A Burning Foot

  When the smiling couple left the young boy with a crumpled hundred-rupee note in his hand, he swore under my breath in English, and then in Nepalese cursed a rain of rabid monkeys upon them.  Nothing happened, not one of the scraggly, golden furred louts made a single malicious move towards the young lovers.  They just continued to laze in the sun, licking their testicles and eating the scraps thrown to them by the people who saw this country as one huge zoo.  Today’s exhibit, Swayanabath: known for the plague of monkeys who maraud around it like false deities.  The boy had once seen a fat man feed an entire chocolate bar to one of them; its eyes had been bloodshot and bulging.  It had looked mangy in its faltering, decimated coat.  It was easy to see that the monkey was going be dead from disease by the morning, but that wouldn’t have shown in the photo taken by the fat mans fat wife, sweating and smiling in the high humidity of Nepal.  That chocolate bar had been three times the value of the dirty note the boy now clutched.