From 2009 to early 2011, I lived in a south Delhi barsati which had an enormous terrace area. When I moved in, this open space looked sad and empty, so I spent many thousands of rupees doing it up with all kinds of plants. Then came the monkeys. A team of five to ten. On finding the kitchen locked, they would break the pots, and sometimes eat the plants. No flower was allowed to bloom.

I replaced the mud pots with heavy cement ones. The monkeys broke fewer of them but ate more shoots and leaves. They would come at night. Soon they'd come at dawn, and make such a commotion I'd wake up terrified. Mild banging on the door wouldn't ward them off, nor would the other tactics I tried. I was afraid of them. They could be aggressive and strong and these traits were multiplied because they operated in gangs. I felt caged in the small room of my large barsati. All I could do was share my misery on Facebook. "Be careful," a friend warned in a comment, "they once killed the deputy mayor of Delhi."

In October 2007, Sawinder Singh Bajwa, the then deputy mayor, was trying to fend off monkeys from the balcony of his home. He fell off the terrace and died. Ironically, in the election he had recently won for the Bhartiya Janata Party, the opposition Congress had made the "monkey menace" a major issue. Apart from stealing food and clothing like dacoits, biting people, and scaling the parliament building, they'd also been known to create a scare on occasion by running through a Metro carriage or through the airport. After the death, mayor Aarti Mehra started worrying about monkeys. She said Delhi had only five monkey catchers for an estimated 20 000 monkeys. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) had also begun fining Hanuman bhakts for feeding monkeys in public places. But the monkeys would not relent. A month later, a lone monkey went around Shastri Park in East Delhi, biting 25 people in a single weekend. People eventually beat him down with metal bars and sticks because they feared it was going to snatch infants away. "Primal Invasion," the Hindustan Times had panicked on the front page.

 

If Delhi's monkeys make less news these days it may be because since then, the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) and the MCD have hired more monkey catchers, raising the number from five to 50 odd, and have raised the reward for every monkey caught to as much as Rs 650. Private contractors act as go-betweens to find monkey catchers from across India, not an easy task because not many would want to be cruel to Lord Hanuman, the monkey god, the god of strength. The captured monkeys are sent to a monkey sanctuary on the outskirts of Delhi. But that we hear of them less is also because the monkeys have effectively been displaced from the media glare, from the areas of south and central Delhi, and no longer infiltrate the Defence Ministry and scatter files as they did in 2004, or kill children as they did once in a while.