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When I finally caught up with her, she asked me what that was about back there and I told her that I thought I had just been cursed.

Part of me wanted to simply give her some money, but ahead of me, Margie was already being swallowed up by the swell of people and I didn’t want to lose her. As I picked my way through the narrow street, she followed, keeping up a steady flow of shouts. I put my wallet back in my pocket and the woman with the basket of snakes let out a horrified shriek as if I had bitten her, followed by a cascade of words for which I needed no translator.

She has a habit of disappearing, and while that’s okay in a grocery store, I didn’t want to lose her in a crowd in India. I asked her to wait but she seemed impatient and was already moving along in the crowd. By “things that shouldn’t scare me,” I mean largely the supernatural.Īt that moment, my wife emerged from the shop along the way and she signaled me to join her. You wouldn’t look at me, six feet tall (barely) with a bit of a gut and say, “Now that’s a macho dude.” I’m just saying that the things that should scare me usually don’t and the things that shouldn’t scare me sometimes do. I’ve even had a rifle held on me in Mindanao and I think I handled myself with an aplomb that surprised me. I have a healthy fear of heights, but nothing I’d classify as a phobia. I used to catch snakes as a kid in Ohio and snakes don’t bother me. A basket of cobras is more effective a panhandling technique than most, and so I reached into my pocket to give her some rupees.

The woman said something to me in a language I didn’t understand, and held out one hand while keeping the basket of snakes close to her chest with the other.

Pulling stroller duty with our youngest daughter, Naomi, I had been trying to stay out of the way of the steady flow of people crossing my path in both directions. I stood in a crowded market in the town of Shimla, in the foothills of the Himalayas, waiting for my wife and my daughter Shoshie while they shopped in one of the small stores that packed the narrow lane. The old woman, dressed in a sari and covered in silver bangles, placed a basket beneath my eyes and opened the lid.