THE BANANA WAS YOUR basic Cavendish, a spotted yellow crescent that looked like it had been plucked from a schoolkid's lunch box. Nandlal Bhagat picked it up, walked to the edge of the rooftop, and raised it overhead, a fruit minaret in the sooty dawn sky. The neighborhood of Chandni Chowk, a jumble of drab, crumbling apartment buildings in the heart of Old Delhi, was just waking up. A boy on a nearby roof stood brushing his teeth; a man doused his head with cupfuls of water from a tub. Bhagat, the most experienced monkey catcher in all of Delhi, began to shout: "Oh! Oh! Lah, lah, lah, lah. Oh! Oh!"

The oh!s were high-pitched and loud, the lah's quick and low. I had expected something more arcane—some real monkey-whisperer juju, or a stealthy biologist with sedative blow-darts—but the setup was simple. Bhagat had a banana. Near him, on the ground, sat a cage. If a monkey was lured inside—wham!—one of Bhagat's four assistants, hidden nearby, would release a rope to shut the trapdoor. "It is the monkey's greed that traps him," Bhagat observed.

All around Delhi, catchers were pursuing similar strategies. The goal was to remove all the monkeys from the city, or as many as possible, a vastly more ambitious target than had ever been set before. In 2006, only 225 monkeys were captured, while in 2007 teams caught 4,479. Two-thirds of those came after Bajwa's death. In the past, the monkeys had been released in the forests of neighboring states, but in 2004 regional governments stopped accepting Delhi's troublemakers. The new plan was to relocate them to the Asola Wildlife Sanctuary, a 7,000-acre forest reserve on the southern fringe of Delhi. I was told I would never be allowed to go there, but I was determined to see it, to find out if it was a natural paradise or a simian Guantanamo.

Bhagat had been chasing monkeys for 35 years; during most of that time he was the only full-time catcher for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), which provides government services to most of the city. He's about five foot three, slight, with hunched shoulders and dark-irised eyes that look like black marbles. His weathered features are strong and cruel, and his movements are furtive, as if he, and not the monkeys, is in danger of getting caught.

Spotting a trio of monkeys in a distant tree, Bhagat began calling louder. The monkeys leapt to an adjacent building and then another. When they reached the apartment across the way, they scampered past a woman sitting outside, sewing. She barely noticed. The monkeys didn't come any closer to us. Bhagat threw a handful of peanuts in the cage, lit a cigarette, and sat down to wait.

The business of catching is that of a bounty hunter: 450 rupees ($9) per monkey, shared by the team. The men have mixed feelings about their work. "I pray to these monkeys, but it has become a business now, so I can't do anything but sell them off," Raju Pandey, one of Bhagat's assistants, told me. He had a dent in his head you could set an orange in, the result of an accident during a monkey grab a while back: After a rope had snapped, a cage full of howling monkeys plummeted several stories and crashed into his skull. He wanted me to touch the dent, and I obliged.

Because of Delhi's rush to put catchers on the streets, the men are neither government-trained nor closely supervised. They emphasize speed over sensitivity. Sonya Ghosh, founder of an activist group called Citizens for the Welfare and Protection of Animals, showed me a video clip one day that she'd covertly made, showing Bhagat using an iron rod to jab and subdue monkeys. Nearly a dozen animals are injured each month. Impoverished catchers predictably try to snag the most monkeys with the least effort. Bhagat explained that a favored technique was to lure a juvenile into the cage first; loyal family members rush forward to rescue the youngster and are themselves caught. Ghosh has filed complaints against the city regarding another questionable strategy, that of trapping monkeys in Delhi's few remaining forested areas. These animals pose the least risk to people but, because they haven't acquired the wariness that comes from living in the core of the city, are easiest to snatch.

Fully urbanized monkeys are more elusive. Bhagat explained that he had worked in this part of town before, catching dozens of members of a large troop. The ones left behind were suspicious.

"They know me, so they'll take a bit of time," he said. But the trio never went into the cage, nor did any others that day.

"Very smart monkeys in Chandni Chowk," Pandey said.