The desperation of a mother macaque trying to rescue her trapped baby while a troop of monkeys kept watch forced a Chinsurah school shut on Wednesdaymorning before a snake expert saved the day.

The baby monkey, which appeared to be less than a month old, had been hanging by a nylon wire entangled in a hook atop a metal fence when Chandan Clement Singh, 45, was called in to help rescue it.

While Chandan tried to snap the wire and bring the tiny macaque down, it's mother whined, chattered and banged on the grille of the school corridor. Every now and then, she would leap onto the cornices of the school building and try to peer inside to find out whether her baby was safe.

The presence of around a dozen other monkeys prancing about on the school premises caused panic among teachers and students even as the rescue operation was on.

Soma Ghosh, principal of Vivekananda Shishu Siksha Mandir, said she was worried that the monkeys might turn violent if the baby wasn't rescued quickly.

"The morning section was about to give over then. There were 200 children inside but we couldn't have let them out as the monkeys might have harmed them. We lined up the students and took them out through the narrow back door," she told Metro.

Such was the commotion that the day section of Vivekananda Shishu Siksha Mandir was declared closed for the day.

The baby monkey's day of misadventure had begun around 8am when it got caught in a piece of nylon netting used to protect the terrace garden of a two-storey private building in the Rathtala neighbourhood of Chinsurah. The incident came to light when a dozen monkeys descended on the terrace and caused a din so loud that the entire locality knew something was amiss.

Some residents tried to free the trapped animal while the rest used sticks to keep the excitable adult monkeys at bay. "We had almost managed to cut the net when the mother swooped in, snatched her baby and disappeared from sight," recounted Soumitra Singha, a member of the school committee who was in the rescue party.

The baby monkey had pieces of nylon netting still wrapped around its body then, one of which got entangled in a hook atop the metal fence separating Vivekananda Shishu Siksha Mandir from a pond.

This happened around 9am.

Within moments, the monkey clan had barged into the compound of the school across the street, where students from Lower Kindergarten to Class IV study.

"The net wrapped around the baby monkey's body got entangled in an S-shaped hook on the top of the perimeter fence of the school," Singha said.

The school immediately reported the incident to the forest department, only to be told that monkeys were prone to bite when afraid or excited. The official allegedly said that it wouldn't be wise to risk a rescue operation until the troop of monkeys dispersed or calmed down.

"We told them that we would reach in two hours. Firstly, there weren't enough men in the office then and the monkeys were pretty irritated. We presumed they would settle in two hours," Chittaranjan Pramanik, range officer of the forest department's Hooghly office, said in the evening.

What the forest department planned to postpone by two hours, Chandan did in another 30 minutes with some local assistance.

"I kept the adult monkeys away with my snake hook and went snapping at the netting with my scissors. It was tricky because the baby was in pain and moving a lot," said Chandan, an expert in handling snakes.

After bringing the baby monkey down, Chandan took her inside the school to tend to its injuries even as the mother, separated from her newborn possibly for the first time, continued banging on the grille.

Chandan found several cuts on the baby monkey's body, most of them caused by the nylon wires.

For the self-tutored snake specialist, who routinely tends to injured reptiles that the forest department "refuses to treat", Wednesday's experience of rescuing and healing a baby monkey was apparently a first.

Chandan, who works for an NGO called Nest for Nature and Social Development, said the baby seemed drained of all strength when stuck to the fence. She seemed to recover after being freed and given glucose water inside the school but Chandan thought she required more caring before being reunited with her mother.

Lest the mother create a ruckus, the baby's saviour slipped out through the back door of the school and rode home on his motorcycle with her safe in his snake bag.

"She is quite active now. I have dressed her wounds. She has shown an appetite for milk. My wife and daughter are having a lovely time playing with her," Chandan said on Wednesday evening.

Till late on Wednesday, the mother macaque was stationed outside the school, waiting for her baby to return.

"I enquired and found out that the mother was still on the school premises. We will return her baby to her tomorrow if she stays as well as she is after treatment," said Chandan, whose wife Soma Stella is a gold medallist from the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute.

The couple's 11-year-old daughter Zita can handle snakes with an expert touch, just like her father.