This Post Has a Snake Casting Call

This is funny.

I’ve been spending some quality time in Kerala these days, it’s monsoon, and it’s green and beautiful and all that. So somehow this topic comes up often, that you always anticipate snakes, especially if you’re walking barefoot into the green.

Oor is it just me?

Fine, I agree that I’m shit scared of them.

And yes, I’ll tell you why. 

I was five, full of life, running barefoot through the paddy fields like some sort of tiny, feral forest spirit (Think Mowgli of The Jungle Book). 

It had just rained, and everything was slippery and green. I stepped on what I thought was a belt. A weird, wet belt. I didn’t think much of it because I was five, and five-year-olds aren’t quite known for their survival instincts. 

Then I felt a presence.
Like the kind of presence where you just know you’re not alone.
I turned around. 

Cobra.

Head up. Staring at me like, how dare you?!

Was it enormous?
Yes.

Or was I just tiny?
Also yes.

Either way, I ran. Probably screamed. Blacked out part of the memory. But I survived. 

Yay.

Naturally, the next day at kindergarten, I did what anyone would do: told the whole dramatic story to my 4-5-year-old friends. And those geniuses told me that cobras are vengeful.

Apparently, they remember your face. They wait. They follow. They attack years later, when you least expect it. (I blame Malayalam movies, man)

From that moment on, I was convinced this one cobra had a personal grudge. I even asked around how long these people live.
20 to 23 years. So I waited.
Two decades of quiet paranoia later, I did the math and realized that the snake guy was probably dead by now.

Peace, finally.

But still.. snakes?

They’re weird, slimy, silent, and unpredictable. Can be deadly (even when they’re not, I swear they’re capable of giving me a heart attack), and most importantly, they’re unnecessarily long.

I mean, seriously, why do they have to be so long!!?

Anyway, I have this thing - if I’m scared of something, I’d absolutely try and face it with class :p

So, I was talking to a friend of mine about this time when I faced the fear of snakes.

This was back in Paris, when I was learning photography. We were supposed to design a jewelry campaign, and our beloved teachers at Spéos were super supportive of any wild ideas we came up with. I wanted to bring a huge-ass python to the studio for the jewelry shoot.

John was the most supportive, as always. I should mention that.

We discussed. I was supposed to make a study in the first place because, of course, you’re shooting with a wild (well, pythons are pets in Europe) animal, and it had to be absolutely fair to the animal as well as the rest of the people on the closed studio floor. I studied the animal behavior, the amount of lights that can be used, if using studio flashes was harmful for these guys. If yes, how do we address that? Not to mention, while doing all of these, I was the one who was the most scared.

Again, I wanted to get used to it. So I went to a few of those huge terrariums in the city to spend time with, uhm, snakes. I met all different varieties of snakes - the thin ones, colorful ones, huge ones with nice sharp teeth, the active ones, the dead-looking ones who’d do their workout once in a blue moon to gulp their prey. Everyone had super intricate patterns on them that made them unique.

There was this super cute (yes, I said cute) one, which was a milky green python. They said I could take him/her home for €350, and boy, was I excited.

I was a student in Paris and €350 was what I used to pay monthly for my 12m² studio apartment, which had a view of the Eiffel Tower, btw. And even the idea of that snake being out of that glass box put me into that tingling dread situation.

Moving on, I sorted out the permissions and a brave team, and then we had to do the casting. The best-looking, best-behaved snake in the city. We managed to establish a network of all the snake people in the city, and perhaps outside the city as well.

And then, the shoot never happened. One of the snakes fell sick the day before. The other had some sort of travel anxiety (or its owner did). And the third one just straight up refused to leave its house.

So yeah. After all the research, the permissions, the team, the casting calls, the fearless overcoming of this lifelong fear - sigh - we had to cancel the shoot.

But hey, I went from screaming at Google images of snakes to casually shortlisting one for a close-up. That definitely counts for something.