AFTER A FEW DAYS PASSED, Bhagat settled for a more modest payment. At dawn we went to buy fruit and vegetables to bait his trap. For a diminutive chain-smoker, he walked remarkably fast. I had to trot to keep up. On our way back, I suddenly glimpsed tawny fur, heard a ripping sound, and saw produce tumble from his shopping bag onto the sidewalk. Before I realized what was happening, the monkey had made it to the top of a nearby wall, where he sat munching a purloined tomato. Bhagat looked up at him and, for the first and only time in my presence, smiled.

The capture site was in Chandni Chowk, a short distance from where we'd been before, in a colony of one-story residences. People had reportedly been bitten. I climbed a ladder onto a roof that seemed safely away from the cage. "You better get a stick to fight off the monkeys if they come," said Raju Pandey. He watched me for a few minutes, looking worried, then clambered up and sat beside me. "I am bodyguard," he said.

Bhagat fired up his oh!s and lah's. This time the monkeys weren't shy. Dozens materialized on the corrugated-metal rooftops. We were surrounded, but the advancing horde wasn't interested in us. One monkey reached the threshold of the cage and hesitated, looking around. This doesn't feel right, he seemed to be thinking, but I'll just duck in quickly and grab a banana …

From behind me came a sharp human cry, and the cage door slammed shut.

Shouting and prodding with sticks, Bhagat and his team chased the monkey from the large capture cage into a smaller holding cage, about two feet by four feet. The convict panicked inside the cramped space, doing Marcel Marceau's famous "The Cage" routine—the difference being that he was in fact trapped inside a cage. He twirled and shook the wires so hard that the cage rocked off the ground. In the next hour, four more animals were caught and chased in too.

Later, Bhagat, Pandey, and the other men celebrated in a walled outdoor area that was both the temporary holding zone for monkeys and Bhagat's home. They sat under a tarp that served as his roof and on a plywood platform that was his bed. They passed a hash pipe around, toking and laughing. I went to look at the prisoners. Squatting next to one of the enclosures, I peered at a male and female huddled cheek to cheek in the back corner. After a few minutes, the couple shifted slightly to reveal a monkey pressed between them, a wide-eyed baby barely the size of a Nerf football. The expressions on the faces staring back at me were unmistakable: shock, desperation, terror.

I had come to India expecting INVASION OF THE KILLER MONKEYS! But I hadn't seen anything of the sort. The people I interviewed at that morning's capture site and elsewhere described relatively minor incidents like nips to the ankles and hands. Monkeys were clearly a nuisance in Delhi, but were they really a menace? It was starting to seem like a stretch.

Before my second session with Bhagat, I had investigated the rampage in Shastri Park, a Muslim neighborhood in eastern Delhi. I met Mohammed Ahsan, whose son, Abdul Majid, was among the victims. He raised the three-year-old boy's pant leg to reveal a small scar on his left ankle. He began to rant, saying that 200 kids had been attacked.

"Whenever the monkey catch the childrens, he tried to intercourse with them," Ahsan said. "And he masturbate here in front of me. Yeah, really! I can't explain it. Ah-ha- ha! I don't know what kind of monkey is this!" I was pretty sure Ahsan was exaggerating, but I was also convinced some attacks had taken place.

The question is, Why? One provocative theory is that the war against the menace is a primary cause of the menace. Rhesus monkeys are highly sociable, and reckless trapping separates siblings, strips infants from mothers, and creates splinter groups of improperly socialized young males. "The moment you go and break up a group by doing this kind of trapping, the animals who are left behind are going to turn vicious," says Geeta Seshamani, of Friendicoes, a shelter that rehabilitates injured monkeys. Shastri Park would seem to be a prime example. The exact number of victims was disputed, but everybody agreed: The attacker was alone.

At Bhagat's camp, the men finished smoking and got back to work. They ferried the cages into a dump truck for transport to Asola. A crowd of people formed on the street, some of them obviously upset. "It is only our impression that the monkeys are a threat, and it's just not right," said a man named Rajesh, his voice rising. "When they were free, before the order to capture them, they were living in peace."