Stolen sandals at Somnathpur and the horrors of Bangalore traffic

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Our last day in India was supposed to be a quiet day with nothing to do. Things don’t always turn out as planned.

Mr Ali advises us when we leave Mysore that our airport hotel in Bangalore is a 3 ½ hour drive away, so we ask to stop off at one more temple on the way. It’s a small but imposing 13^th century temple with just a French woman and a group of three Indians as the only other visitors. As ever, we are told to leave our sandals at the entrance. We stack them neatly in a concrete compartment and look round the temple, which takes under 20 minutes. When we come to leave, Sara’s blue sandals have been replaced with a small black pair. Some mistake, surely? Gradually the awful truth dawns that her sandals are no longer there. We ask the man who purported to be the shoe attendant. He tells us the other visitors took the sandals and laughs. Sara does not find this amusing. We accost , in turn, the security guard, the ticket seller and a guide taking round three newly arrived Irish tourists. The gist of their replies is that none of them is to blame and nothing can be done. We enlist the help of Mr Ali who conducts vigorous conversations/arguments. Still the shoe attendant smirks and says looking after shoes is not his job and anyway, surely I have other footwear. David avoids the impulse to punch his face in, with difficulty.

Mindful of the need for a police report if we are to try to claim on the insurance, we ask where the police station is. The Somnathpur Police Out Post (sic) is a mere 200 yards away. Further discussion ensues between them and Mr Ali. They come with us to the temple and carefully search all round it, as if somebody might have just hidden the sandals as a joke. Nobody had. We ask for a police report and are told that has to be done by an inspector, at a bigger police station. We drive there. More discussion, with ever more people joining in in. Only one guy is in uniform but they all seem to be police officers. Eventually Sara is handed a blank piece of paper and asked to write out her ‘complaint’. She does so. Yet more discussion, and they all head off to a separate room – to file the report, we are told. They return and ask Sara to rewrite the complaint, this time describing the sandals as missing rather than stolen. Presumably this is to ensure their crime statistics (carefully recorded by year and type of crime on a blackboard) are not tainted by an unsolved sandal robbery. Finally someone appears who speaks some English. After checking several times that all we want is a record that we have reported to the loss to the police (ie no form of investigation) he makes further phone calls to someone called “sir” and tells us he will type up a report. This, he assures us, will take just 10 minutes.

As we sit waiting in the plastic chairs, we are kindly offered tea or coffee. We ask for our fallback request of ‘black tea no sugar’ which causes much consternation. After 15 minutes, two small cups of staggeringly strong white tea arrive, each with a quarter lemon which is pointed out to us with much pride. We accept with effusive thanks and, under the watchful eye of all concerned, squeeze out our lemons into the tiny cups of tea, which we then drink with great shows of enthusiasm. Actually, the lemon serves to dilute the otherwise undrinkable concentrate of tannin into something halfway tolerable. After a further wait, the report is finally brought downstairs. All is not yet complete however. Sara has to sign one copy, and the desk sergeant has to sign and stamp it. The sheet is the folded with a flourish and put into an envelope for us. The English speaking officer (well, we assume he is an officer but as he’s not in uniform he could just be a helpful passer-by) informs us with a grin that we are the first foreigners they have ever had to deal with, they were not sure of the correct procedure to deal with foreigners and hence the call to Police HQ. This is also the first ever reported loss of footwear! The latter is probably not surprising as everyone we see seems to wear a 10 rupee pair of flipflops.

Emotionally exhausted, we pile back into the car and set off for Bangalore. The journey seems to be proceeding OK until we he hit the outskirts of the city and discover that the flyover/ring road has been closed as a result of the construction of an overhead metro line. This dooms us to the best part of 2 hours driving through the centre of Bangalore, a sort of urban hell, past the wholesale market and down narrow streets under the now closed flyover. Filth everywhere, cows wandering, cows and wretched humans alike sleeping in the filth on the central reservation. Traffic chaos and mayhem beyond description.

Finally we reach our ‘airport hotel’ at 4.45pm. Mr Ali has offered to drive us to the airport in the morning, as it is now too late for him to drive home today. We ask the unsmiling man at reception how long it will take to drive to the airport given we need to be there at 6am latest for an 8am flight. ‘One hour’ he replies. One hour, for an airport hotel???



Still, the good news is that the hotel is clean and the room comfortable (though it is a shame that there is an external light pointing straight into our bedroom through the exceedingly thin curtains). And a big bottle of Kingfisher is only 160 rupees (£1.60) for 650ml. We sit and drink while waiting for dinner sitting somewhat incongruously in a large dining room laid out with enormous wicker furniture which looks like it should be in the garden, and elaborate curtains with draped pelmets that should be in a country house. And bowtied waiters. Bizarre.

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Photos

Somnathpur temple
Never again to see her sandals.....

A typical Karnataka road scene
Overloaded sugar cane tractor with extra passengers, bus careering all over the road and typical motorbike scene with man wearing helmet and woman obliged to take her chances bare headed