Story about monkeys
by Carole Ten Brink, who was in Mussoorie last summer.
I loved watching all the monkeys that live around
Landour Bazaar. Did
I ever tell you? ....that one morning
I witnessed an incident when one of
the juvenile Rhesus monkeys had just elecrocuted
himself and fallen into
the road way. All the monkeys got very
agitated and gathered in the play yard.
Meanwhile people gathered around
too; their mood was so interesting.
It didn't feel like gawking so much, but more
like showing their sorrow and
holding a wide space around the area. So
I joined them. Soon a big
(alpha)
monkey came out of the agitated bunch to pick
up the dead baby (?, he was
really quite small) and bring him and lay him
at the feet of a female. She
just gazed at the small lifeless body for awhile,
and then began to pull up
a leg and then an arm, etc., as if to see if
he were still alive. During
this period all the monkeys grew very still,
stopping their agitated leaping
around. Now, we were all standing quietly,
mourning, people and monkeys together.
I came half way up to the play yard
fence to take a photo...trying to
be careful not to get too close. Then some
children ran by, burst right up to
the fence for a good look, and immediately several
big, male monkeys
furiously chased them away. The kids had
to run really fast to escape.
The most amazing part of the whole experience
was the palpable feeling of
sadness running between monkeys and humans.
Finally an ? alpha monkey came
up and snatched the dead baby from the mother
and carried it off to behind a
nearby building. Then, slowly, the monkeys
began to disapate. The
'funeral' was over. But I felt so bad for
the mother. She still just sat
there looking so forlorn. Then, people
too began to wander off to their
morning's activities, but to me it looked like
we all carried with us some
real sorrow for the mother's loss.
Tenzing told me later that sometimes
a grieving monkey-mother will
carry
the dead body of her offspring around for days
after it dies, as if unable
to accept that it won't revive again.