1. Try to rewrite the story without its humour, merely as a frightening incident. What details or parts of the story would you leave out?

 

 

1. One hot summer night, a doctor returned home late at night. He heard a familiar scuttling sound of rats from above while opening the door. He heard the sound thrice. The doctor was sitting at a table—on which stood a lamp and a mirror—when he heard a dull thud as if a rubber tube had fallen to the ground. At the same time that the doctor turned his back to find out the source of the thud, he found a snake wriggling at the back of his chair. As the snake slowly slid along the arm of the doctor, he found himself paralysed with fear. The doctor sat there without a muscle moving, silently praying to God. The doctor felt helpless and foolish at that time as he did not have any medicine for snakebite. By chance, the snake turned his head to the mirror and it slowly slithered away towards it. Taking the opportunity, the doctor ran till he reached his friend's house, where he took bath and changed into fresh clothes. Next morning, he returned to his house to shift his belongings only to find that his belongings had been stolen by a thief.

To turn the story into just a frightening incident without humour, I would leave out the following elements from the story: the author's description about his beauty and his admiration of the same; his ambition to marry a fat and rich female doctor; the part about the snake admiring its beauty by looking into the mirror; the doctor's remark about the thief leaving back only his dirty vest.