Bengaluru: For nearly a week they had heard strange sounds from the toilets on the ground floor of their house late at night , but never did they suspect that a five foot Indian spectacled cobra was coiled deep inside a commode in one of them.
So it came as quite a shock to the family of Dr Harsha Rajaram , a general manager of a multi-specialty hospital, when the snake was finally spotted in the toilet of their home in Abigere, near Jalahahalli in Hessargatta on June 3. Luckily no one was bitten despite the family’s elders and two children using the toilet over the week.
“We often heard strange sounds from inside the bathroom, but thought it was either lizards or rats making them,” said the doctor’s son, Rahul, adding, “Never in our wildest dreams, did we think there could be a snake hiding inside the commode. It came as a shock to know because the ground floor toilets are the ones that our family uses the most.”
But as there was also a constant unusual stench from one toilet, the maids were asked to repeatedly clean it with perfumed cleaners, but it did not help, he recounts.
The family dismissed it as a drainage problem, but on June 3, Dr Harsha decided to investigate on hearing a strange sound from the toilet again and was dumbfounded to see a part of the snake coiled within the oval rift of the commode from where the flush water flows into it.
Shocked, he called the BBMP wildlife rescuer and stood guard at the spot till it was removed. Going by its rescuer the snake could have entered the kitchen from outside and then crawled into the toilet to hide itself inside the commode. It was later taken to a forest and returned to its natural surroundings.
