Mr.M pays us a visit

It was the final semester of under graduation and everything was well set. Sleep was good, the weather was better, since I slept all afternoon. Course works were fewer and the semester project was well on target.

Did I mention the food? The food was excellent. I took lunch and dinner at my friend’s house. Dinner is usually much more eventful that lunch. We would have dinner in front of the television just in time for the 9:00 PM, HBO or Star Movies movie. What to watch was never an issue. My friend would have watched it, anyway. The records of the near by movie rental shows that he had so far rented about 1000 movies under his account.(Read as - all the movies in the shop)

Anyway, dinner is usually very satisfying and the movie ends sometime around 11:00 PM. Now that I am lazy and drowsy to walk all the way back (a 5 minute walk)home, I normally end up sleeping on their extra bed. Protocol is that, while I leave in the morning, I lock the front door and throw the key back in through the window (That’s right, he won't loose his sleep for anything in the world). This went on for a few days until one day, I left the door ajar and threw the key back in. In my sleeping frenzy, I forgot to lock the door.

My friend sleeps in the hallway; next to the kitchen. He is a sound and heavy sleeper. For some reason, he opens his eyes momentarily and sees a cute little baby monkey walking down the hall. That is real cute. I like my dream!, he murmurs and goes back to sleep. Soon enough, he sees an entire family of monkeys march by, into the kitchen. It's a dream, alright! and off he goes to sleep again....but soon enough he is awakened by weird noises and crashing of utensils in the kitchen. Luckily, this time he gets up and decides to investigate.

He finds the front door open, that's not good! Next he rushes into the kitchen. Now there are 8 monkeys in the kitchen- papa monkey, mama monkey, granny, grandpa, cousins, relatives and of course the cute little one. They had ransacked the bananas that we had stocked for the next few days. Rice was spilled all over, cooking oil was spilled, the horse gram was spilled, half the utensils were on the floor, the flour was spilled and some of the monkeys had painted their face painted white in it. The contents of the waste basket were spilled and the whole place stunk. The only exception to this is our cute little baby monkey, which was sitting on the lid of an earthen pot with its hands over its eyes - as if to say that it saw no evil or did no evil.

My friend is shocked and in a fix. He had to get rid of the monkeys. Would they leave if he politely asked them to? He was sure that wouldn't work. He makes a banana trail of what was left, all the way to the front door, only to find more monkeys come in and run off with the bananas. Now being at the end of his wits, he picks up a blunt knife and starts 'shooing' at the monkeys as in a swordfight. That seemed to be working! He manages to frighten all of them out. He is now pleased with his skills, that he further tries 'shooing' the monkeys with the knife off the compound, only to realize the entire neighborhood was watching the proceedings with great enthusiasm.

Next, my other friend who was out that night got a shocker when he saw the state of the kitchen. He figures out that I had left the front door open!

I was unaware of the incident until another friend told me, that they weren't very happy with what I did, leaving the front door open. I am also told that it took them one good hour to clean up the mess. I wisely decided to skip lunch. By dinner, things had settled and I got away with a mild warning.