The Monkeys Outside My Window

There are langur monkeys outside my window. Many people have heard me complain about the monkeys on this mountain, so let me be clear: there are two major species of monkey on this mountain, the rhesus and the langur. The monkeys I encountered this morning are not the rhesus, the"raccoons of India", who stake their claims on the school quad and whose red faces terrorize children. These monkeys are silvery, with deep black faces. They are shy, and rarely seen, looking at human visitors with a bemused, tranquil expression.

Today, I awoke to find them outside my window. I heard a tap on the metal balcony outside, which I thought was the garbage man or my aya. Closer inspection, however, revealed a pair of langurs, moving from the balcony to the stand of trees close by. They used the balcony as a sort of highway, moving with ease from one tree stand to another, leaping, then sitting casually with each other, tails dangling below the branches. I stared at them for a while, awed by their presence, and then scurried to get my camera. I carefully parted the curtains with my camera and took a couple shots. The monkey in my view turned sharply to stare at me, and I paused, taken aback. What are you doing here, she seemed to say. Put the camera away, please. She wasn't rude or aggressive, but intense in her stare. Here was a monkey who knew her personal space, and I was invading it. We eyed each other a bit longer, until the sudden bark of the neighbor's dog startled her and the other monkey out of their particular tree and a little farther down the mountain.

As I looked through my sliding glass doors, a bit nervous to go outside (either for fear of scaring them or in fear of my own safety), I suddenly realized the backward zoo I was in. Humans have been colonizing the nature on this mountain for hundreds of years, yet here I stood, camera in hand, in a cage of a room with a window for a wall. I was simultaneously a specimen, an intruder, and a documentarian, exoticizing the beautiful wilderness that had been claimed for my sake years before. As I tried to rationalize my presence, I felt so rude being here. I suppose it's possible to chalk it up to meta-cognition in human beings. It's possible to explain it by indulging in human nature's curiosity with the rest of the world. But I have never felt so out of place as I did this morning, holding my camera against the glass of my cage, while the langurs went about their morning routine.