Bastard macaques
I keep digging up this traumatic stories from my subconscious... a few years ago my boyfriend and I were in India visiting his grandparents. The teeny little town where his grandparents lived was kept on a strict schedule of monkey visits on Mondays and Thursdays. They liked to come in from the wild to raid fruit trees in town. One Thursday morning, still slightly jet lagged, I woke up quite early and convinced the bf to go to the roof grandpa's house with me to enjoy the cool beauty of India at dawn.

And being ripped to shreds by monkeys. Don't forget that. There was a group of about ten of the fuckers crowded over by a fruit tree. The large, silver ones with black faces and long tails that they loop like a hula hoop when they run... they look cute like the flying monkeys in Wizard of Oz until you realize they're waist-high when they're sitting on their haunches.

They noticed us and started immediately walking towards us. "Oh shit", says I. "Not to worry" says the bf, and raises his fist like he's going to hit them and shouts. The monkeys pause, look at each other as if to say "What's this cunt doing, then?", and continue towards us, some of them baring their little monkey fangs. "That used to work a few years ago", says the increasingly terrified bf, who at this point has established himself as anyone but the Crocodile Dundee of the Subcontinent.

So we had to run and take sanctuary, in the most dignified manner possible, which of course means that we barricaded ourselves inside the outhouse. Between stealing peeks at the monkeys who were patiently waiting outside the door, I imagined being mauled to death by wild animals in a foreign land or spending a day of my life trapped in an Indian outhouse. Either way, not great.

Luckily, my boyfriend spotted his uncle wandering through the house through the crack in the outhouse door and shouted to him. Good old Uncle Laloo, the size of a bear, was shortly on the roof shouting and waving a big-ol' monkey-bashing stick around. Our hero! No apologies for length. Take it like a man.
(Mabel DelTaco, Wed 8 Jun 2005, 6:45, Reply)