A Luminous Life

The monkey and the Swamiji

I want to set down one more strange thing I witnessed with my own eyes, from around the time we lived near Equals One, Yvonne's place.

Yvonne kept a monkey there — a large one, almost like an ape, whom people called the King Monkey. She had come by him in an unusual way: she dreamed one night that someone was coming to her whom she would have to take care of, and not long afterwards she heard the drumming of the wandering monkey-handlers passing by. She went down, and the monkey immediately wanted to come to her, though she was a complete stranger to him; she had to bargain hard with the handler, who wanted a great deal of money, but in the end she brought him home. He grew up with her and was quite unlike other monkeys they kept. At one point they thought he was moping and might need a mate, so they introduced a female monkey into his enclosure; she stood near him for the longest time, until finally she went right up to him — whereupon he simply placed his hands on her head, blessed her, and that was that. He sent the mate away. He was not moping, Yvonne came to understand; he was withdrawing from the world, in his own way, as if something of a former life clung to him still.

The Mother herself once allowed this monkey into her presence — even onto her lap, where he peeled and ate a banana she gave him, perfectly well behaved.

Now, our community's own young Swamiji, from the Shankaracharya Math with which my family had old ties, came once to have the Mother's Darshan, and afterwards asked whether he might see this famous monkey he had heard about. I spoke to Yvonne and to Medhanand, and it was arranged. We went to the hall where the monkey was kept, and found him standing at the far end in an unusually pensive way — very few monkeys stand like that — with his back turned to us. But the moment we entered, he turned around, looked straight at our Swamiji across the room, raised his arm, and gave a loud cry of greeting. And our Swamiji — an educated man who certainly knew no monkey language — raised his own arm just the same way and answered him with the very same kind of cry. Then the two of them drew closer and closer to each other, staring, until they stood close together; the monkey made sounds like actual words, and our Swamiji went on nodding and nodding, as if he understood every one of them. I stood there and watched this extraordinary exchange with my own eyes — two beings, of such different kinds, plainly recognising something in each other that the rest of us could only watch from outside.