Tale of urban monkeys

For the last two years, whenever Pintu visits his parental home in Doniya, a few kilometres off Sayedabad, he sees a troop of wild monkeys on house roofs in the treeless neighbourhood.

Seeing them play around, he asks his old mother, “Why don't you give these poor souls some food?”

And his mother would angrily reply, “Give them food? They are a bunch of hooligans! I don't know where they came from -- but they are terrorising the neighbourhood for the last two years.”

 Doniya never had monkeys. Pintu guessed that they must have moved out from the concrete jungle of Old Dhaka where they have been living for many decades now.

Pintu keeps on persuading his mother to be kind to these animals. After all, Pintu is aware that we humans have taken away their livelihood by chopping down the trees and building structures. The least we can do is offer them some food occasionally.

“You want to know what they do?” his mom said.

“They use the rooftop water tank as their swimming pool,” she says, with a bit of smile beneath her annoyance. “We now have to lock the cover of the water tank. Can you imagine that we keep our water tank under lock and key?

“And when we are away, the group invades our kitchen,” Pintu's working sister adds. “They slip the smallest one in the group through the window into the kitchen. The little one then opens the door from the inside. Can you believe that? Then they loot every edible thing they find there.”

“One day when I came from work and opened the door to see everything vandalised, I looked around and found nobody. Then I noticed that there were many small silhouettes behind the curtains. I pulled the curtains and these monkeys came out, jumping and screaming and making their way out the door. They were all hiding behind the curtains. Just imagine!” Pintu's sister points out.

The urban monkeys have indeed learnt a few tricks to survive in the city. They must steal human food to survive where there are no trees. They would socialise on the rooftops and have fun in a way not possible in forests. Pintu says he saw the monkeys pulling down the clothes kept on the rooftop wires for drying and sitting on those and “partying”.

The Dhaka city, which used to have all kinds of animals a century ago, still has less than 1,000 monkeys, according to the forest department.

“There were a lot of monkeys in Old Dhaka around Shadhana Owshadhalay factory. The factory owner had been feeding the monkeys for decades,” said Tapan Kumar Dey, in-charge of wild life conservation of the forest department.

After the factory owner stopped feeding the monkeys, the then Dhaka City Corporation started a feeding programme eight years ago. Consequently, the number of monkeys increased to 500 in the old town, he said.

“Unfortunately, the city corporation stopped the feeding programme two years ago due to a lack of funds. This has made monkeys' lives miserable. They have started to spread elsewhere in the city to forage for food,” Tapan pointed out. “It's so sad.”

He added that the monkey feeding programme needed around Tk 60 lakh a year. “They [the authorities] must resume the programme to provide these poor creatures minimum food.”

“The condition of the old town monkeys is pathetic. We often have to rush there with doctors to save some injured or ill monkeys,” he said.

Besides, there are about a 100 monkeys in the Bangabhaban, around 70 in the Bangladesh Navy Headquarters, a few dozen in the Dhaka Cantonment area, and also a few in Gulshan and airport areas.

The monkeys in the cantonment and navy headquarters are better off as these areas have their ecosystem. In addition, the defence force is kind enough to provide them with food.

In Uttara, some monkeys may have migrated to pockets of parks and greeneries from the airport area.