BHAGAT WOULDN'T LET ME ride in the monkey-mobile. "There is no way you can go to Asola," he said. I called the sanctuary warden, a friendly man who said that I couldn't visit today but maybe tomorrow or next week? He said the same thing every time I called. I tried the warden's boss, J.K. Dadoo, the city's secretary of environment and forests. I pleaded and cajoled, verified my credentials, promised my firstborn. He, too, kept stalling. Finally, on my last day in Delhi, I decided to just go for it and sneak in.

The sanctuary was located on the city's southernmost edge, next to a shantytown. When I arrived, a few monkeys scampered atop a tall perimeter fence of green fiberglass, dodging rocks fired by grinning village boys with slingshots. The sanctuary gates were open wide to reveal a group of people playing cricket inside. One young man turned out to be the ranking ranger on duty. He was hostile, especially when he saw my camera gear. He confiscated it and locked it in a shed. I tried to bribe him. His eyes bulged, he stepped back, and he spoke rapidly in Hindi. "He is a very religious man," my translator explained. "He thinks that you are a devil that God has sent to test him." I put the rupees away, and the ranger gradually calmed down. After I swore I wouldn't print his name, he agreed to lead an illicit tour.

We drove through the gates into a scrubby forest. Scanning for animals, I felt like Sam Neill in Jurassic Park. The dirt road made several turns, climbed over a few rises, and then petered out on the shores of a small lake.

There were monkeys everywhere.

Hundreds of them. Animals that until recently had lived in the heart of a polluted megalopolis. They dashed around the car and chased one another through tall grass. They hung in the trees, silhouetted against the sky, and perched nobly atop boulders, posing for Discovery Channel close-ups. The place was lovely. The animals seemed happy. The activist Ghosh, who sat on the government committee overseeing relocation, had told me, "You have to write good things about Asola, because it is the best solution for the monkeys. It is the only solution." It may be. India is racing past a modernization threshold, the one separating the time when people live alongside wild animals from a time when they won't. That process can't and probably shouldn't be stopped. But it should be noted.

The ranger and I scrambled down slick rocks to the shore of the lake, which is actually a flooded quarry. On the far shore, atop cliffs glowing gold with the setting sun, I could just make out the forms of more monkeys. The Elysian splendor was marred only slightly by the presence of a ravine to our right that was littered with rotting produce. The trees in Asola didn't grow fruit that monkeys could eat, so feeding was done by dumping truckloads of oranges, carrots, and bananas into the gully.

"You should see it when they come to eat," the ranger said. "It is such a beautiful sight."