All of our wonderful friends and family know that I was very concerned about the 4 types of venomous snakes frequently found in Bangalore. Every conversation about the move went something like, “Yes, we are very excited to move to India, but there are 4 types of venomous snakes in the city we are moving to which I am not excited about.” The first week I was here I carefully and thoroughly checked the baby’s crib and the girls’ beds several times during the night for fear of the creepy crawlies.

Two Saturdays ago I was trying to figure out what to wear for our first Bangalore night out without the kids that would translate culturally (you know, not too New York—-black or ripped, not too short, not too tight, not too young-looking, comfortable, somewhat professional since we were meeting Dan’s colleagues later in the evening). As I was getting dressed I heard a lot of screaming coming from the driveway. There is always a lot of screaming around Villa 12, and Dan was outside watching the girls while they rode their bikes so I didn’t give it too much thought. Until 5 minutes went by and there was still intermittent screaming. I went to investigate and found the 3 girls, our 8 year old neighbor, his dad, and Dan standing around a brownish-black, 2 inch long earth worm. Mia said, “Mama, snake, scared.” She kept running up to a few inches from it, squatting down, peering at it, and running away screaming. Guys, why are we screaming? Mia, it’s okay, Lovie, that’s not a snake; it’s a worm. And that’s when Dan said, “Worms don’t move like that.” I went in for a closer look and saw that indeed the worm was moving in a very un-worm like S-shape. Yeah, that’s a snake. So what kind of snake is it? Is it poisonous? Is it a baby something or is this a full grown snake? Do we need to call the snake catcher? Just then, Dan, our brave hero picked up a piece of cardboard from the recycling bin, lifted up the snake by the edge of the cardboard and threw her in the storm drain at the edge of our driveway. We mutually decided that it wasn’t anything to be concerned about because it was so small and probably harmless, although Dan played up his heroic act all evening.

During around the 4th round of cocktails at a local bar, Dan casually mentioned that unbeknownst to me the driver told him that he thought that the snake was probably a baby cobra. Wait, what? I sobered right up and proceeded to start panicking. Apparently the driver told Dan that it probably fell out of a tree or crawled out of the drain when it rained. So if that was a baby cobra, where was the mom? And where were the other babies? Was the cobra nearby in our yard? Should we call the snake catcher? Should we call security? Someone? Although no one else present seemed all that concerned, for me the rest of the evening involved me and Google trying desperately to identify the driveway snake.

From what my research revealed, our snake was not a baby cobra. Baby cobras are indeed black, but pretty much look like small cobras, not worms. Just that much knowledge helped me settle down a bit and continue in the revelry. The next day, when I was able to see straight, I did some additional research and found that the snake was probably the Brahminy Worm Snake AKA The Brahminy Blind Snake or the Flowerpot Snake, and was the world’s smallest snake species. What I found most interesting from http://www.indiansnakes.org/content/brahminy-worm-snake (please excuse the grammatical issues as this was copied and pasted directly from the website) was the following:

“Almost always non-offensive and cannot harm large bodied enemy (like mammals, rodents, birds etc.) except poking their spiny tail on body to distract their attention or make surprize for a while. no aggressive display is known for this and probably all other Worm/Blind Snakes. It is an all-female triploid species having no evidence of male individuals till now. It reproduces parthenogenetically without fertilization by sperm and thus can build up a population from just one individual.”

Big sigh of relief. We had our first and hopefully only snake spotting and it was literally with the world’s smallest snake species. I get the feeling that God is teasing us. We get the street-cred for surviving our first snake encounter, but can sleep soundly at night because it was so puny and benign. Reminds me of my basal cell skin cancer: it’s cancer, but the puny kind.