Mourning for the Monkey

I came across this in one of my backup folders. I remember writing it 10 years back when I was pretty sick of the senseless cultural and religious traditions. I wonder how this story would have developed if I had actually completed it. But perhaps some stories are best left unfinished. Here it goes:

Shadows of the evening were getting over the tired jungle, populated with trees that had passed their day swaying and dancing with the breeze. And now they were calm and quiet, standing with their roots deep down the ground. Their leaves did not clap. Perhaps they were listening to the music of the fall, which could not be seen, but one could feel its cool fresh water with the ears. The environment around was getting humid by the fall nearby. All was set for another peaceful, calm, drowsy and hallucinating night, including the tallest and the oldest of trees, which had seen a lot of this all.

Under this tree was lying a stone, on which a young monkey sat. Though he was a monkey, he was not as monkey as other monkeys were. Apparently, he had everything needed to make him a monkey. He belonged to the monkey race, had a dumb average face, a long tail, dark hair and everything an average monkey could have. The difference was that strangely, he had a human brain. And that was something, which made his life miserable.

And why this could not be so? After all, he didn’t follow the age-old monkey traditions strictly. These traditions were very traditional for all monkeys. They all used to look for food all the day, fought over petty issues, feared and worshiped everything that seemed to threaten them, and in short, did everything a good monkey was expected to do.

On the other hand this monkey used to spend most of his time sitting on that stone and thinking about various things that bothered him. He did not want to take things for granted and suspected monkey traditions. Although he never dared to express himself in public, he never put restrictions upon his thoughts. By the way, another reason for not expressing himself in public was the fact that this monkey was not good at the art of bold expression. And so he kept his thoughts to himself, and to save him from any trouble, occasionally joined other monkeys in their rituals.

(to be continued)