Episode 3 — Hostage Negotiations
At noon the class stopped for lunch near the monkey enclosure, and Siddharth chose that moment to stop waiting.
He had eaten nothing. He had spent the morning filming, and the morning had not gone the way he needed it to, because every time Della should have been exposed she had instead been believed, and a boy who is right and losing is a particular kind of dangerous. He stood up in front of the class with his phone in his hand and he said, loudly enough for Mrs. Vance to hear, “Della. You keep saying you understand animals. You said it about the swan. You said it about the hippo. I have kept a bird list for eight years, and I have never once told anyone a swan was saying hello. So show us the hard one.” He nodded at the enclosure behind them. “Talk to the monkeys.”
The monkey enclosure at Greenwood was a caged island of dead branches, and on it lived a troop of capuchins, small and quick and bored, and a capuchin that is bored is not an animal, it is a professional. The sign on the rail said, in faded letters, DO NOT FEED THE MACAQUES, which was the wrong animal, because Greenwood labelled everything with the name of something it did not have.
Della stood, because a lead stands when challenged. Her uniform was grey-brown and stiffening in the sun. She walked to the rail, and the class came with her, and Mrs. Vance came too, and Della looked through the mesh at the capuchins and the capuchins looked back at her with the flat professional interest of creatures assessing what a person is carrying.
“Communication with primates,” Della said, “is not about words. It is about presence. You do not perform for them. You allow them to read your intentions.”
“So read one,” said Siddharth.
Della stepped up to the mesh. She did not know how to talk to a monkey. She knew how to say sentences about talking to a monkey, and she had found, over three months, that this was almost always enough, so she raised one hand slowly to the mesh, palm open, the way people offered a hand in nature films, and she said, low and even, “I mean you no harm.”
The nearest capuchin came down the mesh very fast.
It came the way the swan had come, except that the swan had wanted her collar and the capuchin wanted something specific, and it reached through the gap in the mesh with one small precise hand, past her open palm, which it ignored, and into the breast pocket of her uniform, and it took the folded card out of the pocket and was back up the branch before Della had finished the word harm.
Della knew what the card was before her mind caught up with her body. Her body had already gone cold. It was her board-exam admit card, the paper Mrs. Vance needed for the form. It was the one document a Class 12 student is told, every day, by every adult, never to lose, the small folded paper with her photograph and her roll number and the words that let her sit the exam that the whole of the last two years had been for, and it was now in the hand of a capuchin at the top of a dead branch, and the capuchin was turning it over with the deep unbothered curiosity of a creature that has understood, correctly, that it now holds something you want.
Every instinct in Della’s body told her to shout, to grab the mesh, to call a keeper, to be, for one second, a normal frightened girl who has lost the most important piece of paper she owns.
She did none of it. Because Mrs. Vance was at her shoulder, and Siddharth’s phone was up, and the girl in the letter does not panic when a monkey takes her paper. She had said she could read them. She had said presence, not performance. She had built the whole day out of not breaking, and she was three feet from a teacher who still, somehow, believed her, and so Della did the thing the costume required, which was to treat the theft of her admit card as a conversation she had chosen to have.
“He is testing me,” she told the class, in the calm deep voice, while her heart went like a bird in her chest. “This is how they establish trust. He has taken something of mine. Now we negotiate.”
“Negotiate with a monkey,” said Siddharth. But the phone stayed up, because whatever this was, he wanted it.
There was a banana on the lunch cloth behind them, half of one, that Farhan had abandoned. Della picked it up without hurrying, as though picking up half a banana were the natural next move in a negotiation she was in full control of, and she held it up to the mesh where the capuchin could see it.
“An exchange,” she said to the capuchin, low, level, an equal. “The paper is nothing to you. This is something to you. Let us both leave with what we value.”
The capuchin looked at the banana. It looked at the card. It came halfway down the branch and stopped, holding the card out over the drop, and Della understood, with a lurch, that it understood leverage, that it was, in fact, a better negotiator than she was, and that if she reached the card would go into the enclosure and be gone.
So she negotiated. She held the banana closer. The capuchin came lower and reached for it and pulled its hand back and held the card higher, and the class began, quietly, to enjoy this, and then not quietly, and Farhan started a low chant of one round to the monkey, and Ritika stood with both hands over her mouth, and Della, sweating through grey-brown cotton, kept her voice serene and her hand steady and negotiated with a wild animal for a document she could not admit she was terrified to lose, round after round, banana and paper, paper and banana, while thirty-one classmates cheered each near miss and Siddharth filmed it all.
In the end the capuchin made the trade. It took the banana with one hand and dropped the card with the other, not to Della, but at the base of the mesh, where she had to crouch in her ruined uniform and reach two fingers through the gap to lift it out, and it came out folded and damp and chewed along one corner, her photograph intact, her roll number intact, the words that let her sit the exam intact, one corner missing.
She stood up with it. She folded it once more, carefully, and returned it to the breast pocket, and she buttoned the pocket flap this time, and she faced the class as though the whole thing had ended exactly as she intended.
“That,” Della said, “is a negotiation. You offer what they need. You never grab for what you need. And you always know exactly what you are carrying.” She pressed the pocket flat.
The class roared. Even Ritika was laughing now, with relief. Mrs. Vance was shaking her head slowly.
And Siddharth lowered his phone, one inch, and looked at Della with the flat unhappy look of a boy who has just captured, in perfect focus, the most impressive thing anyone on the trip had done, and knows it, and knows it does not help him.