Monkeying Around

Thump-thump-thump-thump…crash! Thump-thump-thump-thump…crash! It is hard to write the sound of a monkey running and jumping off your roof into a tree. But sure enough we were in a room on the fourth floor of the hostel as the monkeys playfully leaped off the roof into the branches of the towering pines. Thump-thump-thump-thump…crash!

Monkeys, monkeys, monkeys. Those cute, mischievous creatures that tourists love to feed. To the average westerner who hasn’t spent much time around monkeys they can be fascinating creatures. Clever, adventurous, agile and sometimes eerily humanoid. But to people who have lived around them they are just a nuisance. One time in high school, our family was taking a restful week-long vacation at a guesthouse up in the mountains surrounded by tea plantations. It was time for afternoon tea. The weather was gorgeous, so tea pastries and various snacks were laid out on a table on the lawn. A group of monkeys were lurking on a nearby roof top not far away. As the man standing by the table left to grab a missing item or something, a large male leaped from the orange tile roof, scrambled onto the table and batted the majority of the food onto the lawn with a couple quick sweeps of his arms. As it was doing so, I watched in horror as its entire thieving family scurried across the grass collecting all the scattered bits of food and fled to the next rooftop before anyone could react. It was all tea and not biscuits that afternoon.

A few kilometers up the mountain, at our school, the security guards would occasionally shoot bottle rockets into the tree tops to drive the pests off campus. Now, I work at a school here in America and it's comical to imagine a school wide announcement being made to “please make sure your trash goes into the trash can, we don’t want to encourage the monkeys on campus.” Of course, if you can’t scare them away and you have a monkey infestation then you call the Monkey guy. My senior year, for some reason a horde of monkeys had decided to set up shop around our dorm on the edge of campus. So, a man came with some fruit, a rope and a big steel cage. He set the cage on the ground, placed the fruit inside, tied a rope to the door of the cage and hid around a corner. A monkey would greedily rush in, he would pull the cord and then there would be one less monkey loitering around campus and headed back to the jungle. I did not enjoy trying to casually walk past the monkeys a few feet from the door to our dorm. I know I could take one of those brown haired, pink-faced macaques in a fight if they came at me one at a time, but not if they swarmed.

A Brown Macaque, terrifying right? Photo by Ahmed Zayan

Nilgiri Langur, Photo by Pavan Kumar Nagendla

I've definitely thrown rocks at a few monkeys in my day and even struck one with a slingshot. They’ve hissed at me and chased me enough as a child. The worst was being a small child in Pakistan and having to watch the monkeys play on the playground because I was not brave enough to try to scare them away. My brothers and other older students at school had told us stories of a three legged monkey that hated humans because it had lost a leg in a trap. Whenever I caught sight of a monkey on campus I always counted how many legs they had because I never wanted to be the child who faced that beast’s vengeance on humanity. It never occurred to me that my two older brothers had “seen” it so often and I had never seen it once. I eventually grew out of that fear and my brothers and I have a good laugh about that monster-monkey now.

There are various types of monkeys spread across India, but the ones I was most familiar with were the smaller brown Macaques, the larger Gray Langurs and the black Nilgiri Langurs. After all the stories I could share about monkeys I suppose it's not all bad. As I mentioned, they can be fascinating to watch. They roam around freely, the world is their playground, they climb trees and buildings and have zero regard for people’s private property. They chase and play and fight and live it up. I don’t think they have natural predators. And there I was a student at a British boarding school, in uniform, tied to a strict daily routine, lots of rules and regulations and literally hours of homework a week. We did some monkeying around of our own of course and had some adventures but I can’t believe how strict it was when I compared it to my wife and friends’ experience at American public schools.

But there is something to be said for the ingrained discipline that can foster. Granted, many of the people I know bucked against the constraints of boarding school life and once free from it never looked back. But I think it did teach me the value of self-discipline and self-control. Here in the west we live in a world of excess and indulgence. And to my shame I have often done the same. We are encouraged to indulge, indulge, indulge. If it gratifies our senses, do it. That can be as simple as I really want a cheeseburger so I’m getting fast food at 11pm or it can be much darker in the way many people pursue their own proclivities. But as Christians, self-control is not an option. Self control is a Fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-26)and a sign of the Holy Spirit at work in your life. Over the years I have lost a lot of the discipline that I was programmed with in boarding school. Some of that was the freedom that college afforded me, some was simple choice, some was getting married, having kids and just getting busier, and some was just straight up laziness. But how do I get that back? Do you lack self-control or discipline in some areas of your life? It’s time for us to stop monkeying around and to tighten up. As for me there are areas of my life I need to, and I’m sure there are some for you too.

The good news is that we don’t have to do it alone. It is the work of God in us. We make the active choice to pursue strategies to discipline our impulses but we seek the Lord in prayer to give us that self-control we lack. Some habits cannot be broken by sheer willpower and will need the power of God to break.

It's funny, because as carefree and playful as monkeys can be, they are not human. They live in the woods and eat eachothers lice. And with no self-control we are basically beasts ourselves and no better than a monkey eating someone else’s garbage in a tree.

I’ll end with one last monkey story. After graduating college I took some of my friends and my girlfriend (now my wife) to India to travel around and see some of the places I grew up. One of my mistakes was telling them how not to behave around monkeys. Sure enough, whenever someone saw a monkey they would bare their teeth and hiss at the innocent creature just minding its business. It was funny for them but a bit uncomfortable for me. Thankfully after two weeks of this, even though they deserved it, no one got rabies.

Until next time. Safe travels friends!

Seth

P.S. If you appreciate or enjoy the work I am doing at Marvelous India, feel free to say thank you by buying me a cup of chai!

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