A Monkey's Revenge against Humans

 

If your being isn’t bugged with ambition to a specific extent, the institutions, people, society, even your own family will find you weak and inefficient for their scheme. Satti Bhai, my cousin brother, is a clear example of this. He held a governmental job but had no hunger to rise in the ranks. During his youth, he loved mountaineering but the Himalayas lost their charm as drinking became his primary love in the evenings. He is a thorough gentleman in the art of drinking. Even after the alcohol’s chauvinistic liberality running in his veins, he is always at peace with one and all. As the bottle hits the bottom, he is a replica of some inclusionist, flexible, eclectic and absorptive God.

But then something happened that spoilt the equilibrium. I saw him losing his temper for the first time. It wasn’t after drinking. It was in broad daylight when his body was free of liquor. We were standing in a narrow, crowded old Delhi bazaar lane. Electric cables above, just a few feet above one’s head, crisscrossed the narrow space like thick creepers to give the sense of a false ceiling. Satti Bhai stood with a sense of aloofness and majestic muse about the futility of all this scurrying about, probably already looking up to the evening when his already slow world would become almost stand-still in the beautiful fog created by the bottle.

Then the leisurely strolling moments were checkmated. A monkey was kingly sitting on the electric cables, its legs dangling above Satti Bhai’s head. With an unbelievable ease, it peed on his head. As the warm fluid trickled down his crown, Satti Bhai couldn’t believe the attack on his sagely dignity. He yelled revengefully, baulked a terrible cuss word and jumped to hold the monkey’s tale to swing it and thrash it around. The offending rascal easily escaped leaving Satti Bhai out of words and fuming with rage.

Later, he took bath and shampooed his hair but, as he said, the bad smell won’t go. He got a terrible headache as well, which he said was due to the horrible chemicals in the simian pee. That evening, the bottle failed to sober him down for the first time. He was snappy, moody and argumentative. That was his initiation into after-drinking usual kind of revelry. He is capable of punching his co-drinkers these days. So primarily what happens to us can mould us into countless variants.