Life along with monkeys

My place of residence in Adyar, Chennai, has lot of monkeys! Since my native is Adyar, we transferred to the neighborhood area (buying a ground floor flat, 8 years back) to prevent difficulty of climbing up and down to the first floor home there. Now shifted back to Adyar for the last 5 months, mainly because of the emotional attachment my father hold towards this area and having been grown myself for more than 20 years here, he is more than three decades ahead of me. Though we couldn’t go back to our native home - which remained to be first and second floors since my uncle runs a workshop at ground floor -  we had rented a house close to ours, therefore my dad don’t need to wander between the neighborhoods.

a monkey on the fence (click any pics for enlarge)

I have seen monkeys (bonnet macaque) in my area even before shifted to neighborhood, though I had no idea about them until transferred back to Adyar. I not even thought that I would be back here like a bounced ball, but taking years to respond. For me where I reside becomes second, because I have come to believe that I don’t belong to one place. My intention was comfort and peace, and I am always open to experience new environment and ready to adapt anyplace with basic infrastructures. I dream of living in suburbs, where pollution and noise were at least. That too driven towards the southern districts rather closes to Chennai.

The monkeys here aren’t much troublesome, though they make their presence noticeable. At the rear of our house, canopy of trees (mostly large) sprawls for few hundred meters provides wonderful shelter to the monkeys from very young to aged. Also being very close to Adyar Theosophical Society and Besant Garden, which are very few patches of green across Chennai, adjacently, gives way to forest environment including number of rare flora and fauna. I’m really not sure these monkeys reside among the canopy of trees at the backyard, because they don’t make their way everyday across us. But few houses away from us used to make mild explosions sometime, which we come to know through our servant maid that they blast crackers to drive away the annoying monkeys.

a monkey perched on our staircase handrail

Mostly they come as a group or family, sitting here and there, climbing up and down and leaping through the branches of trees. But they don’t stay long into our sight, as they keep moving like nomads. There are even huge monkeys (perhaps obese) among them, which could scare anybody with their looks. Before I go ahead continue with monkey stories, I need to say my house has inbuilt something pre-cautiously to prevent monkeys entering or looting things leaving its hands through the windows grills. Or perhaps through their early experience with monkeys annoyance, the owners of the house has made additional frames of net to the existing windows, so that we could open the windows without fear of monkeys.

But the windows in the hall doesn’t have this facility, so monkeys have attempted few times entering our house and also succeeded, which we haven’t know until one night dad wake up to see a monkey sitting on my bro’s helmet left on the sofa. Once saw him it leaped through the windows but certainly scared my dad who didn’t expect a monkey sitting on our sofa, that too at mid-night. We were blaming the cats other day for coming into house and drink the milk left at the dining table. But through this attempt we confirmed it was the monkey, and not the cat. Few days back I read news in paper, that a monkey has been constantly attacking an apartment in the neighborhood and its main intention was drinking milk from the milk packets that dropped at every doorstep in early morning. Before the households collect the milk packets, the monkey empty those and also become so obese because of drinking only milk! Lol

Humpty dumpty sat on a wall

A monkey here also tried to scare me once, when I was alone. I working on my laptop other day and suspect something leaps off the window before I saw it clearly. But our pet, which was sleeping near my wheelchair, alerted me by suddenly barking at the window. Initially I too thought it must be a cat, but following the incident above it sounds certainly to be a monkey. Our pet haven’t seen monkeys often, so she kept barking every time they come around and also become crazy to chase them. My mom was plucking flowers one evening (from daily jasmine vine), which has become her daily activity after shifted here, a monkey came waking on the compound wall threatened her thinking she’s having something eatable in her bowl, which she use for collecting flowers. Though it doesn't do anything, she left the bowl on the wall and moved away and it passed as well.

So far the monkeys hadn't been a trouble for us; but it is fun something watching their activities and also provides opportunity to conduct photo shoot on them. The huge ones make wonder through their appearance and they aren't active and fun making like the young and middle once. I leave the post with a small collage on the monkeys fun below, shot at various moments! Thank you