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CRIME: MONKEY MAN
Fright Nights
A furry, winged, clawed entity, half-man, half-monkey,
raids the capital's rooftops, spreads terror and causes two deaths
By Sayantan Chakravarty
He has steel claws. Or maybe they're brass.
They're sharp. They're long.
He's 6 ft tall. Maybe seven. He has springs
on the soles of his feet.
You know when he's coming for you because
he announces his presence. Sometimes with an eerie whistle, sometimes
with howling wind. Sometimes you spy his shadow, sometimes you see his
shape.
But every single time, he evades capture.
Like the devil, he is everywhere yet nowhere...
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1)
SMART GEAR: The Monkey Man has been "spotted" wearing
a helmet and sunglasses. |
| 2)
REMOTE POWER: Some say it carries a remote-like contraption
that enables it to fly. |
| 3)
CLAWS OF STEEL: Victims' "scratch" marks were caused
by very sharp metallic claws. |
| 4)
GIANT LEAPS: It is believed that the creature's feet of
springs help it elude capture. |
It could be a scene
from a screamingly overblown, ketchup-soaked Ramsay Brothers horror film,
but in Delhi's Mullah Colony, whose residents have forgotten the rest
brought on by a good night's sleep, it's all very real. Shamshad Ali,
an autorickshaw driver, has an awed audience of 200 listening to his gripping
description of the so-called Kala Bandar (Black Monkey Man) in a silence
so complete that the faintest footfall would have sent people scattering.
The scene was repeated across Delhi and beyond
last week, as the bizarre story of the mysterious and malevolent Monkey
Man grabbed public attention. Politicians, filmstars and businessmen played
second fiddle to an allegedly half-simian, half-human entity which moved
stealthily through the dark attacking the innocent. The tales ranged from
the surreal to the ridiculous, turning into scare stories recited nightly
in the low-income ghettos "targeted" by the Monkey Man and at
the dinner tables of the affluent.
The Monkey Man's antics were not mere pranksters'
acts. As the result of the terror, two people including a pregnant woman
lost their lives. On May 14, Raman Kumar of Noida's Sector 58 leapt off
his roof and died after he was allegedly attacked by the Monkey Man. A
day later in Mullah Colony, Praveen Kumar's wife Suman died in her two-room
tenement. Just after midnight, on hearing "the scream of the monkey
man" Suman rushed from the terrace where she was sleeping, down the
stairs "to safety". She fell headlong and was rushed to east
Delhi's Guru Tegh Bahadur hospital where she was declared dead of a head
injury. Suman's landlady Kamlesh Kumari, who was also perched on her rooftop
that night, says ominously, "We all heard the scream."
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VICTIMS'
WOES: FACT OR FEVERED FICTION?
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| FLYING FURY: Noida's Rekha Das says she won't
forget the attack easily. The Monkey Man "flew" through
a gap in her room, bit her face and fingers, and knocked out four
of her husband's teeth. |
MONKEY BUSINESS: Kesar Bano and her husband
Ishtiaq awoke to the "screaming" terror. They grappled with
it fleetingly before it fled at a blinding speed. |
Kesar Bano and her tailor husband Mohammad Ishtiaq
live a few blocks away and claim to have grappled with the unidentified
being the same night. They say they threw their bedsheet over the "dark
creature" in order to tie it down. "But it was just too fast
for us. It leapt away into the darkness screaming 'Hoo Hoo Hoo' before
we could even catch a glimpse," says Bano.
Bano and Ishtiaq's encounter was typical-one
of a reported 100 cases attributed to the Monkey Man. Swift, at night,
restricted to the low-income areas of east Delhi and neighbouring Ghaziabad
and Gautam Budhnagar districts of Uttar Pradesh, where people sleep on
rooftops to escape the sweltering weather and lingering power cuts.
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