Monkey Business

It all started with a nightmare. Jyothi Raju dreamt one night that he was plummeting from an enormous stone structure. As he hit the ground, huge rocks began falling onto him, crushing his body to death. He had little idea how momentous this phantasm would prove to be.

The nightmare intensified, and began haunting Raju every single night like some horrible incubus from a myth. It weighed on his mind, driving him into a deep depression and pushing him to the verge of insanity. Extremely troubled, he left his home of Tamilnadu, India for a town called Chitradurga.

Despite hopes of a new beginning in Chitradurga, the nightmares continued. One day, Raju came across the famous Chitradurga fort. Feeling helpless and troubled by his harrowing visions, he decided to commit suicide by throwing himself off the giant stones of the fort.

As he began climbing the massive rocks, a strange feeling came over him. He soon realized that this was the very same stone structure that been terrifying him in his nightmare. Like a man possessed, he scampered up the entire stone wall, nearly 70 feet to the top. Upon reaching the top, Raju saw a crowd of tourists smiling and cheering at his remarkable act.

Touched by this experience, Raju rejected the idea of suicide and climbed down the wall. He went home. The same nightmare appeared again in his dreams that night, but miraculously, he was not frightened by it. On the contrary, he felt relieved and rejuvenated.

The next day, he returned to the fort, where he observed the local monkeys and studied how they climbed the walls. From that point on, he climbed the walls of the fort every day from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Later on, with the help of a spiritual practitioner, Raju realized that in an earlier incarnation, he was the leader of a monkey clan at Chitradurga fort. One day while climbing, a snake had bitten him and he died. As fate would have it, however, Raju’s monkey antics were not yet destined to end. 

Today, Raju entertains countless numbers of visitors with his amazing acrobatics. It is truly a magnificent sight to behold. Raju can effortlessly scale a wall using just his toes and fingertips. He hangs upside down from his feet like some fabled storybook bat in a cave. He gyrates and scurries about with primal simian instincts. He frolics with his monkey companions and even buys them food with the money he earns. In short, he is the Monkey King.