Langurs

Langurs are the long-tailed, black-faced monkeys who occupy the ruined Old Fort and, in Saleem’s account, set about dismantling it stone by stone. Their most consequential appearance comes during the failed ransom exchange: one langur, whom Saleem names Hanuman, finds the money bags and destroys the payment before the collectors can claim it. The episode gives the animals their own territory, purpose, and power to redirect human events.

The Old Fort as territory

The Old Fort has been deserted by people and become the langurs’ home. They climb to its highest points, establish territories, and repeatedly loosen its masonry. Their labor is described as patient and collective: they pull and rock at the stones, one at a time, until each breaks free, rolls down the walls, and crashes into the ditches. The ruin is therefore not merely a backdrop to human dealings; it is an active habitat undergoing a slow transformation under the monkeys’ persistent work.

The narrator imagines the process reaching its end: the Old Fort will become a heap of rubble, with monkeys screaming in triumph above it. This projected future makes their routine movements seem like a campaign against the structure itself. The scene’s scale shifts between the individual stone they dislodge and the eventual disappearance of the fortress, turning animal behavior into a visible measure of historical decay.

Hanuman and the ransom bags

During the attempted exchange, three men leave three gray bags on the topmost landing of a turret. The bags contain the money intended for the Ravana gang, whose representative has ordered the payment to be left there. The men defy the instructions by hiding in a ruined room nearby, while the bags wait above them in the gathering dark.

A langur enters this human arrangement without recognizing or respecting its purpose. Saleem gives him the name Hanuman, invoking the monkey god who helped Prince Rama defeat Ravana. The name links the animal’s intrusion to the gang’s own theatrical name, but the langur acts without any stated knowledge of the ransom or the people waiting below. He sniffs out the unfamiliar bags in his territory, pounces on them, and begins to pull them apart.

The bags are soft enough for Hanuman to tear open. He scoops paper from their insides, scattering it down into the darkness, then drags the bags to the edge of the outer wall and kicks them over. They fall into the ditch, where they land with a soft plop. Having finished, Hanuman loses interest and runs off to a distant pinnacle, where he resumes rocking a stone. The contrast is exact: what is a high-stakes payment to the men is only an alien object obstructing the langur’s territory.

Consequences for the men

Below, the three businessmen do not know that the money has been destroyed. They see the gang’s collector emerge from the gloom in a demon-like headdress, go up toward the landing, and then rush away again, cursing. When the men finally climb to investigate, they find a torn fragment of gray cloth and a crumpled rupee. Saleem suggests that they may glimpse a dark flurry of monkey, and that they begin to understand what has happened.

The langur’s intervention overturns the expected course of the exchange without intention or negotiation. The collector arrives to find the payment gone; the men are left to piece together the loss from scraps; and the gang’s threat is answered not by a human plan but by an animal’s destructive routine. The fort’s monkeys have already been loosening its stones, and now one of them loosens the men’s arrangement as well.

Narrative significance

Saleem’s naming of the langur as Hanuman makes the episode resonate with myth, but the animal remains materially specific: he climbs, sniffs, tears, kicks, and departs. The narrator’s mythic association sits alongside the creature’s independent behavior rather than explaining it away. The result is an encounter between a human symbolic world and an animal whose immediate concerns are territory and unfamiliar objects.

The episode also places human schemes within a landscape whose changes do not answer to human intention. The men treat the Old Fort as a convenient hiding place and the turret as a secure drop point; the langurs inhabit the same architecture as a domain to be worked over and reclaimed. Their presence unsettles the assumption that people alone determine what happens in the scene. A ransom plan can be undone by a monkey acting on its own terms, just as the fortress itself is being undone, stone by stone, by the animals who live there.