Four rescues between 11:15 am and 3:15 pm. Four different locations, four different kinds of chaos, and by the end of it, one very memorable bite. This is what a rescue day sometimes looks like when the calls decide to stack instead of spacing themselves out politely.
11:15 am: GoodEarth’s carpentry unit calls. Someone has found a snake wedged between wood panels, and given the setting, everyone is imagining something suitably dramatic. It’s a checkered keelback, large, bright yellowish-green, clearly well fed and not remotely interested in the drama. Non-venomous, mostly harmless, mostly annoyed at being disturbed. I move it to the water body nearby and head back.
I’m barely home when the phone rings again. Attiguppe metro station this time, ten stations from where I live. My number has clearly done the rounds after a couple of Kengeri metro rescues. It’s not just gossip that travels fast. I check the map, decide driving makes more sense than public transport when you’re carrying rescue equipment. With the items in my bag, I’m sure the security at Challaghatta station would’ve called Rapid Action Force.
By the time I arrive, the platform has turned into a small production. Station staff have cordoned off the area, several of them filming on their phones, and a decent crowd of commuters are amused to watch me deal with a snake on a seemingly regular day of commute. Someone asks if I have a YouTube channel. Someone else, more practically, asks how much I charge for rescues. The snake, for its part, is the only one in the vicinity not performing for anyone. I pick it up and release it on the way home.
Home, finally. A quick wash, and I sit down to lunch, the first real pause of the day. I don’t get far into it before another call comes in: a snake in a kid’s shoe. I abandon lunch and rush over, half expecting the usual scramble to find the family cat instead of the actual snake. This time it’s accurate. Another young rat snake, considerably more frisky than the last one, and it makes its opinion known with a bite that draws blood. If there’s a takeaway here, it’s this: tap your shoes before you put them on. Not a metaphor, not a life lesson, just useful advice from someone currently nursing a puncture wound.
I’m still releasing the shoe snake when the next call comes in, and this one’s a genuine change of pace. A construction site, snake spotted three floors underground. Getting there requires something closer to gymnastics than snake handling, scaffolding, ladders, and a fair amount of squeezing through gaps that weren’t built with rescue equipment in mind. I spend 40 minutes combing a claustrophobic underground site before finding the culprit: a young checkered keelback, apparently unbothered by the depth or the darkness. It gets moved to safety, and so do I, back up three floors and into daylight.
Four rescues, four hours, one bite. Different settings, but the same afternoon, back to back, with barely enough time between calls to wash the previous rescue off my hands before the next one started. Oh, not just that, with water shortage in the community I live in, I had to go to another community to take a shower after all this drama.
These are the days I could do without. Not because any single rescue was particularly hard, each one on its own is routine by now, but because four of them stacked together with no gaps in between takes something out of you that a single rescue doesn’t. The body doesn’t distinguish between a five-minute pickup and a forty-minute crawl through an underground site, it just adds up the totals and presents the invoice later that evening.
I’ll take the bite over a bitten kid any day, and I’d rather drive 35 minutes to Attiguppe than have station staff try to handle it themselves. But there’s a difference between doing the work and doing the work four times in four hours, and today I felt that difference in my knees, my back, and one very sore arm.
