BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
The first herald of oblivion was not a sound, but a scent.
It crept into the sanctum of Chandrakant Deshmukh’s slumber like the ghost of a forgotten epoch, a primordial musk of sun-scorched earth and overripe fruit, an olfactory violation of his whitewashed walls and the sterile geometry of his meticulously ordered existence. He surfaced from the depths of an afternoon nap with the slow, dawning horror of a man who knows, even before his eyes unseal, that the world has been rearranged around him by forces indifferent to his sovereignty.
His sheets were a tangle of serpents about his legs. His heart was a captive bird thrashing against the cage of his ribs. The apartment, his fortress of solitude on the outskirts of Pune, reeked of the jungle. It stank of the wild. It breathed of everything he had spent forty-seven years building walls against.
Chandrakant Deshmukh sat up.
And there, upon his grandmother’s teak dining table, polished to a mirror sheen by three generations of devoted hands, sat a god.
Not the benign, saffron-smeared deities of the temple murals, no. No Hanuman. This was a god of the margins, a shaggy, rust-coloured divinity of chaos. A Rhesus macaque, his pelt the colour of monsoon mud, regarded him with ancient, unblinking eyes while his delicate, almost human, fingers peeled a stolen banana with the reverence of a priest at a consecration. His face was a pink, hairless mask of antiquity, seamed with the wisdom of a thousand raids, a thousand stolen mangoes, a thousand narrow escapes from the slingshots of vengeful boys. It was the face of a creature that had outlived empires.
Chandrakant’s mind, a well-oiled machine of spreadsheets and risk assessments, stuttered. Then it rebooted. The balcony window. Yes. He remembered the cool touch of the night breeze, the intoxicating scent of rain on gulmohar blossoms, the reckless luxury of leaving a portal unsealed. A mistake. An invitation. He was a man of precision, of neat rows and synced tables, of quarterly reports and quarterly goals, and this intrusion was an anarchy he could not abide.
But Chandrakant was also a man who believed in the primacy of his own intelligence. He had risen from modest beginnings to become a senior financial analyst for a multinational corporation. He had negotiated mergers. He had brokered peace between warring departments. He had tamed volatility itself and reduced it to a series of elegant bullet points.
This was not a predator. This was a problem. An inconvenience. A negotiation.
He held his hands out, palms open, the universal gesture of surrender and appeasement he had once read about in a wildlife magazine on a long-haul flight to Singapore. “Peace,” he murmured, his voice a low, placating rumble. “Be still. I mean you no harm.”
The monkey ceased his peeling. His head rotated with a mechanical, unnerving exactness, a fulcrum of concentration. Those eyes, black and deep as a well in a forgotten forest, bottomless as the void between stars, fixed upon him. They held no fear. They held no malice. They held only the cold, unblinking curiosity of a predator assessing prey, a calculator measuring the distance between his claw and Chandrakant’s jugular. In those eyes, Chandrakant saw himself reflected: a brown, soft thing, terribly fragile, terribly breakable.
“You see,” Chandrakant continued, his tone taking on the syrupy condescension one reserves for fractious children and nervous interns, “you’ve had your fun. The fruit is yours. Take it as my gift. Now, the window. You must go back.” He gestured with a sweep of his arm that was meant to be imperious, a command from the high priest to the stray dog, from the master of the house to the trespasser.
The monkey’s gaze followed the gesture, landing on the sliver of blue that was the open window. It was a narrow portal, a slim escape route back to the wild, laughing green of the city’s outskirts. A world of branches and sunlight and the pure, uncomplicated tyranny of instinct. A world where there were no quarterly reports, no performance reviews, no carefully curated personas. A world of raw, unmediated existence.
For the briefest of moments, Chandrakant saw a flicker. A softening in the creature’s posture. It was a pantomime of understanding, a deliberate performance designed to lull him into complacency. The monkey chittered, a low, placid sound that was almost friendly, almost forgiving. Then he took a bite of the banana, chewing with exaggerated slowness, revealing a wet, red maw and a row of canines like tiny, yellowed scimitars—weapons honed by evolution for the single purpose of rending flesh from bone.
It was a display of ownership. The banana was his. The table was his. The air he breathed was his. And Chandrakant was merely a guest in his kingdom, an interloper in his newly claimed dominion.
Emboldened by this apparent truce, Chandrakant took a decisive step forward, closing the distance between them. A fatal error. The first of many.
“Good,” he crooned, the word a honeyed poison dripping from his lips. “There’s a good fellow. Now, let us return you to your proper place.”
He gestured again to the window, his motion a little sharper this time, a little more insistent. The monkey watched the gesture, his head tracking Chandrakant’s hand like a hawk tracks a field mouse.
And then, the elements themselves conspired against him.
A gust of wind, a careless, indifferent breath from the simmering afternoon, swept through the apartment and nudged the balcony window. It swung inwards with a soft, final sigh. The lock clicked home with the sound of a coffin lid being sealed.
The sanctuary had become a cage. The escape route had been erased.
The change was instantaneous, and it was absolute.
The false calm evaporated like mist before the sun. The monkey’s body went rigid, his spine a taut bowstring of terror. The low chittering ceased, replaced by a sound that crawled from the pit of his being—a low, guttural growl that vibrated through the floorboards like the first tremor of an earthquake. His head snapped towards the closed window, and in his eyes, Chandrakant saw the abyss.
The ancient wisdom was gone. The curiosity was gone. The performance of placidity was gone. In their place was a primal, unfiltered panic, a black, swirling vortex of terror that had no room for negotiation, for reason, for mercy. The creature saw not a man, but an obstacle. Not a host, but a wall. And walls, when they stand between a trapped soul and his freedom, must be torn down.
A shriek tore from the monkey’s throat.
It was not a chitter. It was not a call. It was a jet of pure, undiluted rage, a sound that seemed to split the air itself, to shatter the placid Sunday afternoon into a thousand razor-edged shards. It was the sound of a soul trapped in a cage of his own making, the sound of a wild thing staring into the abyss of his own extinction and deciding, in that final, desperate instant, to take the world down with him.
He launched himself.
It was a blur of rust and fury, a projectile of muscle and bone and seething terror. Chandrakant had time only to register the impact—a cannonball of wiry sinew against his chest. He was hurled backwards, his spine meeting the sharp corner of the sideboard with a sickening crack that he felt in his teeth. A crystal vase, his mother’s, exploded into a constellation of glittering fragments on the floor, each shard catching the light like a frozen tear.
Pain, white-hot and blinding, erupted in his forearm. The monkey had latched on, his claws, curved and needle-sharp, sinking through the thin cotton of Chandrakant’s shirt and deep into the meat beneath. He screamed, a high, reedy sound of disbelief and agony, so unlike the measured tones of his boardroom voice. It was the scream of a man who has never been truly hurt, discovering for the first time what pain actually means.
He flailed, trying to dislodge the creature, but the monkey was fused to him, a second skin of claws and teeth and malevolent intent. His canines found Chandrakant’s shoulder, sinking in with a wet, percussive crunch that he felt in his very marrow. The pain was a live wire, arcing from his shoulder to his brain, short-circuiting every logical faculty he possessed. His carefully constructed world of reason and order collapsed like a house of cards in a hurricane.
He fell to the floor, the monkey riding him down like a conquering general. The stench of him was overwhelming—the rank musk of his fur, the sour tang of his breath, the copper perfume of Chandrakant’s own blood now painting the pristine white marble in abstract, arterial patterns. It was the smell of the wild, the untamed, the chaotic world that lurked just beyond the veil of his controlled existence, a world that did not care for his spreadsheets or his synced calendars or his carefully curated legacy on LinkedIn.
And then, the true horror began.
The creature’s attack was not random. It was not the mindless flailing of a frightened animal. It was a systematic dismantling, a masterpiece of architectural destruction executed by a demonic demolitionist. He was a predator in the grip of a transcendental terror, and Chandrakant was the temple he was sworn to tear down, brick by screaming brick.
A claw raked Chandrakant’s cheek. He felt the skin part like wet paper, felt the canyon carved from his temple to his jaw, felt the warm, arterial gush flood his vision with crimson. He tried to shield himself, but his hands were butterflies against a hurricane, his strength a candle flame against a gale.
Another claw found his eyelid. There was a grotesque popping sensation, a sound like a grape being crushed between thumb and forefinger, and a shard of excruciating, supernova-bright pain detonated behind his eye. The world went dark on one side, a permanent eclipse. He was being unmade. Piece by screaming piece. Organ by weeping organ.
He could feel the creature’s breath on his exposed innards now, for the monkey had torn away his shirt, his claws savaging the fabric like paper in a shredder. His attention shifted to Chandrakant’s stomach, the soft, pale expanse of his vulnerability, the tender flesh that had never known a day of physical labour. He paused, seeming to inspect his handiwork, his eyes—those bottomless, soulless pits—scanning Chandrakant’s exposed torso with the detached interest of a surgeon examining a cadaver.
And then he bit him.
Just below the ribs. A powerful, crunching bite that sank through the skin and the muscle and found the slick, warm treasure beneath. Chandrakant was dimly aware of a deep, resonant tearing sound, a sound he had only ever heard in nature documentaries, the sound of hide being peeled from a carcass, the sound of hyenas at a kill.
He looked down. A part of his mind—the detached, horrified observer that watches from a great distance—observed the scene as if through a fogged lens. He saw his own intestines, a glistening, opalescent rope of pink and white and glistening membrane, being pulled from his abdomen like a magician’s endless scarf. The monkey, his face now a grotesque mask of Chandrakant’s own gore, held a loop of his guts in his clawed hand, examining it with a kind of solemn curiosity.
The panic in his eyes had gone. The terror had been exorcised. Now there was only a flat, cold calm, the peace of a predator who has successfully neutralised a threat. The monkey had remembered, in that final, fatal instant, what he truly was: a creature of the wild, born to rend and tear and survive.
Chandrakant’s breath was coming in ragged, wet gasps now, each exhalation a bubbling sigh that tasted of copper and iron and his own mortality. He felt the creature’s fingers, cold and impossibly strong, probe the ragged wound in his belly. He felt a final, titanic tug, a rending of the last fibres that held him together, as the monkey, with a definitive, almost contemptuous gesture, ripped the last of his viscera free, spilling them across the Italian marble floor in a steaming, glistening pile that steamed in the cool afternoon air.
His mouth opened, but no scream came. Only a wet, gurgling sigh, a last exhalation of a soul that had been torn from his moorings.
The last thing he saw, through his one remaining eye, was the monkey sitting back on his haunches, his chest heaving, his fur a matted crimson tapestry. He was no longer a god. He was no longer a demon. He was simply a creature, doing what creatures do.
The monkey looked at the ruins he had made. He looked at the silent, carnivorous city beyond the glass, the sprawling, ungovernable green of the Pune outskirts. He had no interest in Chandrakant’s legacy, his ambitions, his neatly ordered life. He had no interest in his quarterly reports or his carefully curated persona. He only wanted to escape. He only wanted to go home.
Slowly, with a dignity that was almost majestic, he crossed the blood-slicked floor. The marble was no longer white but a glistening crimson, a mirror reflecting the creature’s triumphant passage. He paused at the window, his head cocked, listening to the distant hum of a world that had no place for him, a world that had tried to send him away, a world that had failed.
Then, with a paw still dripping with the evidence of his triumph, he pushed open the glass and vanished into the banyan trees, leaving behind only a cooling body, a lesson in the arrogance of man, and the grim truth that a home, once breached, is but a tomb.
And the window remained unsealed, a silent witness to the folly of those who believe they can negotiate with the wild, who believe they can broker peace with forces older and more terrible than their spreadsheets, who believe that a lock can hold back the jungle.
THE END
The window was always the point of ingress. The window was always the point of egress. And the window, in its silent indifference, remained open to the world, waiting for the next fool to leave it unsealed.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Dear Townies and Conservatism (2024).