No Bed of Rhesus

(Published in Outlook City. Wrote a version of this in a post for Animal Rights India. As for the monkeys, they're still here...we're still getting along, and I reflect that, well, I've had worse-behaved human guests so I shouldn't complain.)

My guests have been hooted at, had obscene gestures made at them, and showered with muck. "Really," they say nervously, retreating from verandah to main house, "it's a zoo in here." A gibbering band of bandars celebrates our departure by doing imitations of The Who at the guitar-smashing stage. Because of the curious fence around the verandah, it feels like being in a cage: on display, harassed, hoping the bars will hold.

The first monkeys I met in Delhi were much more polite: the twice-born, the legendary rhesus macaques of North and South Block. Civil servants and ministers came and went, but there were always monkeys in the corridors of power.

It's often said that it's hard to tell the three apart, but that's not true. The ones who do their raiding in bands are the civil servants, the ones who jump up and down and hoot raucously are the politicians, and the quiet guys over there, reading files and sipping tea, that's the Bandar-log. The only real grief they caused the Government of India aside from shredded files was that, in the heart of Red Tape Land, they refused to sign attendance registers.

The four places where you'll always find monkeys are at the University, near Parliament, in temples and on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, home to the media. The University monkeys were more civilized than the students: they refrained from eve-teasing, rigging elections and organizing bandhs and only got into the bhang on Holi.

The BSZ Marg monkeys often dropped in for cups of Akhtar's tea. One group of four would sit with grave solemnity at the Udupi while the waiters brought their regular "order": garish ice creams with vadas on the side, no sambar. Like true media types, they never paid the bill. When the Old Lady of Boribunder turned into slutty Page 3 pin-up, the monkeys endeared themselves to us by getting smashed on purloined rum and pissing into the water tank on the ToI roof.

As Delhi expanded and its forests died, rhesus macaque became permanent migrants, small bands of furry exiles always on the run, displaced by yet another granite-marble colony or mall. Papers wrote of the "monkey menace": the baby biters, the homicidal ones who killed people by dropping flower pots on their heads. No one mentioned that we'd made them homeless in the first place. The MCD caught monkeys and dropped them off at the ruined ramparts of Tughlaqabad; they came back, searching endlessly for the homes we'd taken from them. Parliament hired langurs, about the only other monkey that rhesus macaque fears, and Priti Langur and Hero Langur scared off monkey bands as official servants of the state (payment in bananas).

The band of bandars who scared my guests was terrifying at first, the bulls gnashing and barking, the mothers rampaging like thwarted vamps, even the babies baring their little teeth. We called the langur man, but his langur was on holiday—"chutti ke liye Mashobra jaati hai". So we did nothing for a few days, beyond politely asking the littlest baby not to pee through the bars.

Yesterday, they were quieter, less hostile. The bulls slumped like tired clerks and stared into the sunset. The mothers slept in tree branches, holding their babies close. When I asked them to stop thumping the bars, they obliged. The afternoon settled into peace. In the evening, a baby monkey came shyly up to the bars, and pushed a bit of fruit in at me, looking coy. I think I'm going to have to tell my landlord he has sub-tenants.