A lone monkey had been walking around for days. One day, a friend came and held his hand, as you can see in this picture that I took through my bedroom window. Later, they went off together.
As the forests are destroyed, they increasingly reach habitated areas, and destroy gardens. They are intelligent and care for each other, but people are always chasing them. At a recent lunch, Mrs X, overweight and well-groomed, wanted them sent to other countries where they could be eaten or experimented on! Why were there animal welfare laws that protected them—the minister responsible for these laws should be put in a cage, she said. Others had kinder stories, about dogs making friends with monkeys, and about a monkey who brought a stolen packet of milk everyday for his dog friend.
‘It is strange’, I said to Mrs X, ‘why only people have enmity in their hearts, though animals can be friends.’ ‘I have no enmity for anyone’, she responded. ‘But you have it for animals, for monkeys’, I replied.
There was silence, but she was probably mentally planning on sending me off to another country too.
Roshen Dalal 