Life Stories: Escaping Death by King Kong

I originally come from India and lived there for 7 years before moving to the United States. I was visiting back to my grandparent's home in India during the summer because there was no school. The roofs to many houses in India are open and one can actually go and stand on the roof. Being near the equator there, it obviously gets very hot during the summer and we didn't have any air conditioning at my grandparent's house. So everybody would sleep up on the roof where it was open and the breeze cooled us down.

So my cousins and I slept peacefully all night long and then woke up in the morning to start the daily routine of doing nothing. All the adults had left to go downstairs and ready up for their jobs while my cousins and I were dilly-dallying. There was one mattress still left up on the rooftop on which we sat thinking about what to do. I decided to take a sip of my water under the hot sun that had started to shine down harshly upon us. While I was drinking the water, I got a punch in the gut! Not literally a punch but it felt as if something was telling me to be ready. At that same time, my smallest cousin saw a baby monkey on the wall of our roof. It was all by itself with no other monkey in sight. My cousin, who thought he was the funniest of us all, decided that it would be a great idea to scare the baby monkey. The poor monkey was quite spooked by the annoying sound that my cousin emitted and it started to make a crying distress call. Soon enough a ginormous monkey (not King Kong or anything but to my 11 year old mind he was) that was 4x the size of the baby monkey appeared right next to the baby. Since I was the largest compared to my cousins, he saw me as the biggest threat (DARN YOU GENES!) and stared me down with his piercing brown eyes. My brain went into automatic mode as I saw the monkey leap at the speed of a bullet towards me. Water gushed out of my mouth as I dropped the water bottle to run at full sprint to the stairs to get to safety. The monkey was right on my heels and that's when it happened... he finally grabbed on. But, it wasn't my leg, arm, or anything normal. He had grabbed for my pants and had grabbed hold of my underwear. I didn't give a care in the world as I jumped after my 3rd stair step over a flight of 10-11 stairs partially shredding my underwear in the process. I ran to my grandparents panting and sweating like a maniac. After that it was basically a blur.

When I regained sanity, I found out that my cousins had gone and hid under the last leftover mattress while the gargantuan monkey chased after me and laid there breathing as slowly as possibly until my grandparents went upstairs to scare the monkey away.

Moral of the story: "Don't mess with a parent's baby."