Practically neighbours

DISCLAIMER:

This article although based on true experiences is intended to be purely satirical. Its content should in no way to be interpreted as an attempt to belittle any part of the society but should be viewed only as satire. This article is not intended to be insensitive or offensive but is from a child’s point of view and in fact is meant to be evocative for readers to be more empathetic towards the unfortunate.

They used to live a few meters away from my building in their nest. They were ‘a shrewdness of apes’ or so I was told. Our forefathers used this collective noun in their times when shrewdness used to mean wickedness and sadly, we still use that word in the same sense when really it just means sharp-wittedness. The dictionary says that one whose abode isn’t far off is called a ‘neighbour’, so I thought I ought to call them my neighbours too since they lived just at the other end of my society wall but my mother didn’t agree. She said I can’t compare them with our normal neighbours since they were too different and that they lived on the streets. I found that phrase weird because they lived on the footpath or the divider but never actually on the streets.

In my summer vacation, I would commodiously stare at those apes all day. People have a unique sense of finding amusement in other’s business like a man would know his neighbour’s child’s marks but wouldn’t know in which standard his child is studying. For a naïve child like me, it was more disheartening than entertaining to stare at them. Their nest was nothing but a torn, stained cloth hung up on a rough, grey wall like a crude flag to mark their territory, a sickening floor and well that’s sadly pretty much to it but few of them did manage to find plastic or a bigger cloth instead, in order to feed the definition of an abode for the sake of it because their real roof was a cluster of branches of a tree that would protect them from the sun and the rain and anything but their fate.

There used to be loud noises of yelling and fighting in the afternoon coming from those nests which used to fail to catch anyone’s eye though there were at least fifty people going by that street every minute. In India, a man will hear a bat hitting a ball, a whispered gossip about an actor or even his phone’s vibrating notification about a ‘buy 1 get 3’ offer from a shady website louder than a poor man’s cry. This is how badly we’re taught to ignore them to preserve the bubble of our privilege. Weird as their words were, I still tried to listen to them trying to understand how they’re very different from us as people said but I heard a tone of distress and a pitch of anger just like ours.

One day when I was in my society’s garden with my friends, I noticed them stare at us playing on the swing. The next morning when we came to play again, we were shocked to see some of those little apes on our swings! They seemed like normal kids having fun with joyful eyes and wide smiles just like they show in pretentious tv commercials portraying that their product will somehow work beyond its purpose and paint your whole life with happiness. However, their expression changed from happy to scared when they saw us at the entrance of the ground and immediately sprung on the wall and jumped in their nest. We used to sometimes feel caged in our own society as we weren’t allowed to go out while playing but I realised in that moment that in reality, they were the real prisoners put behind bars of unfairness who somehow felt free inside our cage.

There were some days when a kettle of vultures used to stop by their nest. I used to think that vultures only picked on the dead but these vultures were different. They picked on the small females and took them somewhere from where they never returned to their nest. I tried asking my father about where they took them but he was too busy reading the newspaper so he just told me that they took them to another home. I knew he was lying because those females cried for help when they were dragged and forced by the vultures into their rides. After that, the leader vulture would hand something to the big apes and fly away and the small ones were seemed to be forgotten soon as they left or that’s what it looked like to my stalking eyes. It was almost like they adjusted rather quickly to the females’ absence. You’d be surprised at how good Indians can be at adjusting; be it a bad neighbour or a bad government, a person here would even adjust to daily bullying rather than raise his/her voice because that would be more convenient.

Once I was playing football with my friends and the ball went into a cabin in our society. I went inside to find the ball and instead found three little puppies who had been hiding there. I wasn’t allowed to touch stray animals because of my allergies but I used to still play with them with my friends. We even named them. Shiro, the pearl white one was my favourite. He had big doe eyes and was a runner. He used to run behind me or anyone even on a slight nudge, shaking his furry little tail. We used to play with those cute pups almost every day. One day Shiro went missing. Few days later, while returning from school, when my van stopped due to traffic by the backside of my society, I saw the nest more clearly. It felt like an HD version of what I had been watching for days. The tent, their ragged stuff, I could see everything closely but what I saw I wish I hadn’t. There was a bloody white fur coat hung on a stick over a small bonfire burning between their tents. I then remembered one of the rumours I had heard was that the watchman had sold Shiro to the apes. I cried that day after going home. However, somebody’s hunger was more important than a child’s pet. People sometimes may not realize how being able to be a vegan or even a vegetarian is a privilege when the poor cant even think of living without milk or an egg that sometimes singularly becomes a meal for them.

The apes didn’t fear the thunder or the night, the only thing they feared was a pack of looter wolves in brown uniform. They would shiver at the echo of their siren howls even during broad daylight. They would get sometime before the pack arrived at their nest as they used to be warned of the wolves, every time they were going to show up, through a dominoes of signalling by the other fellow apes. They would then use this time to hide all their handful belongings by throwing them to the other side of the wall, that is, into our society. Though it was all flung just by the wall, that used to be one of the only times when their scent crossed the wall and their world touched ours. Prepared to face the pack, they would stand tight against the wall pretending to not have any nest there and the wolves would arrive and smell around to make sure of that. Then on slight suspicion they would howl and attack the apes and try to hustle them out of there. Sometimes their resistance would be stronger than that of the wolves’ persistence of driving them away. Unity is an amazing thing. Millions individually can fail to protest while even a hundred united can bring about a change. I mean that is how our country started getting independence.

Weirdly enough these wolves never showed up when the vultures did. It looked almost as if they used to coordinate their timings of harassing the apes.

The only goodness the apes used to get was from a lady in saffron. She used to visit their nest every Sunday with a truckload of goods and with one long speech about something and a cameraman. They seemed to like her a lot. Charity can be very controversial to think about. A well-to-do person can bargain for that 10 rs with a poor vegetable vendor or argue about that 2 rs with an autorickshaw driver but at the same time donate 500 rs to a foundation whose list will be displayed on the society notice board. It was all going as per routine till the time the lady stopped visiting and the apes started starving. They eventually left and this time they left for good and never came back to their nest.

Maybe they went to a wall of some other society and made another nest there and maybe there is still a girl watching them from her window despite the society telling her to ignore them. Maybe she’ll do something about them when she grows up and maybe the world will be inspired by her will to help.