Have you ever wondered about that egg,- the one desperate Nagaina dragged with her into the abandoned rat-hole we called home? The one that Kipling doesn’t mention again. I was that egg. Now I am full grown. I’ve re-located. Living in another country you can deceive yourself that the past is insignificant, even that it never existed. In my reformulation, the story would have ended so very differently. Mostly I can forget that I was born an orphan, with 24 siblings slaughtered by that treacherous Rikki Tikki Tawi. I prefer the condensed moniker RTT;-to grace him with his full name may re- flesh memories preferred forgotten. Still, on hunting nights when the moon is waxing, I sometimes find myself involuntarily hissing it’s entirety, so magic-ing -up his mongoose wraithness.

Mom, you remember, perished but not before hiding me under the dung-enriched earth of a side alcove. Snakes,-cobras in particular,- have an excellent sense of smell and near-perfect recall. The offensive sweetness of desiccated rat-pellets mingling with the stink of jubilant mongoose, the muffled distant cries of Man as Mom was murdered, the jubilant rasping of  RTT as she lay dying, these are my earliest memories.