A resident of northeastern India got the fright of his life yesterday (November 10) when he saw a deadly cobra in his bathroom.

As he ran to raise the alarm, the equally terrified reptile tried to flee down the drain but got stuck in the metal mesh covering the outlet.

Rescuers from Snake Helpline travelled to the home in Bhubaneswar and captured the cobra.

They cut off the metal mesh surrounding its body and then released it in a natural habitat.

Ajay Mukharjee, a resident of Bhubaneswar in eastern India, saw a cobra in his washroom on November 10. Shocked, he came out of the room raising an alarm.

The cobra tried to escape by slipping through the hole in a steel mesh that had covered the drainage outlet. The small hole let the cobra’s head and neck pass but trapped the rest of the body.

The family made a call to Snake Helpline and when its general secretary Subhendu Mallik visited their home he saw the cobra trying to come out of the washroom door dragging the steel mesh along.

Ajay Mukharjee’s brave wife, Diptimayee, had pinned it down with the help of a long stick.

Subhendu captured the snake in a bag and took it to his office where the cobra’s was inserted into a transparent restraining tube. Two members, Silka Selony and Asis Kumar Behera, carefully cut open the steel mesh with a cutting plier. They took 10 minutes to break open the steel mesh and the snake was later released in a natural habitat.

Subhendu Mallik said: "We did not find any external injury on the cobra, so we could release it quickly.”