moving into a new neighborhood…

I saw it from a distance, a shimmering black length across the breadth of the narrow country road. I was speeding and speaking into my phone when my eyes were taken by this long thing on which light played and made an effect of it twisting about itself like a length of loose photographic film. At the moment when it struck me that it was actually a snake, it rose and folded back and shot into the bushes whence it came. I hadn't imagined that something so black could glint like that and I cursed myself for causing the commotion that denied me a better view of it—such a beauty! I fear snakes though I've held an occasional one in my hand, and I'm excited in a strange fearful way that in a year I'll live where there are many of them.

Technorati Tags: environment, karnataka