Monkeys on the rooftop

It is unlikely that there will be any person who has lived in the hill stations of the North but has escaped the attention of the far older residents of the hills, monkeys.

Roofs in the hills have to deal with sunlight, rain, snow, and, of course, monkeys. Unlike the lot that pours or shines and moves on, the last will leap, cavort, fight and pound with unwavering consistency. Muscles are flexed; supple bodies are built by heaving and tugging at pipes, cables and other sundries. Overhead water tanks are breached by ‘bouncers’ who have fed themselves on stolen shopping bags and tossed garbage. Anthropoids of assorted sizes and shapes can be seen ‘gossiping and grooming’.

If they could, they would create little simian cities over the metal sheets. In the process, we, just under the heavy metal being played above, have learnt to decipher various sounds — small monkeys running or big ones fighting. Periodically, someone is sent aloft to risk life and limb and face the ancestor with bared teeth, to hammer down the loosened nails and tighten the screws that keep the corrugated sheets in place. Failing this, the next time a storm comes, we run around to keep buckets, mugs and assorted dishes under leakages. The result is that we have a West-East musical fusion — a house concert of hard rock above and a jaltarang within.

Down the decades, all sorts of measures have been taken to tackle the monkey menace — the government’s largely ineffective steps and the citizenry’s desperate ones. Someone has put up rings of barbed wire, another has added to the undying wealth of Internet vendors and purchased assorted gadgetry; yet another has kept monkey ‘guards’ around his place, and I, playing an imitation game, have tried a little of it all — and now, bits of barbed wire and plastic monkey ‘guards’ festoon the roof.

Then one bright early winter morning, the chickens came home to roost, or rather, the monkeys decided to sort out the matter of thwarting their rights to the roof. En masse, they attacked the older son who was returning from his jog.

Off to the hospital we went. As a matter of fact, the nurse cried out, “Ek aur bandar se ghayal” (another one has been wounded by a monkey). The cry went past the head-nurse and the junior doctors to the harassed head of department. The grown-up son and the ageing father joined the chorus that sounded like a mantra, “Corona to chala jayega, bandar se bachao” (Corona will eventually go away, save yourselves from monkeys).