The Monkey Man

While walking my dogs one day about two years ago, I saw a long-tailed macaque chained in a neighboring yard. Immediately, alarm bells clamoured in my head. I knew who lived in this abandoned house surrounded by beer bottles, weeds, broken furniture and rotting food debris: An Indonesian squatter, his Indian wife and their two children. The gossip in the neighbourhood was that he lived by petty crime and by sending his wife out to work as a prostitute at night.

This is a picture I took of another captive long-tailed macaque in similarly sad circumstances. I hope to tell her story another time.

The Monkey Man, as I came to think of him, was tall and husky, with a shiny bald crown, thick moustache and distinctly threatening manner. He followed me home on his motorbike the very day we moved into our house. He tried to question me, although he spoke no English, and I, no Malay. Undeterred, he sat outside our gate on his bike, the engine sputtering, studying me and our house with a speculative look in his eyes.

He came back again and again, apparently just to stare. I assumed he was sizing up our house as a potential target for a break-in. Whenever I walked our dogs, he would trail after me on his bike, alternately scowling and grinning. I avoided him as best I could, and, when I couldn’t, I tried to look tough and unconcerned, despite the flutter in my pulse and the sweat in my palms.

Once, I saw his children – a boy and a girl – keeping kittens in a rusted little bird cage. Seeing them try to feed the kittens scraps of bread, I brought over some kitten food and tried to explain the basics of kitten care to them. The girl, the older of the two, caught on quickly and nurtured the kittens as best she could. I checked on her and them for several days. But one morning when I arrived, the kittens were gone. Neither the mother, nor the girl, who spoke some English, was willing to tell me what had happened to them. Other animals came and went, faster than I could intervene: puppies, rabbits, birds.

The girl not only spoke some English but could also read and write, which the boy could not. Their mother explained that her husband refused to let him attend school, because “he didn’t want his son to know anything he didn’t.” In this case, sexual discrimination actually worked in the girl’s favour, although given her beauty and the rumours about the mother, I worried about what her future might be. I tried to persuade the mother to seek help from family welfare, although I knew very little about what could be done in such a case.

And now, here was a monkey trapped in this hell. He had a metal hoop bolted around his neck and was chained to an old telephone wire spool. His chain allowed him to climb up and down the single, almost leafless tree within reach and inside the drum of the spool. The spool and the area around it were filthy with excrement and garbage.

I started visiting the house, loathe as I was to attract the attention of the man. I took fruit to the monkey (he liked bananas when they were overripe and he was fond of rambutan) and talked to the woman repeatedly. I offered to buy the monkey, despite the obvious drawback that her husband would almost certainly go out and catch another one. A moot point, anyway, as she insisted he wouldn't part with the monkey for any amount of money. (Neighbors told me that they suspected he used the monkey to break into houses.)

The second thing she made clear was that she was terrified not only of her husband, but also of her little boy. I understood that; the boy once charged at me with a parang when I remonstrated with him for beating the monkey. It was a clear case of “monkey see, monkey do.” I had seen the man beat the monkey with a stick himself, while his wife stood by and told me how much he “loved” the monkey. I had no doubt he also beat his wife and children. (Later, the boy disappeared for several days. The mother told me he had run away because his father was angry.) She also said the monkey was “naughty.” If by naughty, she meant that the monkey was hungry, frustrated, bored, hostile and crazed with fear, she was right. And her boy was on his way to turning out the same way.

I called the SPCA for help. They told me that they had nothing to do with the abuse of wild animals and advised me to contact the Department of Wildlife. A number of phone calls later, someone in the Department said they would investigate the situation. I followed up with another call, and was told that the man had a proper license to keep the monkey and was doing nothing wrong.

“You saw how the monkey is kept?” I asked in disbelief. “On a chain with no food or water? Surrounded by its own filth?” I was assured their investigator had seen it and there was no problem. “But he beats it,” I protested. That was of no more concern to the Department of Wildlife than it had been to the SPCA.

I didn’t want to go back. I didn’t want to see the monkey again. I didn't want to look into his hopeless eyes and know that I couldn't do a damn thing to help him. I made myself go back anyway. Day after day, I went. I had a nebulous idea that if I could gain his trust, I might be able to sneak him away at night eventually – if I could figure out a way to cut the chain or the hoop. I would need the monkey’s cooperation to do that, lest he scream the house awake or bite me. I lay awake nights, formulating and discarding plans for rescuing him from his captor.

The mother and children became used to me hanging around and began to ignore me. I had an idea, even hazier than the one about abducting the monkey, that somehow my being around might be a good influence, might calm the boy and encourage the girl and even lead the woman to leave her husband. I guess I thought a lot of myself and my influence.

The monkey, too, grew accustomed to my presence. Each time I went, I stood closer to him. At first, he would lunge to the fullest extent of his chain – which made me want to cry with pity – shrieking and baring his fangs at me. I persisted, moving closer day by day, always with a wary eye on him. A day finally came when I could stand within his chain-range, sharing his invisible prison cell with him.

He would take the fruit I offered him, keeping his distance and reaching for it at arm’s length. Sometimes, he still lapsed into displays of frightened ferocity that drove me back a few steps, but his outbursts grew less and less frequent.

When the moment of bonding came, it was in classic primate fashion. I feigned grooming myself, plucking imaginary lice from my equally imaginary fur and “eating” them. He watched, utterly absorbed. Without making eye contact, I held out a hand to him. He took it gently in his own and explored it with his fingers. The skin of his hands was baby-soft against mine. Tentatively, I began to pretend to look for lice in his fur.

And then – an amazing moment! – he held my wrist in one hand, pushed up my shirt sleeve with the other and began to groom me. He brushed the delicate hairs on my arm with a black finger nail and peered intently at my freckles. He plucked at them repeatedly, in an effort to remove the “lice” from my arm. I felt like Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey and Birute' Galdikas all rolled into one!

We were friends – but I was no closer to saving him. Depressed and physically ill, I left for a long-overdue trip home, heartsick with worry and uncertain whether I would ever find a way to help him or the children. When I returned, the squatters and the monkey were gone. For many months, I assumed they had taken the monkey with them until a neighbour told me that he had called the Dept. of Wildlife while I was gone and raised Cain until they confiscated the monkey. I think it’s possible that his being Malaysian, and male, made the difference.

I hope the monkey ended up at Zoo Negara, where I understand there is a rehabilitation program in place. Monkeys are retrained to live in the wild and released into protected areas, with the hope that they will go deeper and deeper into the forest, away from humans.

I worry about what happened to the children. If I had known they would be gone when I got back, I would have pushed harder to get the woman to do something, anything, to get her children away from the Monkey Man. Would she have left him? Would the authorities have helped her? I don’t know.