Seventeen-year-old Shahzadi Zarqa drapes a writhing bundle of snakes around her neck, letting them wriggle across her face and body.
The smiling, dark-haired Pakistani beauty selects two of the scaly reptiles and pops their heads in her mouth.Then she takes another and encourages it to bite her finger. When the fangs draw blood, she sucks out the poison.
Decked out in costume jewelry and a red tunic, Zarqa performs her snake show nightly against a painted backdrop outside the castle in Multan, 250 miles south of Islamabad.
She has tamed a collection of 30 snakes, some of which she says are highly poisonous. But Zarqa has lived with snakes all her life and does not mind their bites.
"I gave her a dose of snake poison when she was born," her father, Shahzada Ahmed Bux, told Reuters.
"I always wanted to be a prince, but when I realized it was not my destiny, I made it my mission to make my daughter the princess of snakes," he said.
Zarqa demonstrates how she feeds a snake by hand, forcing its mouth open with a stick, which she then uses to ram a piece of buffalo stomach far down its throat. She massages the snake's body to help it digest the meal.
Handling her pets with nonchalant skill, Zarqa keeps them clean by stripping away dead scales by hand.
"Snake are harmless animals," she said. "They do not bother anyone unless disturbed. What harm could an animal bring which has no eyelids or ears? It is a very innocent being."
Zarqa says she gets pleasure from snake bites, which help her to get a good night's sleep. She has high immunity, but if the snake injects too much poison, she sucks it out.
Zarqa, whose family originally came from Kashmir, donates 35 percent of her earnings to the Kashmir Fund in support of Muslim militants fighting Indian rule in the Himalayan region.
"I take pride in the people who lay down their lives to free Kashmir from Indian occupation. Sometimes I feel like joining their ranks and killing all their enemies," she said.
Charming snakes in a dusty Punjab provincial town is all very well, but Zarqa yearns for wider audiences. "I wish to become a movie star, but my love for snakes will not end."