Monkey see and monkey do...

We’ve taken their jungles away, so what they want is restitution of what is rightfully theirs. So ‘twas on a bright morning, the house had just been cleaned of every single dust particle (well, almost). The glass top dining table was gleaming and what with the sun pouring through the French windows (why do the French call doors as windows?), the overall picture was one evoking images from an interior design magazine. Then I turned to walk into another room and I came back to see a Simian guest, making himself very much at home, sitting cross-legged on the dining table, hugging the crystal fruit bowl with one hand and helping himself to an orange with another…!

He/it looked at me quizzically and I just could not get myself to welcome it. So, I said “Hey, there!” Obviously, I didn’t get the tone menacing enough on the first go, because, he let go of the orange and picked up a pomegranate. Then it struck him, when he saw me rolling the newspaper into a baseball bat, that I did not want him around at all, and he made a dash for the exit, with cherries. Unfortunately, like many of us, he couldn’t distinguish between what is real and what is not. The cherries were fake and as I closed the doors, I could see him spit it out and give me a reproaching stare for endangering the environment with dreaded plastic.

From then on, we’ve been forced to keep the French windows closed. The monkey band was however, intent on getting back not just their rights but their pride too…fancy being caught stealing fake cherries! So they sent an emissary on a day when my visiting mother, ignoring our counsel, had the kitchen door wide open and aromas of her many dishes wafting out. The monkey walked in, mummy screamed. I cannot tell, who was more scared—Mummy or the monkey. My always unflappable and eternally dignified dad, recalled that the scream wasn’t nearly as loud as it had been the day she had spotted a full of beans jumpin' green frog of Orissa countryside in the bathroom, hence we had nothing to worry about. But for the monkey, it was was way too much—he bolted for his life and it must have taken a great deal of cajoling to get him back into the war against humans. But the rest of the band were spurred to plan another onslaught. They launched it the day my mother and I, were tending to the green gladiators, and your’s truly, left the doors of the balcony open. There we were digging and repotting my grateful plants, when I heard my kid say a very feebly questioning and trembling, “Mimi...?!” The proper noun hung there in unabashed trepidation, causing me to turn around and see a fairly large sized moneky (they finally sent the big guy) on the dining table holding on to the whole bunch of bananas, and proceeding to climb down the table. As he sauntered through the room to make a very unhurried getaway, he passed the piano, and looked at it. I almost thought he would put down the fruit of his labor on the floor and play a simian sonata for us! But I think he was smugly satisfied—he had squared for the fake cherries, the closed French doors, the scary scream…he had the whole loot, the real Mcoy.

It took me back to our ancestral home in our village and how we used to wage a battle against the monkeys when we visited during the summer. I remember there was one particular one, who had his hair arranged in a middle parting, and for some reason, he felt that our house was his. All my grandma’s efforts to keep him out, by keeping all the food and the kitchen locked up wouldn’t work. Then one day, perhaps to protest the lock out, he opened a bottle of her blood pressure medicine, swallowed all the pills, and moseyed off into oblivion, making us think that he had done a Marilyn Monroe on us. Ma was wailing that she was probably responsible for his ‘alleged’ suicide, and upped the prayers quotient for all her children, till some one spotted him waking from a deep dream of sleep like Abou Ben Adhem. Needless to say, he came back, unreformed and back into monkey business.

It’s hard to change, for monkey

…And for man?