The Slytherin Wizard

“COMElet’s release this fellow in the bushes,” says Shravan as he led me into the forested tracts of the sprawling Theosophical Society campus in Chennai.

- G.C. Shekhar

After a short walk, he pulled out the wriggling rat snake—captured at 8 am in a housing colony—from a black cloth bag and handed it over to me to do the honour of setting it free. The snake slithered into the long grass and disappeared. “If it were a cobra, I would have released it in a more remote area—for the well-being of the snake as well as humans. But a rat snake, among the two dozen or so non-venomous species in and around Chennai, causes no harm,” he explains.