Mahlya is dead, the entire village mourns
When I woke up from my afternoon siesta on a hot summer afternoon, the words that I kept hearing all around were, “Mahlya is dead.” Apparently, he had been hit by a car while he tried to cross the highway.
My eight-year-old daughter said, “I was there. He had a small streak of blood at the corner of his mouth. The rest of his body seemed fine. How did he die of such small injury? How did a whole car hit him and he had only a little blood at the edge of his lips?” I tried to explain internal bleeding and haemorrhaging to her, but I was also distracted by all the parallel conversations going on among the people of our village.
When I asked her if she was afraid, she said, “His hands were just like mine, and his eyes too. He looked a little like me. That’s why I was not scared when I saw him dead.”
“I did not know he was dead when I first saw him. I thought he was just lying down,” she added quickly.
“Tatya (her grandfather) buried him behind the Maruti Mandir (Hanuman temple). Lots of people from the village came to see him,” she said.
Mahlya was not unpopular in the village, but people were tired of his stealing. He was always perched on the neem tree at the edge of the village and made a run for whatever he could get his hands on: a kernel of maize from someone’s field, raw mangoes plucked from the tree, bitten into and then dropped to the ground, half-eaten guavas. He never touched sitaphal (custard apple). The skin was too bitter for him.
The first time I saw Mahlya was on the terrace of our house on the farm. I have a little room on the terrace, which I use as an office. I was in a meeting on Zoom when I heard a loud crunching sound outside. I came out to find Mahlya munching on the Kabuli chana that my mother had spread on a bedsheet to dry.
He stared at me with his golden eyes and dark face. His black hands were frozen mid-air between the floor and his mouth, with a few chanas held firmly. His lips were slightly apart and his canines were clearly visible. His long silver tail was now caught behind his back, arching like a question mark.
I made the first move. I tried to shut the door of my room. Two ripe mangoes were next to my laptop, and I was worried that my computer might get damaged if Mahlya lunged for them. When I turned back after closing the door, Mahlya was already halfway to the parapet of the terrace. In one jump, he made it to the cassia tree next to the house and then on to the tamarind tree, and then he jumped to the ground where our dog Mowgli tried to chase him.
I knew it was Mahlya the langur the moment I saw him. He was big but not threatening. I had seen threatening langurs before; I had even been attacked, but Mahlya was not like that. He stole food but he was tolerated by the village. He was not liked by anyone, yet everyone cared for him.
They often left a chappati or jowar roti in the backyard, knowing that Mahlya would come and eat it.
At first, Mahlya was not his name. My father explained that in rural Marathi, Mahlya meant the alpha male of a langur troop, morkhya vanhar (lead monkey).
But our Mahlya did not have a troop and so it became his name. He was ousted from his position as Mahlya in his troop by another large but younger male only a few days before the Forest Department sent a monkey catcher to our village at the behest of the panchayat. The troop was a nuisance. They had become bold enough to enter houses and steal warm jowar roti from right next to the earthen chulha.
Some langurs chased little kids if they had food in their hands, and others jumped on the tin roof, which would cave in from the weight.
The monkey catcher got everyone, but Mahlya escaped. He was still licking his wounds outside the village at the edge of the forest. The troop and the new alpha male were taken to the Gyanganga wildlife santuary, some 60 km away, never to be seen again.
When people from my village saw Mahlya after that, they recognised him and felt sorry for him and perhaps a little ashamed of their actions, and so the guilt made them care for him.
But now, he was dead. He had been hit by a car and my father and daughter had buried him, and many people from the village came to see him, a langur, one last time.
— The writer is director of the India Programme of the Snow Leopard Trust
