Week 11 Story: The Search for the Banana

    Bibliography: Shri Krishna of Dwarka and Other Stories by C.A. Kincaid (1920)

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    One day in the jungle there were five monkeys who were really good friends. Each monkey was a different color and their names corresponded to their colors. They were Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, and Orange. Each day the monkeys would roam the jungle looking for food. Their favorite food were bananas, but in this jungle that was the one fruit that was scarce. Everywhere they looked they saw apples, oranges, lychees, and berries. Red was fed up with the same fruits over and over, he craved bananas, but there were none to be found in the whole jungle. 

    The monkeys decided to split up on a nice afternoon and went to parts of the jungle that they have never explored before. Yellow went to the part of the jungle and found a cave. At the mouth of the cave he heard loud snoring and curiosity got the best of him. He decided to follow the noise and saw a giant bear sleeping the day away with a big bundle of bananas right next to him. Seeing this Yellow got excited and decided to come up with a plan to steal the bananas. 

    Slowly, he creeped up to the bear making sure not to make a noise and when he was in reach of the bananas he snatched them away. Right as he was about to walk out of the cave he heard the bear let out a low growl. He quickly turned around and saw the bear waking up. Without waiting to see what would happen Yellow ran out of the cave back to the other monkeys, but before he got there he heard a loud roar which he knew was the bear.

    When he reached the tree where the monkeys live, Yellow found the other four looking dejected with nothing in their hands. That is until they saw the ripe yellow fruit in their friend's grasp. Out of breath, Yellow tried to tell them that the bear was coming, but the other four were too focused on the bananas to even listen. Red decided to take matters into his own hands and snatched the bananas from Yellow and ran down the tree. This caused all the other monkey's to follow him down and right into the hands of an angry bear. Seeing this all the monkeys stopped in their tracks and just stared at the hulking menace in front of them. All they could do was throw the bananas at the bear and run for their lives. 

Author's Note: I adapted this story from the second half of the Shri Krishna's stories when Krishna is searching for the Syamantaka jewel. I decided to change the characters into monkeys and the jewel into bananas.