Ananthashayanam

I know, I know. After reading this story, you might think that all my old lady had in her life were adventures or sort of it, and nothing else.  But, I would say it is something like that.  And no fictionalized moment is involved in any of it.  The living legend still lives and all you need for a live documentation, is to come to my house.  So, coming back to stories, do you know what ‘Ananthashayanam’ means?  Before you google it and ‘navigate away from this page’, I will tell you.

‘Ananthashayanam’ is a Sanskrit word that comes from ‘a posture of reclination of Lord Maha Vishnu on the great snake called Kaliya’.  His very famous posture is lying on the curled up shesh naag, with one elbow popped up and his head resting on it.  So, imagine a human being in an ‘Ananthashayanam’ posture!  Don’t worry. My granny did not do it.  She just sort of did something like it.

Those days, she wasn’t living with us.  We were here in Baroda and she used to visit us often.  And yes, with a ticket and her baggage, she used to travel alone.  All the way from Trivendrum to Baroda, when no 28-hour Konkan railway existed and when it took more than 48 hours for the journey.  So, once it so happened that she had reached back home in Kerala, after a long journey and it was past 2 am.  She used to live alone in her house, though her eldest son and family lived just a few yards away.  On her insistence, we had not informed her son about her arrival.

As she had arrived late, she just opened the door, dumped the luggage and slumped on the rolled up bedding.  She slept soundly till her daughter-in-law came knocking with tea and breakfast in the morning.  After exchanging news and having breakfast, both of them decided to make the place a little inhabitable.  As they both lifted up the rolled bedding, the daughter-in-law shrieked. 

There, under the first set of mattress, stretched leisurely was a serpent.  Almost nine feet long, shiny black and silvery tones here and there, it was lying on the second set of mattress.  Grandma says that it had a look of being disturbed out of a pleasurable siesta, but certain calmness, unlike the humans, shone in its luminous eyes. 

Pushing my shrieking aunt out, grandma stood outside for sometime.  About 10 minutes later, they saw it get out of the nearby window and vanish among thick bushes beyond.  When they got inside the room, they saw that it had left a gift for my granny.  A still-shiny piece of its old skin! Bizarre gift, I know. All the same, she kept it carefully wrapped, till she came here to stay with us.  No one till date knows whether granny was aware or not of the snake, through out the night.

My granny is known for the incident in the village, thanks to my aunt and her group of what we call over-the-fence-gossip-mongers.  They call her ‘the lady who slept on a snake’.  The lady who did something like ‘Ananthashayanam’.