be marked. The scorpion tattoos on the bodies can be referred to. Some get small tattoos of the snake.

His phobia is strange herein. He keeps shuddering  merely at the idea of snakes. But the pranks he makes all the time cannot win our admiration and praise. He lacks courage and guts; this is to be sure of. He will jump if a belt is thrown at unawares or he comes across a rope in the dark. If this can be as such, how will he step outside? 

Snakes by A.K. Ramanujan is an astrologer’s poem or while playing the ludo, specially the snakes and the ladders, seems to have finished it. The poem has born out of graha’s fear and tantra-mantra.

The snakes appear on unawares. Sometimes we make mistakes on seeing the twisted and coiled things. Sometimes not, very often lie in mud and on the way. They really look like museum stuff or like quartz.

No, it does not happen
when I walk through the woods.
But, walking in museums of quartz
or the aisles of bookstacks
looking at their geometry
without curves
and the layers of transparency
that make them opaque,
dwelling on the yellower vein
in the yellow amber
or touching a book that has gold
on in spine,

The older, spirally bound note-books too, make the hair stand on his body and he hanks and dreams of cobras. But in course of time, he has come to live with. Bare realities can never be. 

Have we thought about the farmers working and toiling into the fields? The dust which flies from the feet of the farmer on   some noonday while taking to the road makes him imagined of. Angry hisses and hooded standing may hint the bad mood of the aunt.

The twirls of their hisses
rise like the tiny dust-cones on slow noon-roads
winding through the farmers’ feet. 
Black lorgnettes are etched on their hoods,
ridiculous, alien, like some terrible aunt,
a crest among tiles and scales
that moult with the darkening half
of every moon.

Sometimes the snake men are called for ritual purposes. Their hisses and uncurling envelope in the whole room. In order to please the customers, as a spectacle of daredevilry, the charmer called on the auspicious occasion of the puja round off the snakes around their necks. The mathematician horocopic, astrological Brahmin pundit father’s money too worked wonders. 

A basketful of ritual cobras
comes into the tame little house,
their brown-wheat glisten tinged with ripples.
They lick the rooms with their bodies, curves
uncurling, writing a sibilant alphabet of panic
on my floor. Mother gives them milk
in saucers. She watches them suck
and bare the black-line design
etched on the brass of the saucer.
The snakeman wreathes the writhing
around his neck
for father’s smiling
money. But I scream.

Sometimes the sister’s braid and the tassel take him by surprise. He is so fearsome even the fluffy and shiny things can surprise him. If the sister sits with the long black hanging hair scattered around, he will take her for a ghost and if it is braided into the waist, he will take it for a cobra lurking around.

Sister ties her braids
with a knot of tassel.
But the weave of her knee-long braid has scales,
their gleaming held by a score of clean new pins.
I look till I see her hair again.

The poet can write about the striders, but fears treading in waters, into the ponds full of lotuses where the snakes lie in. He feels scared of snakes and ghosts alike. Spooky tales are not, but the tales of vipers and reptiles take his sleeps away and he feels it helpless and frightened. But the poet seems to be gathering courage later in his life when he grows up.

 Man is a walking shadow, and the poet fears his own shadow too. How is that who fears his own footfall? The ticking of the clock too can aggravate the heartbeat of a weak man.

My night full of ghosts from a sadness
in a play, my left foot listens to my right footfall,
a clockwork clicking in the silence
within my walking.
The clickshod heel suddenly strikes
and slushes on a snake: I see him turn,
the green white of his belly
measured by bluish nodes, a water-bleached lotus-stalk
plucked by a landsman hand. Yet panic rushes
my body to my feet, my spasms wring
and drain his fear and mine. I leave him sealed,
a flat-head whiteness on a stain.

Now he can dare walk through the woods challenging it all. Where there lie in frogs, there can be snakes. Flies too keep buzzing the reptile and his eyes. To evoke the terrible and horrible gruesome imagery is the job of the poet who falls short of a prankster and here it is his pranks that we are reading.

Now
frogs can hop upon this sausage rope,
flies in the sun will mob the look in his eyes,
and I can walk through the woods.

Here the poet appears to be a fortune-teller, a stone-dealing palmist, an astrologer, a snake-man, a horoscope-maker of India.

Blakian stuffs are here, tiger and lambian things, Miltonic temptation and fall story of God and Satan, Adam and Eve. Does Shelley not tell about the swift, tameless and proud west wind, the power-force of it as Nature perceived?

Have you seen the cobras with the heads vermilion-pasted during the specific puja? The folk narrative of Icchanagin has always charmed us.

While reading this poem, I too get reminded how did the charmer having caught the black cobra come to show the bamboo-slick-woven basket with a red piece of cloth wrapped over the coiled and spiraled snake and how did he make me touch the skin asking to seek for blessings for a hefty sum of money?

There are some cobra places. Cobras live in the piles of haystacks, collected wooden logs, bamboo thickets, into the holes of the earthen walls, anthills, brick fields and thatched or tiled roofs. Black, brown, grey and white cobras, their snouts, tongues, eyes, marks on the hoods, are strange, horrific to describe the features. It is a poem of Nag vision. The vipers he has not. He has taken the help of humor, mockery, irony and mythology to deal with.

If the poet is so scared , resin leather stuff can also take on so easily. Where will he walk on?

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