Monkey Adventure at Kannapaman Temple
Trip Start
Oct 09, 2007
1
16
45
Trip End
Mar 10, 2008
Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu,
India
Thursday, January 10, 2008
You walk in about ½ kilometer from the gate at the road, along a simple red dirt path that is strewn with lots of quartz rock and bordered on both sides by humble bushes that appear to arch overhead in the distance. Eventually you see the temple steps, rising about 25 feet into a boulder formation that contains a cave, with a simple, unassuming temple on top. The temple is crowned in the distance by a perfect triangular peak of one of Arunachala's many formations. Trees surround the round rock cave formation, some of them flowering with bright yellow tropical blooms that attract a variety of exquisite humminglike birds and an amazing variety of butterflies. Black ones with brilliant red bodies, black ones with brilliant blue wings, monarch like ones, ones with teal blue wings that are edged in black. It is enough to make your heart sing, resting there in the shade on the rounded rocks, with the breezes stirring the leaves of the trees, amid multiple layers of stone paths that encircle and form the base of the temple.
I have gone there 3 times now
Me on temple steps
. I have Kumar, my wonderful, very honest auto Rickshaw driver, drop me there for a couple of hours and return to pick me up. The birds' singing is constant in the airily forested surroundings. Their chattering melodies are delicate and enchanting, as are the birds themselves and the butterflies when they come and go. The footpath for walking all the way around Arunachala passes right behind the trees, and around 4:30, you can hear a distant, softly muffled cow bell begin to draw nearer and nearer. Bellowing moos soon follow as a small herd of massive bulls, their cows, and calves, saunter past. An opening in the greenery allows you to see each animal quite clearly as they pass in almost single file along the footpath. The single, belled cow brings up the rear. I guess the sound urges the others on.
My favorite bird is a tiny, exquisite black bird, whose head, neck and shoulders are draped in shimmering and brilliant, luminous green. His beak is thin and long with a gently curved tip. Though his wings don't keep moving when flying, at rest or feeding, everything else about him says hummingbird. Another very tiny bird who seems to accompany him is yellow with black markings, also with a slender slip of a long beak for drawing the nectar from the coned yellow blossoms on the trees. They have such refined, fascinating little bodies. I have spent more time trying to capture pictures of the birds and butterflies than meditating, and rationalize my guilt about that by reassuring myself that I am a nature lover, and being witness to the incredible beauty of the creation is its own form of open-eyed mediation (even if trying to get a photo of these very fast moving living gems isn't in the slightest bit meditative).
Today I had laid down on the rock and was praying, soaking up the silent energy of the mountain that sits below the music of all that is living in such sweetness here
Sunlit Kannappaman Temple, Sunset
. (This mountain is older than the Himalayas.) At one point, I opened my eyes to see what I would guess to be an adolescent monkey sitting only about 4 feet away from me. His facial skin was pleasantly red (not bright), and he appeared to be very patiently sitting in his own silent meditation. He seemed calm enough to simply look at me, even when I moved, until I went for my camera a little too quickly. Damn! He was gone in a flash over the walkway, down to the next level. I did manage to get a photo of his backside as he scrambled down the back steps to the ground. Oh, well. Lesson learned. If I had just laid there and enjoyed him, we might have had a real moment of magic together.
I resigned myself to the loss of that possibility and went back to meditating. 20 minutes later, though, I hear some hefty movement of branches in the surrounding trees and am treated to an entire clan of about 30 monkeys, of all ages, sizes, running and jumping from tree limb to tree limb, sitting directly above my head in the branches, scampering and fighting on the temple rooftop, and cuddling their young, in between foraging for food in the trees and eating yellow blossoms.
While I am having a VERY good time watching them and photographing them, they could care less about my presence. The Indian woman who cleans the temple area warns me to be careful, not to get too close to any of them, and not to fall off the edge of the boulders as I go about taking photos
Kannappaman Temple outside Tiru
. She disappears for a moment, then returns with a gallon jar of old rice and is carrying a stick about 10-12 feet long with her. She pours all of the rice out in several piles on the back steps. Things immediately get intense. Furious food competition and loud fighting break out between several groups of adults. Fighting monkeys move very quickly. I am a little unnerved at just how dangerous this could become in short order. But this woman knows what she is doing and wields her stick with great effectiveness as she shouts at the fighting groups, who immediately break up and eventually settle down.
The granddaddy-sized males chase all the others away while they take the lions share (big handfuls of the rice). The dominant one allows one female to feed and stops eating long enough to have a sexual encounter, then quickly goes back to eating. By now the other adults are eating as well. The temple caretaker soon starts wielding her stick again to make sure the little ones, who have been chased away up to this point and are hanging on to the rock wall looking longingly at the food, can get in on the meal. Of course the adults turn right around to reclaim their territory and primacy. Several of the small ones do a pretty brave number holding their own spot while the adults continue to get chased away so they can eat.
The littlest one, who has been sitting timidly off to the side on the ground, finally works up enough nerve to approach as the pickings get scarce. It furtively takes one grain of rice at a time, puts it to its mouth at light speed, while never taking its apprehensive little eyes off the larger ones who might want to reassert themselves. He startles at every movement of an adult, but does manage to eat.
Having used up all my memory in one camera, I remembered I had a second, took a few more photos, then left to meet my driver at the road. It was a delightful surprising encounter for me, the highlight of my day, needless to say. I got lots of photos which I will share and post when I return to Kolkata.
