One of the monkeys captured by the forest department. A Telegraph picture

Tindharia, April 13: Monkeys are to Tindharia what rats were to the town of Hamelin. And residents of this fairy tale-like town, around 25 km from Siliguri, are banking on the forest department to do what the pied piper had done for the fabled town: rid them of the menace.

The drive to capture the marauding monkeys, which entered its second day to today, has not yielded much. The forest department isn?t holding out much hope either.

?We began laying traps in the bazaar area since yesterday, but have only been able to capture two monkeys. And it might well be impossible to catch them all,? said Madhusudan Karmakar, range warden, Wildlife I, Sukna. ?There could be about 150 to 200 monkeys in the area.?

The news offers little comfort to women like Ishara Rai, whose 7-year-old son, Anit, was attacked by three monkeys while on his way home from school last month.

?He was bitten on the back of his head and chunks of flesh were clawed out of his back,? said Ishara, who now insists that her husband drops her son to school.

Another child, Subeksha Pradhan, who lives in the Rajbari area of Tindharia, too, had to be treated for monkey bites after she was attacked two months ago.

Though residents say the monkeys have been part of their lives for many years now, they have started believing that the proximity to the simians might pose a greater problem in the days to come.

?The monkeys enter our kitchens and eat our food. They often go on a rampage, hurling everything they can lay they hands on. In the bazaar area, the moment a shopkeeper looks the other way, the monkeys make off with goods,? said Unmad Shanker, a local resident and a Darjeeling Himalayan Railway employee.

Raju Das, the divisional forest officer, Wildlife I, argued that the local people were equally to be blamed for the man-monkey conflict.

?The people lure the monkeys to their homes by offering them food,? said Das.