Close Encounters Of The Reptile Kind!!

 A short real-life drama!

We moved to Ponda, Goa, in the early 1990s, when our little family was still finding its shape. From our bedroom window, a squat hill rose like a sleeping giant, and every morning the ridges and valleys beyond it felt like a private country. We settled into that landscape the way people settle into a second home, learning its light and its small social rhythms as if they were our own.

My Kawasaki Bajaj was a different kind of loud. It sat in the yard like an animal waiting to be fed. My daughter, Aditi, loved it – she would clamber onto the fuel tank with the careless certainty of a child who thinks the world is safe. My wife rode behind me; the three of us fit on that bike the way a secret fits a pocket.

Two‑stroke bikes need regular care. The muffler in the silencer collects carbon and must be taken apart and cleaned. Mechanics would strip the muffler, scrub the deposits, then start the engine before reassembling so any loose carbon would be blown clear. The practice made sense, but it also made a sound like a small explosion – raw, metallic, and startling.

One afternoon, after the mechanic had finished cleaning, he kicked the bike to life. The engine answered with a cacophony that seemed to shake the air itself. The sound was so violent it felt as if the world had been nudged. Sound slammed into the yard and into my chest. I flinched. The mechanic laughed, pleased with the job. Then something moved. Then something slid out from under the fuel tank with wet deliberate grace and lay across the workshop floor: a snake, sleek and indifferent, as if it had been sleeping there for years. It did not strike. nor flee in panic. It slid, as if it had been waiting for the exact moment the bike would roar.

The mechanic swore softly. The snake vanished into the scrub before any of us could move. We were unhurt. We were lucky. But luck is a thin thing. For years afterward, every time I heard the familiar sound of a Kawasaki two‑stroke cough to life, my throat tightened, and the memory slid back into me: the sudden roar, the slow uncoiling, the thought of what might have been.

I saw Aditi’s small hand in my mind – her fingers curled around that same tank on rides we’d taken a hundred times. I saw my wife’s hair against my back. The image hit like cold water. The bike had been a nest. The cable harness, the hollow under the tank – a perfect shelter. We had been riding with a hidden passenger for God knows how long!? 

Even now, years later, the memory tightens my chest when I picture my daughter’s small hands on that tank and the casual way we trusted the machine. A few years after that, I sold the Kawasaki and bought a scooter – safer, quieter, more of a family vehicle than a prideful mount.

I never told my wife or Aditi about the snake. I carried the secret with me, thinking it would fade. Now I am sharing it, finally, because some memories are too strange to keep to oneself.