They were cornered into the edge of a patch of ground that jutted out into the lake about 30 feet, the seven-year-old boy and his seventy-year-old grandfather faced a pack of twenty angry monkeys in the nearby woods. Hiding behind his grandfather’s legs, the boy peered to chance sight of the advancing mob of monkeys. At the head of the charge, the biggest of them, a burly monkey which seemed to be the obvious leader, snatched and whipped its furry arms in the air with vehement hisses. His grandfather had a stick in his hand, a thin tiny stick which he had picked up earlier just to wave it playfully in the air, as if in remembrance of a long-lost childhood. When they reached the tip, the last bit of land, the leader of the pack suddenly charged with a jump and its pack of four-legged soldiers immediately roared into an organized start.
It all happened so fast, before the boy could realize it, the monkeys had been driven away. When the boy opened his eyes, he looked up just as his grandfather was turning around to face him, the early morning hue showed his face as some mystic warrior of the fog, and the boy noticed the thick white mustache on his face, it glimmered like the edges of a sharp blade.
Through the fog, an aged hand reached out and the boy held it firm. Lifting himself up, the boy hugged his grandfather in a tight wordless embrace, a cormorant dipped into the water to fish, a cricket stridulated its last chirp for the ending night and a pack of doves flew across the brimming sky, another silent moment in the jungle came to pass.
Across the lake, a peacock called out and a sudden cool wind revealing its patterns on the lake, breezed over the boy still hugging his grandfather. Patting his back, the grandfather rose and threw the stick into the lake. Stroking his mustache, a weathered smile came across his wise face, and he said to the boy,
‘It was the mustache you see?’
…
Twenty years later, the boy sat by his grandfather’s casket and stroked tearlessly at his chin. A sparse mustache adorned his early adult face, still a long way to go for a thick white mustache like the one he had, he thought to himself as he stared at the lifeless body of his grandfather. As he rose and turned to leave, it occurred to him that this would be the last time he would ever see him. But, other thoughts pressed at him, there was, as a matter of fact, the issue of the will, which had express instructions on how each of the late grandfather’s assets would be hence divided.
When he turned around, he faced the forlorn faces of his uncles and aunties, faces he and his grandfather had not seen for a long time, certainly not during the final few years of the old man. They were here for the inheritance, the boy knew that much. The pack of monkeys had returned, hungry and desperate. And the boy had a thin letter in his hand, his grandfather’s will. He opened it right there in that silent hall and read it out aloud.
The shocked and terrified gasps of the uncles and aunties showed that they were going to get nothing. The boy was to get something at least and the real needy of his poor neighborhood would get a lot of it. The monkeys had been driven away.
Smiling, he turned to face the casket and stroked his thin mustache.
