    33

    It's

    aside a half-eaten fruit or for a passerby to drop a crust of bread.  They

    picked through the garbage for gourmet treats--wilted vegetables or

    melon rinds.  When the rains came, these pampered langurs stretched

    out under the overhangs of roofs.  When it was sunny, they turned

    those roofs into a playground.  Getting along from day to day was a

    breeze.

    The second crew of langurs lived in the hills just outside of town.

    Life for them was anything but easy.  They were forced to comb the

    ground for edible shoots.  They stripped the greenery off the trees for

    dinner, and they dug the occasional insect out of a rotting log for a

    protein treat.  When it rained, they huddled miserably under the

    dripping leaves.  In the pecking order of local groups, their

    superorganism was on the bottom.

    Every once in a while, the monkeys from the hills became fed up

    with their gritty lot in life.  They came down to the village where the

    pickings were easy.  The monkeys of the bazaar, however, were not

    particularly interested in opening their neighborhood to these

    intruders from the wrong side of the tracks.  The privileged lady

    langurs who lived in town got together and chased their

    underprivileged cousins back to the woods from which they'd come.

    But no social group's position in the pecking order is written in

    stone.  One day the male leader of the bazaar langurs was fooling

    around with a sidekick in the middle of the town road.  The hill

    langurs stood at the edge of their territory, grudgingly watching the

    fun.  Suddenly, a car came hurtling down the tarmac.  The lordly male

    of the elite group looked up startled--but too late.  The car sideswiped

    him and sped away.  The leader of the bazaar troop was dead.

    Sensing a sudden shift in the balance of power, the chief of the

    hill tribe sauntered over to the aristocratic ladies of the

    ever-so-snobbish bazaar set--the same supercilious aristocrats who had

    chased him and his companions away an endless number of times.

    The hill langur leader donned the simian symbols of authority--an

       members hung around the bazaar, waiting for a small boy to toss

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