Jordan was a pleasure of a baby.  He was very sociable.  During meetings he was handed around and came back when we were about to leave.  Once we went to a concert at Woodstock School.  Some of the high school girls from our community took him to show him off to their friends.  He came back with different coloured lipstick kisses all over his chubby face.

He seemed to be born with a sense of humour and a love for music.  If he ever got cranky, Tony would play the guitar and sing to him.  He would listen and stare for ages.  It was one of his favourite things to do.

He loved the community he was born into.  Rebecca Roka was his first best friend.  Jessica Sardar came next, then Zarina Masih, Michaela Shiels and Kezia Hoffman.    He got on well with everyone.

One day we heard a group of men talking really loudly on the road.  We looked over the balcony to see what was going on.  They told us they had found a monkey.  I went down to look and sure enough, there was a tiny langur lying on the road.  It was squealing and thrashing around. Its knuckles, tail and head were scratched and its eyes were blood shot.  It looked very weak.  I found some cloth and took him inside.

We named him Moses.  He was the cutest thing, next to Jordan, that we had ever seen.  We guessed he must have been the runt and abandoned by his mother.  We wiped him down and tried to feed him.  He slept in a big cardboard box in the lounge. He squealed the first night, woke up once the second night and slept through the third.   He seemed to get stronger every day.  He started to cling on which was a good sign.  The girls had duties to take care of him and they loved him.  When we found him he had four teeth.  By the fourth day he had six.

Jordan had an issue with Moses.  He was used to being the centre of attraction.  Suddenly, out of the blue, this monkey had come off the street, taken his blanket, his golly, his bottle, his Cerelac, some of his toys and our attention.  We had to watch him.  On a few occasions, we caught him throwing his books and wooden toys into the box.  Not to share, but to try to get Moses back for using his things.

Moses was doing well.  We had discovered how to use the tiniest balloons on the end of a syringe to feed him.  He had been with us for about two weeks when a well meaning friend of ours got over-excited about feeding a langur.  She overfed him.   The next day, Zoë woke up to find him choking in his box.  He had milk coming out of his mouth and nose and he couldn’t breathe.  We were beside ourselves.  He died a few hours later.

We cried our eyes out.  The girls missed a day of school because they were inconsolable.  We were inconsolable.  Jordan seemed relieved that he was not going to have to grow up with a langur as his twin brother.   I’m not sure what we were thinking.  What if Moses had survived?  What if he had grown into a 15 kg,  75cm long adult?  What would we have done with him?  He would have taken over our house, our lives, eaten all our food and no doubt slept in our beds.

We buried him near the rock on our roof.   We talked with the girls about it and came to the conclusion that life would never have been simple or satisfying for him, living with us.