The Day I Fought a Monkey for My Lunch
He had the high ground, the confidence, and eventually my sandwich.
The monkey held eye contact with me for three full seconds before either of us moved, and in those three seconds I understood, on some ancient level, that I had already lost.
It was a Thursday in October, one of those Delhi afternoons when the smog lifts just enough to let the light go gold, and I had done something radical for a man in his thirties with a desk job: I had taken my lunch outside. Actual outside. Lodhi Garden, a bench under a jamun tree, my mother's paneer sandwich wrapped in foil that still smelled of green chutney and the steel dabba it had traveled in. Kishore Kumar in one earbud. For eleven months I had eaten lunch at my desk with the blinds down, scrolling, chewing, answering emails with one greasy thumb.
This bench was supposed to be my new leaf.
He arrived without sound. One moment the bench across from mine was empty, and the next there was a rhesus macaque sitting on its backrest like a small landlord inspecting his property. He had a torn left ear and the settled confidence of someone who has never once doubted himself. He looked at me. He looked at the sandwich. He looked back at me... and I swear his expression said: we both know how this ends, friend, let us not embarrass ourselves.
I would like to state, for the record, that I am a grown man. I have a gym membership I have used four times. I have watched enough nature documentaries to know you are supposed to make yourself look big. So I sat up straight, squared my shoulders, and said, in the deep voice I reserve for electricians who overcharge me, "No."
He scratched his chin with one finger, unbothered, the way a chess player considers a move he has already decided on.
What happened next took maybe four seconds, and I have replayed it for years. He feinted left. I clutched the sandwich to my chest like a rugby ball. He was not going left.
He was never going left.
He came straight over the top, one hand on my shoulder, one hand on the foil, weightless and certain, and the last thing I said as my mother's paneer sandwich left my life forever was, and I need you to sit with this, "SIR."
I called the monkey sir.
He ate it on a low branch directly in front of me. Not hurried. He peeled back the foil like a man opening a gift he already knew he deserved, ate in slow, luxurious bites, held eye contact through most of it, and then dropped the empty foil at the base of the tree the way rockstars drop microphones.
That was when I heard the laughing.
On the next bench sat an old man in a brown sweater vest, shaking so hard his newspaper had slid off his lap. "He took my egg roll on Tuesday," he said, wiping his eyes with a folded handkerchief. "Straight from my hand. He has excellent taste, this fellow. Only the good lunches." He patted the bench beside him and held out a paper cone of roasted peanuts, and because I was a man with no sandwich and no dignity left to protect, I went.
His name was Mr. Bhalla. Retired from the railways. He came to the garden every day at one o'clock, he told me, because his flat had gotten very good at silence since his wife passed, and the garden was terrible at it: parakeets, cricket commentary from a groundskeeper's radio, schoolkids on a botany trip, the monkey mafia. We ate his peanuts and watched my mugger groom himself on the branch, entirely at peace with his choices, and Mr. Bhalla told me the locals called him Chairman, because he sat wherever he wanted and took whatever he liked.
I went back the next day. I told myself it was to reclaim my honor. I brought two sandwiches, one as a decoy, a strategy Mr. Bhalla declared worthy of both a coward and a genius.
Chairman... did not show.
Instead we talked for forty minutes about his wife's terrible driving and my terrible boss, and I walked back to the office feeling something I could not name at first, because it had been a while.
Light. I felt light.
Here is the thing nobody tells you about eating lunch at your desk for eleven months: it never feels like a decision. It feels like... nothing. It is designed to feel like nothing.
And then one afternoon a monkey with a torn ear robs you in broad daylight, and you find yourself on a bench eating a stranger's peanuts, doing the math, realizing you had gone almost a year without eating a single meal in front of another living creature.
Chairman did not steal my lunch. He stole the version of me that ate at his desk with the blinds down and called it a life.
I started writing again that month. Small things, first ones since college, but suddenly there was material everywhere: a monkey with a landlord's confidence, an old man who saved the ends of his egg rolls for pigeons, the specific gold of one p.m. light coming through a jamun tree. I wrote a short poem about the way a memory can be funnier than the moment ever was, because in the moment I had genuinely feared for my life, and in the retelling I was already the clown in my own favorite story. One night, feeling brave and slightly ridiculous, I posted it on a community wall for poets. A stranger from another city commented that a monkey had once taken her entire birthday cake off a hotel balcony in Shimla. We are everywhere, apparently, the robbed.
Mr. Bhalla and I had lunch on that bench for two more years, until his daughter moved him to Pune. On his last Thursday he brought two egg rolls and we ate them fast, hunched over like criminals casing the trees between bites. Chairman never came for them. New territory, maybe, or old age, or, and this is what Mr. Bhalla chose to believe, professional respect between veterans.
I still go. Different job now, longer commute, worth it. The bench has been repainted twice and the jamun tree drops its fruit every June like small purple grenades, and I have learned which weeks to sit elsewhere. I eat slowly. I leave my phone in my bag. My mother still makes the sandwiches when I visit, and she still asks, every single time, whether "that badmash" is bothering me, with the tone she once used for boys who bothered my sister.
Last winter I unwrapped a guava, cut it in half with the seriousness of a man performing surgery, and set one half on the far arm of the bench. Then I sat on the other end and did not look. Insurance, Mr. Bhalla would have called it. Tribute, honestly.
Ten minutes later I heard the softest thump of weight landing on wood. I kept my eyes on the trees. There was a small, dignified crunching... then nothing. And when I finally turned... the guava was gone and a monkey with a torn left ear was walking away down the path in the gold afternoon light, unhurried, like a chairman leaving a meeting that had gone, at last, exactly as he wanted.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.