The Sting

Jayashantha Jayawardhana

Akila left for the Maths class at Mrs. Jayasekera’s at 7.30 in the morning. Reaching there, she was delighted to learn that the class was not going to be held because some relatives were to pay them - Mr. and Mrs. Jayasekera a visit that morning. Almost clapping with delight, she got back to the ‘Depot’ road and waited for a bus to take her home. By 8.30 a.m., she returned home to a surprised mother who was busy sweeping the garden. Before the latter could inquire why she had returned early. Akila explained why the class had been cancelled.

Having changed into a black frock with maroon flowers, her favourite dress at home, she came into the parlour. Seating herself upon a comfy couch, she switched on the television, set in the stand-by-mode with the remote and was delighted to find ‘Pissu Pusa’, her favourite cartoon programme being telecast on Jathika Rupavahini. Hardly had she settled herself on the couch before her little brother, a nursling started to shriek. His scream brought their mother into the parlour where Akila sat laughing merrily at the antics of the crazy cat and his satellites.

As she began to nurse the infant, mother asked Akila to sweep out the rest of the compound. Muttering a protest though, she switched off the television, rose and came out of the parlour. she picked up the broom leaning against the mango tree opposite the verandah and began to sweep.

Akila was eleven. With a rotund face and fair in complexion, she was a beautiful child. She had a charming smile that endeared her to almost everyone who met her. But, her parents knew she was a very naive child.

If she spotted or just thought she had spotted a monitor or a rat snake by the ‘kohila’ pit beside the well, she would refuse to go anywhere near it until the following day. Understandably, the little herpetologist thought that monitors and rat snakes did not spend more than one day at the same spot. Akila alone knew how she had come to predict the behaviour of reptiles like that.

As she continued to sweep, she recalled the nightmare she had had the previous night. A cobra with a great hood had materialized from under her table and had jumped onto the bed and stung her on the neck just above the collar-bone. Just as its fangs pierced her neck, her shriek pierced the nocturnal silence, which brought her father and mother into the room. When she had described what she had seen, her father quipped that such an athletic cobra could have easily won the gold medal for ‘high jump’ at the Olympic Games.

In the backyard, the grass was a bit too tall, so she had the reasonable suspicion that it harboured venomous snakes. As she stepped closer to the lush grass, she felt something sting her left toe. The next moment, she felt such pain and so clearly saw a big snake moving through the grass some two feet ahead of her that she was ceratin she had just been stung by a snake and began to scream, ‘I was stung by a cobra! I was stung by a cobra!’ and ran in. Alarmed, her mother inquired what had happened.

Squirming with rising pain Akila told her how she had been stung by a huge cobra, her speech being punctuated by intermittent cries. When she examined the bite, however, she saw it was little bigger than a needle-point. Still, Akila appeared to be in such pain that mother suspected she had been stung by a snake. She called her husband who ran a grocery in Kuliyapitiya some three miles from home and told him what had happened. He returned home in half an hour with a cab to take Akila to hospital.

Disturbed as he was, once he had arrived home, the skeptic father went to examine the spot where Akila had been stung. He found a nest of Kalanduruwo with a few vicious flies on and around it, half-hidden in the luxuriant grass. A hanassa lay about a foot from it which appeared to have fallen from the coconut tree by the woodshed inside which he found a big rat snake a moment later. He realized in no time what had happened.

With a big grin he walked over to the trishaw where they sat in, ready to ride off, and asked them to get down much to the dismay of the disturbed mother of the frightened daughter.