AHMEDABAD: For residents of Jashodanar-Vatwa and Isanpur's industrial pocket in south Ahmedabad, the media highlighting of the elusive Monkey Man is a sharp reminder of the nightmare that they went through in 1996.
Then too it was summer vacations and a mysterious animal, whose size grew as the word spread around and rumour mills went in overdrive, injured 19 persons and sent the city in a spin. Police control room went tizzy each time one saw a shadow of a jute sack flapping on a clothes line.
Says RMO of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation's L G Hospital in Maninagar, Dr Dharmila Shah, people started coming in with injuries and they were not sure who and what had injured them. Some said it was a jharak, a local variety of a hyena, some said it was a strange animal that looked like a overgrown wolf which walked on its hind legs, much like our ancestral neanderthals did.
Says Mehrzaban Beramji, a resident of Jashodanagar, ``we used to sleep the days and keep a watch in the night, with pick-axes, sickles, spears, lathis and mashals torches. That fornight drove enough fear amongst small children who would not venture out after dark.
But, the mysterious animal was never caught. ``Eventually we came to a conclusion that the suspect was a palm civet, a monkey like animal which eats almost anything and lives in congested areas where food is abundant. They also tend to loose their cool in the summer and start attacking humans'', says Dr R K Sahu, superintendent of the Kamala Nehru Zoo.
The zoo staff laid traps all over south Ahmedabad, did what ever was taught in forestry manuals but ``the civets are very smart and agile'', says Sahu. The mystery was never solved and one more ghost went down into the Nightmare on Elm Street.
