No Monkeys Here Today

This is the piece I submitted for my first Creative Writing assignment. I like it, but it didn't quite fit the criteria. The tutor liked it enough to give me some very positive feedback and a more than acceptable mark. I have learned that if you want an extrinsic reward (that bit comes from the Big Red Book that teaches us everything) you may have to sacrifice some of your creative autonomy and do what they asked you to do! 

‘Chink chink.’

‘Salut.’

The chime as the two bottles meet is the only bright sound amongst the murmuration of evening activity in the Jehangir Mahal Palace at the setting of the sun. We’re sitting on our private terrace on the roof, our evening ritual undisturbed by other guests who wander in the periphery. We have our first beer, we have each other and we are in India. This India is a place of muted tones, dirt roads from the same palette as the golden stone temples, dark, dusty greens of grass and trees and a wide, rocky river that adds silver to the azure reflection of the sky. Against this background, the vivid orange of the robes of monks and mendicants seems truly holy. There is a perfume only India can call its own. Incense and mothballs, washed but un-deodorised bodies, faded cotton sluiced in river water, bleached clean on sun-warmed rocks, warm cow and spice.

It’s swallow time. As the light begins to change, they gather to dance and weave amidst the cornucopia of the insect buffet. We are high and they are low and briefly our environments coincide. We sit enthroned, guests in a new dimension, watching swallows caracole in what we perceive as nothing. They disregard us. Leaden and grounded we are no threat to them, we cannot join them as we could in water. We can only fly in our imagination and so we watch.

The light changes. There are newcomers to the stage. Clumps of heavier, slower, noisier performers. It’s parakeet time. They bring in flashes of bright colour - the yellow of their underwings, the turquoise of their trailing tails - and noise. They squawk and bicker and the silent swallows part before their bow wave, fading into the encroaching dusk. The turrets and domes of the palace roof are black silhouettes against the vastness of a striped sky, pink through orange to a murky gray on the polluted horizon. The parakeets are passing through and in their wake is a sound low enough to be felt in the bones. A whoompf…whoompf…whoompf, rhythmic and slow, a pressure wave of warning.  The parakeets are gone. It’s vulture time. Like bombers returning from a wartime raid in some old film, they are coming home to roost in the domes of the palace. Redolent with majesty and power, their solitary passing is soundless except for that beat, felt deep within the gut. You hold your breath as they pass over, harbingers of death, dark shadows against a darkening sky.

The light has almost gone. The sun sits on the edge of the night. It is the orange of India, the orange of musky marigold garlands hanging from the mirrors of taxis, the orange of the shrines at the roadside reeking of incense. It’s bat time. The movement is a flicker at the corner of your vision and the sound is theoretically above your register but in your head it comes and goes. A cheese-wire through the matter of your brain. The insects, so relieved when the swallows left, turn to find themselves gaping into the darkness of a fast-approaching bat cave. Oblivion. The night is filled with a silent flittering, a cacophony of sound that you can’t hear, a dance that you can only sense.

It’s human time. Another beer, the temperature a very balmy thirty five degrees. We talk about the day, our voices low. We laugh about the monkeys and their diaries – we laugh about it still ten years away. Our little Indian temple guide, the one we chose from the rabble of small boys all eager to please, to earn rupees, the one who keeps the rest away, preserves our peace.

‘Where are the monkeys? Why are there no monkeys here?’

‘No monkeys here today. Tomorrow monkeys here.’

Always tomorrow in India. That’s Indian time. We carry the frustration with us, or we let it go and kick back, legs dangling over the three storey drops.  Monkeys will come. Temples will decay. Small boys will wait. On the roof of the Jehangir Mahal Palace in India it is night and we sit drenched in it. Our curry is served on our private terrace. In the marbled splendour of our rooms, Vishnu and Hanuman will guard us through the night. Tomorrow we will visit the market place, we will try to avoid the sacred cows and we will drink ice-cold, misted-bottled Coca Cola to sustain us in the heat. And then it will be swallow time again.