CALVINO’S MONKEY

I met a monkey from an antique land.

Last summer, while I was browsing through this book : ‘If on a winter’s night a traveler’by Italo Calvino, a monkey appeared on my balcony and started drinking from the water-tub. I had left that tub for the frail and thirsty birds. It was a quiet afternoon- only jarred by the sound of the ceiling fan and the occasional manic pixie shriek of my landlady.

Suddenly the monkey decided to enter my room-
“if there’s water there must be food too”, it must have thought.
Monkey Brains.

Well, what does one know about monkeys, these days? We left that gene pool epochs ago (not to get technical). At least, some of us did.
This is what happens when you keep your doors open and invite the natural world in.

I was cautious now as monkeys tend to be impertinent and monkey like. With caution comes time-dilation. In that three dimensional space of my room the fourth dimension lost its drive and I was stuck with a monkey that was about to carnage my mental peace. I threw the Calvino on one side and tried to look for scary things. My room lacked any metallic or wooden object — nothing stick like. My sleepwalking habits had also made me get rid of anything sharp or remotely threatening to my own constitution. I wouldn’t have harmed the monkey anyway. I was writing meaningful letters to PETA every now and then and putting up a Facebook status from time to time speaking out against animal cruelty, thus doing my share of impact activism and animal love. None of that mattered now. The monkey remained oblivious of me. Even apes were indifferent to me. Such was the nature of those days. Life and Times of Sounak K.

I finally found a vuvuzela like object and yelled ‘Monkey. O monkey’ (must have been some acoustic device that was left by my scientist friend) trying to garner the attention of that smallish ape. It was looking through my stuff with the curiosity of a ‘knowledge-hungry’ child. I even started marshalling antinational thoughts suspecting the governments’ hand — in its’ totalitarian scheme even apes had started breaching the privacy of my abode. Perhaps they have switches hidden in their brain, you know like the Manchurian Candidate. Perhaps they have designed ape-spies to crack down any dissent.
It also reminded me of a line from the book I was reading,

‘nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as the police states do.’

What if it found my poems on Che Guevara and sent for the Hitman who would take me to vacant lot and put a bullet in my brain; and worst of all cut open my jugular and make it rather messy affair — painful and arduous.

There’s always the easy way of poisoning me and making it look like a natural death. I should have taken those Karate classes seriously.
I started panicking just when the monkey looked at me and now it started to jump up and down. It found the book I had thrown away earlier and held it up as if it were an armor. Books were indeed armors in the society we were living.

I had to bring an end to this trapeze show. I stood my ground and took the posture of a warrior. I announced to him,

“My name is Ozymandias, the king of kings.”

I knew my Shelley.

The monkey looked transfixed. Did my authority made him calmer? Or was it Shelley’s words. A moment of tensed inaction and then it went back dancing. We kept shifting places and the room was our ring. None of us would give up their vantage point. It took me a while to realize I was dancing in accord with the monkey. I had no control of my movement.

I was waltzing with a monkey and it was leading me on, and I didn’t feel bad about it.

I was rather ecstatic. Must have been those dopamines of activity.

Yes, I was dancing, jumping and fighting gravity like I had never done in my life. For a while I felt I was flying, yes I was flying. I was free. It was a cosmic dance like that scene in the movie Solaris by Tarkovsky.

My entire existence shuddered when I realized that I had grown a tail and there had never been a happier moment in my personal history of warfare.