On a trip through India in 1983 I decided to spend some time in Goa to enjoy one of the last true hippie bastions on this planet. On arrival I moved into a family-run hostel but after a while an opportunity presented itself to rent a small house.

Located somewhere on the beach road between the villages of Calangute and Baga, north of the capital Panaji, the place was a cosy little affair built in the style of the former Portuguese colonialists, just a little less impressive than most of the much photographed larger and ornate villas of the surrounding neighborhood.

The house sat on the edge of a sandy square just a few meters from the street. It had a small veranda with two red painted stone benches on both sides of the entrance door. The main roof was covered with red ceramic tiles and the building itself had whitewashed walls. The few small windows had dark wooden shutters and prison-like iron bars but no glass panes. Entering through the massive wooden entrance door one immediately stood in the middle of the main living/dining/sleeping room. No luxury here, the floor was covered with simple brown coloured ceramic tiles and the underside of the roof served as the ceiling.  Bare white walls and some very rudimentary furniture completed the interior. An open archway lead into the spartan kitchen equipped with nothing but a simple kerosene cooker and a few barren shelves; in one corner of that room, however, there was a kind of shower cabin with a water tap.

Indeed, this water tap had to be considered a luxury as it certainly was not a regular fixture in most houses here. In fact, many places in the area had no running water at all so people had to get water from nearby public wells and store them in containers in their houses.

The water tap was installed in an about one-square-meter wide cubicle surrounded by raw concrete walls, so that’s why I called it my shower – even though there was no shower head or any fixture alike. A simple metal pipe served as drain and lead through the wall into the garden. As a result, there was always a lush patch of greenery just where the pipe ended on the outside in the otherwise pretty much neglected and mostly withered garden.

Certainly, that tap had one obvious advantage: there was a steady supply of fairly clean water for most of the day, so there was no need to heave murky well water. The tap, unfortunately, had a shortcoming, too: the large supply pipes that fed my house had apparently been laid under the main road which was exposed to the sun during the day. The surface of the road heated up the pipes beneath tremendously raising the water temperature close to boiling point. Taking a hot shower on a hot day might be a big hit in the Far East – Japanese really have a liking for piping hot water, but I much rather preferred a cool splash after a day at the beach.

Therefore, I had to devise a way to keep a sufficient supply of cool water: I bought some large plastic buckets at a local store, filled them with water in the morning and stored them in my shower cubicle so that the water remained cool in the shade of the house and made my ritual afternoon bucket ‘n ladle showers a fun exercise.

I must confess that most of my days in Goa were dominated by a lazy routine. After breakfast at the local restaurant, I often headed for the beach, spent the morning swimming, reading and chatting with whoever was around. In the early afternoon I usually headed back to the same restaurant for a simple lunch of some noodles or rice after which I then returned home for a shower and a nap before getting ready for another evening on the party circuit.

So, on one of those ordinary days I had just returned from the beach looking forward to getting back into the shade of my house, a shower and an afternoon nap.

While I had been out and about, though, a black snake of about one meter in length had found entrance into my house through the drain pipe of my shower, had coiled up behind the buckets on the warm damp floor and was dozing the afternoon away.

It didn’t stir when I entered the house and didn’t move when I got undressed and stepped into the cubicle to take a shower. In fact, nothing indicated that I had an unwanted guest in the house and apparently all this clatter and movement had not alarmed it in the least, maybe because snakes and people have been living side by side for a long time in that part of the world.

But then, as soon as I noisily sank the ladle in one of the buckets to splash some cold water over me, the startled snake suddenly began to move, and soon after all hell broke lose! Both the reptile and I were at this very moment sharing the minimal space of my shower, me, naked, petrified and unable to react, blocked the only obvious exit while the snake madly thrashed about in its attempt to find a safe getaway.

At this point I am tempted to embellish my little story by claiming that it must have been a Cobra, which in fact was a feared regular sight in this neighborhood, and I courageously grabbed it by the neck and tossed it out the window – but far from that. Firstly, there was no window to toss things out of and, after long seconds of thrashing about, the reptile found the opening of the drain pipe and slithered away so I had no opportunity to take a closer look. I could still hear it wasting my garden greenery as it was leaving the grounds.

Sometime later I talked to my landlady about the incident and she readily launched into one of her stories about the horrors of people who got bitten by cobras and other unpleasant creatures. She indeed managed to scare me to the point that I instantly went to the next hardware store to get some wire mesh which I attached to the outer opening of the pipe. When I checked the house for other holes, though, I realized that there were so many cracks and openings in the walls and roof that patching them all up would have come almost close to rebuilding the house – and despite some other unpleasant surprises with biting insects and noisy geckos no other snake ever visited me again as long as I stayed in that place.