Commentary

The Himalayan Monkey Dance!

It’s a beautiful night; stars are out in numbers and shining brighter than their usual. The chilly night somehow feels amazingly warm and the snow over the mountains is glowing with a kind of glow that confuses the proven laws of physics.

I walk slowly, it’s as if my body doesn’t want to walk and yet it is traveling. Closer and closer I get; to peals of laughter and squeals of fun. Something is magnetically drawing me towards this strange rhythm as I keep on walking up the mountainous path with the beautiful moon in a starlit sky giving me company.

I could see them now. Foggy at first but clearer now, Himalayan monkeys they were, dancing; yes! the monkeys high up in the firs and pines of Kashmir were dancing. They were dancing to a rhythm that only an alpine forest under a thick blanket of snow can provide. The dance floor is a frozen lake right in the middle of a vast meadow surrounded by dark shrouds of ethereal darkness and the song that they are singing is perfectly audible to me, and yes for some unknown reason I could now understand “monkey”, yes the language of the monkeys is called monkey and so they sang:

“We frolic and we have fun, monkeying around in our sacred den, next on the list is us and that’s not a pun,

Justice! we will do to the order of things infinite,

Another mutation is all it takes,

for we to become unlike them,

Let this dance be a ritual,

for monkeying will go where no one else ever did,

What they call civilization,

is one more step towards extinction,

Limitless power amongst mortals is nothing but wisdom,

that’s drugged by arrogance We frolic and we have fun,

monkeying around in our sacred den,

next on the list is us and that’s not a pun”.

And then they saw me, and before I could muster up enough courage to escape their attention, one of them came up to me and monkeyed: “Wake up Human”

And I woke up, “what a silly dream”, I said to myself and went right back to my interrupted sleep”.

Ejaz Raboodi-Gosani

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