Looking at something and seeing it are two different things. One does not see anything unless it is reflected through the lens of conscious reality. One day my friend gave me a frantic call. Breathlessly she unfolded an episode that sounded quite bizarre, even to my fertile imagination. 

   ‘It’s strange yaar. I was sleeping in the afternoon when suddenly the doorbell rang. It was my neighbour and she wanted to borrow something.’ I interrupted here to tell her that it was hardly strange as neighbours are meant for precisely that. 

  ‘Only in the kitchen’.

     In my entire lifetime I had never heard of anything like a ‘spot earthquake’. Even if there was such a phenomenon, it would hardly be coupled with a rain of muck and filth. ‘Hey….’, she whispered, ‘do you think it was……?’

    I not only thought it was. I was sure. Having mercilessly been weaned away from the good old suspense thrillers, we have recently been exposed to a torrent of Sci-fi or horror movies. Therefore the only logical explanation, which would naturally have seemed Sherlockian earlier, suddenly appeared either too Supernatural or too Extra Terrestrial. But since this accepted wisdom is frowned upon by the more rational and since no UFO was reported seen anywhere, I advised her to hush up the matter. All it required was a thorough search of the entire scene (just in case a tiny alienated ET or Jadoo was waiting to be rescued) and of course a spiritual cleansing of the kitchen from the Bhooth.      

      It was exactly fifteen days later that I was meted out the same treatment. Only my experience was weirder. You see, for the past two decades I have always had a strange fascination for these beautiful contraptions- those hung outside homes to create soul stirring music whenever the wind decides to flirt with them. It is only recently (with the sudden emergence of Feng Shui in our country) that what I called ‘the musical things’ finally found a meaning and a name. Its purpose was to keep out Yang and welcome Yin. And it was called a wind chime. Anyway, since I’m quite passionate about music and musical things, I have an assortment of the oddest variety. They include Chinese bells of various shapes and sizes, a school of spiral ceramic fishes and a herd of cows that cling and clang in a sea of breeze, hearts and angels that clash with gusts of wind, colourful elephants that dance at a whiff and more recently, a bunch of oranges that sway with the blustery weather.

      Of all these, the oh-so-real thermocol ‘oranges’ were my favourite. Every time the wind blew, a fruity flavour was now added to those mellifluous sounds. Therefore, it really disturbed me one day to find that three out of the five oranges had neatly been plucked out. All the doors were again locked. In the recent past, none had dared to cross our gates, especially with the forbidding ‘Beware of Dog’ sign posted like a sentinel outside. Even so, squeezing in through the locked grills required an enormous amount of flexibility for a human form. Who could have done that? Who, but a curious wrinkled, wide- eyed, variable green little thing from outer space? Or a long armed Djinh with a fancy for fruits. I spent the next few days in dread. My friend advised me to exorcise the house to rein in that gallivanting spirit or alien or whatever until….

       One day I was woken from my afternoon siesta by a weird touch. I lazily opened my eyes and found myself directly looking into a pair of mischievous eyes. Someone was on the bed. There was a silly grin on his curiously wrinkled face and he was tightly clutching onto the two remaining thermocol oranges(I had removed the half eaten windchime from the verandah and hung it in our bedroom). Still in a state of deep slumber, I felt dazed. For the next ten seconds my world stood still. Nothing moved but my thoughts and with every second, my belief in Charles Darwin and his theories began to strengthen. Finally I let out a scream. The monkey screamed too. He then jumped out of the bed and ran into the other room.     

      I followed him cautiously and what I saw there took my breath away. I ran back into the bedroom and cautiously peeped from behind the door. There were at least twenty of them- of all shapes and sizes. The sight was familiar- almost exactly as my friend had described. A storm was brewing in my drawing room and the monkeys were creating it. Three tarzans were swinging from sofa to chair. The connoisseurs of art were curiously examining my precious handle-with-care curios. A cuddly little chimp was embracing a stuffed toy (a huge black orangutan) that sat limply on the sofa. A momma with a miniscule creature pinned to her chest was relaxing on the beanbag. Two Nawabs sat in front of the aquarium watching the fishes dance. And on the dining table a feast was in progress. Banana peels were carelessly strewn and every box on the dining table was opened. Few gluttonous diners sat munching snacks while the uninhibited freely relieved themselves on my drawing room-turned- mujra room- turned playroom- turned toilet. From the bowl of artificial fruits on the table, every fruit was bitten and discarded. Yet my Prince Charming(the one who had woken me up from my beauty sleep) still held on tightly to the two recently ‘plucked’ oranges from the bedroom.

     Just when I was wondering what had happened to my dog Champagne, I saw him mingled with the group. Being a Golden Retriever, he looked like a bigger version of them. Sitting on his haunches, he kept looking expectantly at his newfound ‘friends’, gobbling up whatever they decided to toss at him- probably as a favour for letting them in without a whimper. After fifteen more minutes of monkeying around, they left. Champagne followed them outside, almost certainly to wave them goodbye. Surprisingly, they broke nothing but my routine (I spent the next two hours cleaning up the mess) and took nothing but the two remaining ‘oranges’.

    As I sat stunned, there was a telephone call. ‘Hey, that was no ghost’. It was my friend. ‘The doors were locked but what I forgot to mention was that there was a small hole on top for the exhaust fan to be fixed. My neighbour had the same experience yesterday. You’ll never be able to tell who came in through that hole.’ 

    Having just experienced the simian symphony, I took a wild guess. ‘Monkeys?’   

    ‘Oh!’ she sounded disappointed. ‘How did you know?’

    I didn’t want to rob her of her excitement. So I launched on a long-winded speech. ‘Well’, I began. ‘To look at something is quite different than actually seeing it. One does not see anything unless……..’

    ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever’, she said, cutting in through my philosophy.

    The next day was my birthday. My friend presented me with another wind chime. It was a beautiful piece with bunches of grapes dangling in spirals. ‘I hope those monkeys don’t take this away too’ she said.