Monkey Woes

These last few months have seen me engaged in a campaign to house the monkeys of Ayodhya and Faizabad in mini-sanctuaries at different places in the two towns. I have submitted a detailed proposal on behalf of the Sahriday Samiti to the district, State and Central administration to prepare such green forested acres for the monkeys who run rampant among the rooftops and streets, snatching what they can from unwary people, and getting caught in wires and cables.

The monkeys here, Rhesus Macaques, are a khaki coloured, low-browed and short tailed species different from the Bonnet Macaques seen in the South. They are always ripe for being made into a political-religious issue by Hindu fundamentalists who make much of them being forms of Hanuman. But their welfare is not a matter for anyone to be unduly worried. In fact, they are perceived as a huge nuisance, and cost lakhs of rupees in damages every month and crores every year. The telephone department alone shells out Rs. 20 lakhs a month on damaged cables and installations, not to mention the Electricity Board, local cable TV operators, shopkeepers and street vendors, and ordinary residents who cannot put out clothes or edibles in the sunlight, grow a kitchen garden, or even have a peaceful cup of tea or coffee on the terrace or balcony of their homes.

If things are left to be this way, any residual affection that people have for these animals, either in religious terms, or just as fellow-creatures will disappear, and more and more cruelty will be practised on monkeys in the name of self-defence. Recognizing this, I took up the cause of monkey rehabilitation to make people work for their own welfare, to separate issues of the common good from emotive religious and political flashpoints, and to actually achieve some long-term relief for monkeys. After all, with humans encroaching on vast areas of forest every year, where are these animals to go? My proposal covered points of public-private partnership, making faith and a respect for animals the positive cornerstones for true development, and creating examples of monkey rehabilitation that would serve to inspire other monkey infested towns of tourist importance, like Agra, Mathura and Brindavan.

So far, my proposal has met with a stony silence from the administration - both local and Central. My people's campaign, meant to put pressure on the administration through means like writing postcards and having neighbourhood meetings has been handicapped by my contracting TB, and by the stupendous inertia of the people in this part of the country.

Meanwhile, my own friendship with the monkeys is growing stronger by the day. Not only have I successfully got an injured baby monkey back on her feet after two months of care, I have also had my heart broken by her, and am daily called and greeted by around a dozen familiar monkeys who frequent our compound. I may never be able to solve their problems in the way I had dreamed, but at least I can give them grapes, bananas and roti!

Parikrama Perils

Dust, grime, decay, neglect have a way of settling on the soul. I am finding this out the hard way in the goodlands of U.P. Goodlands because Awadh, the region which Faizabad and Ayodhya represent, is quite different from the real badlands of East U.P, like Gorakhpur or Azamgarh, or West U.P, like Meerut or Saharanpur. And yet, for someone arrived from the gleaming metro of Chennai, where buildings, streets and neighbourhoods get regular makeovers with the steady inflow of capital, the visual landscape here is tough to get used to.

People live in dilapidated houses because they cannot earn enough money in this sluggish economy to do major repairs. Tin roofs and makeshift arrangements involving a few bricks here, a stone slab kept over some drain there, are common. My own present living arrangements consist of a large, long room with a tin roof, and a bedroom in the older portion of a sprawling house whose walls give off a seeping chill in the winter months.

Still, old buildings and non-aesthetic surroundings are not enough to damage the soul. What really does?

In late October 2009, I set off for the Chaudah Kosi Parikrama. This is a nearly 60 km circumambulation of Ayodhya, two days before the shorter Panch Kosi Parikrama, both annual rituals for thousands of pilgrims from nearby villages. I must admit to a certain dewy-eyed naivete when I started the parikrama. I had been to the Mahakumbh Mela in Allahabad in 2001, the Sinhasth Mela in Ujjain in 2004, to places like Thiruvannamalai and Tirupati regularly. This would be an opportunity to explore my faith and deepen it, I thought.

Instead, it was a stumbling across miles and miles of rural paths, plotted by some fiendish government officials who had decided to make life as miserable as possible for pilgrims, to extract the utmost mileage for an angry God. We set off in a heady fashion alongside the Sarayu river from Faizabad, reached Ayodhya and walked on in what was a night-long walk. I was hoping the journey would be enlivened by song and satsang, bhajan and shared accounts over cups of hot tea. What I found instead was an endlessly hurrying stream of most businesslike people, discussing the prices of essential commodities, as they hurried to complete this ritual. The Chaudah Kosi Parikrama, apart from its most unfair length, which covers Darshan Nagar more than it delivers proximity to Ayodhya, seemed to me quite bereft of the madness, the crazy love of the divine, that one encounters in places like Varanasi. This was a hurried procession of practical, tight-fisted, rural people.

And there were genuine dangers. We were miles away from hospitals. No one who had fallen sick or had a heart attack would have found any transport in the middle of the night to reach civilization. There was a huge build up of people in front of a railway crossing that made me fear a stampede or a mass mowing down by train (all things that have happened here in the past). The night air had just begun to turn cold with the approaching of winter. I rested in two places with my young companion, Lakshmi, on hay spread out to give some warmth. At one place, there was a pond right next to where we lay, and the chill crept out in silent waves, making it impossible for one farmer to continue. He had underestimated the cold and not worn or brought any warm clothing.

Anyway, a day later, I was not at all keen to take part in the Panch Kosi Parikrama, which local purists informed me, was a must after the Chaudah Kosi! Who makes all these stupid rules, I wondered. In other homes, women were getting ready to start their brisk 15 km or so walk around Faizabad and Ayodhya towns. "Why didn't you start with the smaller version?" many demanded, with an irritating practicality, to my refusal to accompany them. "This is a much nicer Parikrama - you can complete it all in the daytime," others cajoled. Thanks, but no thanks, I thought. The lack of any identifiable spiritual element in the Chaudah Kosi Parikrama had cured me of any desire for a repetition.

Besides, my legs were aching far too much!