A gray arm wraps itself around the metal gridwork of an open window with two, long black feet extending into my office. There is a hanuman perched on my windowsill. The foreign word falls from my mouth easier than in my native tongue; gray langur. I also lean into the Bengali because I dislike the English homophone, langour. Listless is not at all a trait I associate with these quick-moving primates who can leap thirty feet in a single bound. They’re an annoyance on my lane where human neighbors rattle sticks or shout in aggressive protest while thieves make off with vine-ripe eggplant or break some pipe or limb while jumping from branch to ledge. The street dogs go mad with excitement, putting the entire street into an uproar for some time. Two neighbors seem particularly irked: one who throws rocks and has threatened the hanuman even after they left the immediate surrounding of his home (where his anger seemed more like some deep-seated act of hatred or revenge), and an older man who is either firing crackers or perhaps a starter pistol. Four houses over, I startle at the boom and see only a puff of smoke from my window where the man scowls into the branches of a krishnachura tree.
The hanuman eat my roses and occasionally break a line of twinkle lights strung above the rooftop. I play the stick rattling game myself at times. But I still don’t mind so much. I enjoy their company. This morning, I’ve been entertained by just one from the entire troupe. She was mostly interested in whether I had any dried dates tucked away in a pocket, but I was hoping for some deeper connection.
I tried a magic trick, moving the date from hand to hand with an empty reveal and voila! Though she didn’t seem to care. She was quite perturbed by my attempt at playing a tune on the ektara and also a flute. (But, how can I blame her as I hadn’t had a song prepared and the one-stringed guitar was sorely out of tune?) I spun and twirled in an interpretive dance which stirred some curious glances… but she was hard to impress. Though her black face lined with a spiky fringe of gray pulled in closer as I opened a small wooden box, not much larger than a golf ball. Inside, a tiny hand-painted alligator wiggled its legs on hidden springs. I closed the box and opened it again. Once more, but then her interest had gone.
I brought over my Buddha Board; a stone plaque that changes color when brushed with water, where the painted image disappears within a few minutes as the water evaporates. I tried to paint a hanuman that looked pathetically more like a lion, and I told her as much while picking up a picture book, Beasts of India, and flipping through pages with folk drawings of lions and tigers. The hanuman made it clear that she was growing annoyed with me. (Why, for heaven’s sake had I not brought out any more dates?)
I’d exhausted my bag of tricks and went back to work at my laptop, having pulled out three different books for a new project. I began reading one out loud for stronger focus and noticed that this, of all things, drew her in rapt attention. I walked back over to the window to sit, reading from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek until I hit a line that struck me *just so* that a few gentle tears welled up in my eyes. I left the other books in the window nook and went back to my desk.
And then she shifted. The hanuman now didn’t simply tolerate my silly performances; she was beginning to enjoy the entertainment. She tapped at the cover of a book as if urging me to continue. I opened Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, reading from the middle of the story where ‘the marriage was on the point of breaking up’ between Aureliano and Fernanda over a photograph of his lover dressed as the Queen of Madagascar.
And so the hanuman and I sat together with a cloud of wordsound floating between us.
It wasn’t until now that I made the connection between this encounter and the line that first moved me from Annie Dillard’s book:
…but the memory remains of something powerful playing over me.
I was feeling the power of this very moment and this very exchange, recognizing how lucky I am to have a life where I can think about art, peck away at work and read to a monkey, all over a morning cup of coffee. Hanuman are named a Hindu god (half-man, half-monkey) who was cursed to forget his powers. But they were always there, waiting to be remembered. Maybe that’s true of all of us. What powers of my own have been forgotten? Or, right now, how can I hold on this this memory of that something powerful playing over me?
The answer, for me, was clear. Write it down.
to forget his powers by a sage after he played pranks on sages and innocent people
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