My brush with celebrity

The main reason we traveled to Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh was the monkeys. The macaques there are known for their snatching and exchange behavior, similar to that of the macaques at Jakhu temple in Shimla. There was also a “monkey lady,” who apparently fed the monkeys, that Danny was interested in talking to.

When he first called her up, I could catch snatches of her end of the conversation, and I was surprised to hear that she had an American accent. We were instructed to look for the blonde woman when we went to meet her. (As I later realized, there are plenty of Westerners living in Vrindavan, being that it is one of the main sites in India for the followers of ISKCON.)

We were expecting just some random person who was interested in monkeys and liked feeding them. We were yet again surprised to meet a fabulously rich woman who lived in a humongous old haveli that she was renovating, complete with carved wooden furniture that she was having made on-site. She invited us in for tea and cookies, and we sat around an intricately decorated metal table, while her adopted street dogs, Krishna and Radha, hung out by our feet. It turned out that not only did she feed the resident troop of macaques that live just outside her door (600 chappatis daily, hot off the stove!), but she also ran a clinic for the poor and the street dogs, right out of her own home and funded out of her own pocket. On top of that, she also had a staff that went out to the villages to provide similar care, and she owned farmland nearby on which she was trying to learn how much food one acre could produce for a family.

Apart from telling us about her work and proudly showing off the restorations being done around her home, she didn’t really tell us much about who she was. To us, she was this mysterious woman with a ton of money and a government job which provided her with armed guards, and who also loved animals, wanted to help the poor of India, and had ties to the Hare Krishna community (though she claimed not to be a Hare Krishna herself). We didn’t even know her full name, just the Indian-sounding first name she went by. Suffice to say, she was actually really interesting to talk to.

We went to her house twice to watch her feed monkeys and so Danny could interview her for his research. On our second visit, we got a tour of the clinic, where people came for medicines and to receive care for injuries. We also learned that she had taken in a cow and was going to house an elephant on her farm while it healed from a wound on her foot. It was nice to see someone put all their wealth toward a good purpose.

A few days later, we were in Jaipur, at a hotel with wireless, and we did a little Googling, to find out more about this eccentric monkey lady. We found the site for her organization, which happened to list her full name. We then learned that she had come into her millions by inheritance, being that she was the adopted daughter of a billionaire heiress and philanthropist, and that she had once been portrayed in a TV movie about said billionaire’s life. There were actually a number of different accounts about her adult life, which seemed to be full of intrigue, although no one really seemed to know all the facts. She’s said to have married an infamous actor from children’s TV, though she didn’t seem to have a partner with her in her haveli and made no mention of a Mr. Monkey Lady. (A Wikipedia search of this actor also makes no mention of a wife.) She also has supposedly donated large sums of money to right-wing causes, including George W. Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004. One can only hope that with her clinic in full swing, she’ll put that sort of use of her money to rest. When she spoke with us, she made mention of politicians, actors, and other VIPS, which seemed to be corroborated by what we found on the internet.

If she were from my generation, she would have been the kind of person who popped up in People and Us magazine. Instead, she seems to have been rather successful at running off to India and getting away from her possibly scandalous previous life, where she can feed her monkeys in peace.