If instead of a scorpion it would have been a snake, the lady might have had died, yet the villagers who cast ‘scorpion shadows’ on the wall clicked their tongues and would have sat doing nothing with their ‘peace of understanding on their faces’.The period has been moved up to the 18th century, and the dialogue has been slightly simplified and clarified, but Shakespeare's language is largely intact (and easier to understand than in Baz Luhrmann's new “Romeo & Juliet”). The same happens with the mother whose getting stung is regarded as the litmus test of her bodily and spiritual sanctity. It is the story of India where any problem is directly related to one’s earlier and latter life of the victim. The story that how an ailment ails a society and how the people inside the society instead of working for the benefit of the society works against it bound by their dark ignorance. The mother is not the mother of the author but the body politic of the society. The scorpion is poisonous, so is the ignorance of the villagers. The scorpion’s poison seems to run parallel with the poison of superstition. In fact the sting of superstition seems to be more dangerous and harmful than the sting of the scorpion. The poem starts with the climax where the diabolic act is already done and the entire poem is a follow up of whatever goes on after the sting. The details mentioned are also vague (though the details of the duration and the names of the herbs are very precisely mentioned). The poem seems to be a remembrance as the word ‘remember’ suggests. Stanzas do not follow any set type or format. The structure of the poem is quite modern since it doesn’t really have much of a regular structure to talk of. Building on that the poem’s diction is very well suited to the occasion of poem which seeks to describe a situation. Again the words do convey the double edgedness of the satire where the descriptive-narrative flavor of the poem is intensified. In fact all the words are simple and any number of words will suffice as examples. The simplicity of the poem again is highlighted by the choice of simple words. The words like ‘clicked their tongues’, ‘mud baked walls’ etc add an exotic Indian touch to the poem. The choice of words is so made as to suggest the simplicity of the emotion conveyed but the simple words do signify greater attitudes and that is what good poetry is all about. Nobody did anything for the benefit of the mother other than make these kinds of nonsensical remarks except the father who tried all his quack techniques to heal the lady but it took around 20 hours for the poison to lose its sting and until then the mother writhed in pain and thanked god for the punishment that was meted to her instead of her children being victimized. According to the villagers the sting of the scorpion would purge the impurities of the flesh and would make the mother spiritually healthy. Unable to find the creature the villagers prayed that the scorpion be still and invoked the gods. The villagers tried to search for the insect in order to immobilize it so that the poison doesn’t spread since according to their belief the more the insect moves the more the poison spreads inside the body. The author recounts the night, a scorpion driven by continuous rain hidden beneath a rice sack stung the poet’s mother and ran off after the attack.
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