sentences:  However, she never had the chance to explain this enigmatic statement fully, for she was stricken by cholera, and died.Maya suspected that something far more sinister than the disease had killed her mother, and her suspicions were confirmed by her father’s death shortly thereafter.He had been killed by the bite of a krait, a tiny venomous snake, and in the last hours of her mother’s life, Surya had repeatedly warned Maya to beware ‘the serpent’s shadow’.