Monkeys at School – 4/1/15

                I’ve been here for so long that the animals in inappropriate places barely even cross my radar. I bike past cows in the middle of the road without even blinking (although I do sometimes curse the traffic jams that they cause). I don’t think it’s funny or strange when Stephen tells me that he prefers to wash his clothes in the morning so that the monkeys don’t steal his clothes when they’re more active in the evening. I lazily watch the mice in my host family’s kitchen and gaze at the geckos in my room. The pigs eating trash on the corner of the road by the Assi River are mundane and the sweater-donning goats sauntering down the ghats are commonplace. I wouldn’t even think to blog about them if not for talking to my family in the US.  Banaras is the about the closest you can get to an actual concrete jungle. This blog is about a hilariously scary run-in with the dubious monkeys who inhabit Varanasi.

                After school one day I was working in the library when I heard the terrified shrieks of some teachers in a classroom nearby. “BUNDER UNDER AH GAYE!!!” “MONKEYS HAVE COME INSIDE!!!” It was the sort of high frequency squeal that can shatter glass and burst eardrums. Sure enough, when I peered into the room through a window there was a monkey perched on a desk and just hanging out. A few feet away, two teachers were cowering under desks. I, not wanting to suffer the same fate as Stephen, retrieved the bat that Ben P keeps in the cupboard that we share (he futilely hopes that one day his ninth graders will memorize the poem “Casey at the Bat” and he will reward them with a period of playing baseball out in the field). Ben had already left school to go to Urdu class and I decided that someone might as well be protected from the monkeys (they leave you alone if they think you can hurt them i.e. by wielding a bat). I camped out in a corner and brandished the bat whenever a monkey started getting too close for comfort. It was from this vantage point that I watched the monkeys climb inside the library through the open windows and start scaling bookshelves, grabbing books at random and throwing them on the floor.  A few monkeys even stole books and ran and still others chucked some books at onlookers on the lower story. Finally, some of the groundskeepers arrived with long bamboo sticks and started whacking any monkeys that didn’t leave.

                As the monkeys left, I took a look around to assess the damage. A couple of chairs had been turned over and 30 or so books were not in their right places, but I think it could have been worse. Many of the teachers were still under desks as I walked around and asked me if the monkeys had finally left.

I don’t think monkeys have often been near the top of my list of favorite animals, but if they were before, they certainly are not now.