We were in a rooftop café in Varanasi. We looked out across the water to the sandbanks on the opposite shore and at the rowing boats overloaded with pilgrims in brightly coloured clothes and at the broad sweep of the river stretching into the distance upstream and downstream. We looked down at the smoke rising from cremations on the burning ghats and at people ducking their heads in the water at the bathing ghats. We watched the monkeys gathering on the next door rooftop.
Then our food arrived. I can’t remember what we ate, only what I didn’t eat. It was a chapatti whipped off my plate by a monkey that leapt off the parapet and bounded past, snatching and grabbing as it went.
Monkeys are a sacred animal in India as well as a nuisance. A few years ago a government minister fell to his death from a balcony during an altercation with a monkey. There was talk of controlling the increasing numbers of these large holy vermin in New Delhi, where it happened, but I don’t think anything was ever done.
It was in Varanasi that we found a monkey skull on the ground where we walked along the river bank. Its mouth grinned at us and its empty eye sockets stared up at us. It was sinister, being almost human. Perhaps the skull had fallen from a nearby rooftop where the animal had died and decomposed. There is so much life and so much death in India. It’s not hidden away. Particularly in Varanasi.