Advertisement
Published: March 19th 2007
I don’t really follow cricket, but I guess I’m a bit drawn to the events of this weekend, the first weekend in the first round of games gearing up for the World Cup. You see it seems that there were some unexpected losses and upsets, namely the Indian loss to Bangladesh (which, as one friend explained, was supposed to be such an obvious game people had expected to sleep through it) and the Pakistani loss to Ireland. And like I said, I could probably not care less about the Indian or Pakistani teams and their chances at World Cup fame. But I was oddly happy to hear of these turns of events this morning. At least I wasn’t the only one caught off guard; clearly there was something in the air that left me, the Indian cricketers and their Pakistani counterparts caught with our defenses down.
It’s been another educational week in Chennai, and it seems that this time the city was out to teach me a lesson or two about being a traveler. The title of the lesson: “You may have been a spoiled traveler as a child, visited six continents, climbed Kilimanjaro and lived in Banaras for eight months, but don’t think you’re any better than any other tourist just cause you’ve never had anything stolen” or “We’ll see how much you like traveling after we slash your bag and steal your wallet and camera.”
I have spent an unusual amount of time in the last few weeks thinking about how lucky I have been as a traveler (and in retrospect this seems rather strange and a bit like proof of the ability to jinx myself). I’ve heard so many warnings and horror stories. One of my friends in Banaras had her passport and wallet stolen from underneath her sleeping head on a train. I heard another story about a girl who I went to high school with; she was on a bus in Brazil that was hijacked and driven to the middle of the jungle, where all the passengers were summarily robbed of anything of value and left to walk seven miles back to the main road. For some reason I had recollected these stories in the past few weeks and played them through my head, wondering all the while why I had never had to deal with anything like that. Either I was really lucky or I had learned a few things in my days of traveling and had become a smart tourist (and that’s where I made the mistake of commending and therefore jinxing myself).
Part of why I’d been thinking about my luck as a traveler was because I had been eyeing my purse as of late; it was made from recycled material and not only was it starting to get dirty, but it occurred to me that while the material was ideologically very sound, it might not be the most practical for traveling. I had even looked at my purse several times and thought how easy it would be to cut through the paper-thin material and empty the contents. Of course this had never happened to me before but I had heard all kinds of stories of travelers whose had had their purses gutted or their purse straps slashed by quick-moving pick-pockets. For a few weeks I attempted to look for a new purse but, unmoved by the selection I was finding, gave up on the task, probably thinking somewhere in the back of my silly head that nothing like that would ever happen to me anyway. So why worry about it?
Saturday my co-worker Muniyandi invited me to his house for dinner. He lives way out in the suburbs of this very expansive city, and to get to his house by auto would have been quite expensive. So he gave me instructions for the hour long bus ride that I would take to reach the general vicinity of his house; he would meet me at the bus stop and we would take an auto to finally reach his home. The bus I needed runs rather infrequently from the bus stop across from my hostel, but the temperatures have started to climb and I didn’t feel like walking to the next bus stop. So I mosied over to my usual bus stop, leaned the left side of my body on a pole, and stared off in the direction of oncoming traffic. For twenty minutes it was just me, one of the elderly ayahs who works at the YWCA, and a school girl in uniform. I finally decided to ask the girl whether my bus would ever come, and she and the ayah told me that it would, thought not in a tone that was thoroughly convincing. After another ten minutes and some discussion between the two of them they both told me (the school girl in English and the ayah in Tamil) to get on the next bus with them; I could get off at the next stop, where the buses I needed apparently come more frequently.
Bus 20E was packed and I just managed to squeeze into the end, right next to my new ayah friend and the school girl. When I reached into my bag to pay the bus conductor I couldn’t find my wallet. “Oh shit,” I thought. “Did I leave my wallet on my bed?” And that’s when I noticed that my water bottle was sticking out of a huge gash in my purse. From my vantage point in the packed bus it looked like a rip in the fabric and I panicked, thinking my purse had torn open and my wallet had fallen out somewhere between the hostel and the bus stop. Meanwhile the bus conductor was yelling across at me in Tamil that I had to pay the bus fare, and the other passengers in the back of the bus were starting to join in, as if several people speaking Tamil would be any clearer than one person. The conductor had started to make his way through the bus to take my fare and he finally got close enough for me to maneuver around and show him the huge hole in my bag; with gestures and the help of the ayah and the school girl (who at this point had figured out why I was cursing to myself and couldn’t pay the bus fare) I managed to communicate to the bus conductor that I had no fare to pay. He was very understanding and, instead of kicking me off the bus right then, waited until the next stop and instructed me to wait until the bus had come to a complete stop before letting me get off.
At this point I was delusionally convinced that the bag was torn (not slashed), so I speed-walked my way back to the original bus stop. Surprise. My wallet was not lying on the ground, waiting for me like a good wallet would. I walked back to my hostel room, soaked in sweat and still convinced that I would find my wallet on the hostel grounds or in my room. It wasn’t until I walked into my room and lay my purse on my bed that I realized it was not torn and I was not going to find my wallet; the purse had been slashed through both sides, leaving a small hole on one side and a larger hole (big enough for someone to reach in and take a wallet) on the other. My time had come. I was no longer a smart tourist. I was just another schmuck who had her wallet stolen without even knowing it.
I tried to stay calm, figuring that I could cancel my credit cards and, in the end, 600 rupees (about fifteen bucks) wasn’t too much to lose. I changed into something dry and went back out to the main road to talk to the traffic policeman who worked the intersection by the bus stop. He was unusually helpful and offered to take me to the police station to file a report when his shift was over. Luckily as I was talking to him a friend walked by and, after learning about what happened, decided to take me to the police station herself.
This turned out to be the best thing that happened to me all day. For one it was nice to have somebody who spoke English accompany me to the station. And after all the horror stories I had heard about police stations in Banaras (about women who went to file reports about rape and ended up being molested by the police men), I was glad to have a female friend accompany me. But, most importantly, what I think helped me keep my head on my shoulders—when I could have been royally freaking out about my lost ID, credit card, check card and 600 rupees—was the fact that my friend Yazasevani has a scooter. I am completely aware that this is ridiculous, but for some reason that I am not entirely able to explain I happen to love riding on the back of any kind of two-wheeler. Scooter, motorcycle, whatever. It gives me a very bizarre sense of peace and contentment with where I happen to be at that moment in life. Perhaps it has to do with the wind in my face. Maybe it’s the feeling of being able to weave through cars and cheat the traffic that is trying to hold me back. Whatever it is it has a remarkable effect on my sanity and by the time we reached the police station I was feeling much more like a normal person and less like a pissed off victim of a pick-pocket. The first station we went to turned out to be the wrong one. While our hostel on Poonamalle High Road falls under the jurisdiction of the F2 police quarters, the opposite side of Poonamalle High Road is the territory of the Egmore station. So off we went, me in a drugged-sort of daze on the back of her scooter.
The visit to the station itself was rather unproductive. I was handed a blank piece of paper and asked to write a police report. Thank God Yazasevani was there, because otherwise I would have had no idea how to write such a report. Especially because by “police report” what they actually meant was a letter to the “Dear Respected Sir of the Crime Branch” in which I was supposed to explain what had happened. Only they didn’t actually want me to explain what happened. Instead they told me to leave out the part about my purse being slashed and write that I myself had lost my wallet between the bus stop and the bus. The police officer attending us explained that this was because if I mentioned that my purse had been slashed it would make the incident a crime, which would take several weeks to process and they would probably never get back to me with any results. Claiming to have lost my wallet, however, would somehow make me more likely to ever hear about my things again. At this point I was wondering why I was even bothering with a police report. The credit cards would be useless by then anyway, since they would be cancelled, and the chances of my driver’s license turning up didn’t seem high enough to merit the writing of this ridiculous and false letter to some unknown “Dear Respected Sir.” But, figuring I was there already, I finished the thing off, signing it in the way I’ve been taught to write every letter since I arrived here, “Thanking you. Yours sincerely, Libby Abbott.”
Later, when I was home and talking to my friends they asked me what happened at the police station. I simply explained that they were not very helpful, which didn’t seem to surprise anyone present. “That’s because they probably know who slashed your purse.” According to my friends the police know most of the pick-pockets and petty thieves in their beat. They have developed a mutual agreement; the police under-report the incidents and allow the thieves to continue their work, so long as the policemen receive a cut of the profits made by each of the thieves. I don’t know whether my friends are overly cynical or whether they have come to terms with how these things work here. Their explanation makes more sense, however, than the convoluted one that the police officer tried to give me for why I should lie in the police report.
In the same conversation I was having with my friends, Rajani—trying to find the positive in the situation—offered “Hey, yaar. At least your camera wasn’t in there, right?” “Right. At least my camera…Oh shit. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.”
And then, in the fading evening light on our quiet YWCA campus, I had to walk to a corner behind one of the hostels just so I could jump up and down and let all manner of cuss words come flying out my mouth. Curse those bhenchods who slashed my purse, curse my stupid luck, and curse me for being such a clueless tourist. It was two hours after the whole event had happened and it hadn’t even occurred to me to think of my digital camera. I never take my camera with me on the bus. But then Rajani’s comment made me realize that I had, in fact, packed my camera; I had hoped to take pictures of Muniyandi’s children when I went to his house. Well so much for that. No dinner, no meeting his children, no camera.
It didn’t take me long to get over the loss of the wallet. I hated feeling like an idiot for having no idea it had happened, but a few minutes on the back of Yazasevani’s scooter and I had come to terms with the loss. These things happen. It was an ugly wallet anyway. (One that, ironically, I had only been using since I had had my last wallet stolen when my car was broken into at five in the morning at a grocery store last fall). But the camera is taking some time to get over. Last night I had a dream that somebody handed my camera back to me, and when I woke up this morning I was sad all over again that I was never going to see my camera again.
I hope that, if nothing else, whoever stole my camera sold it for something close to what its worth and is using that money for something good. Maybe he has to feed his family. Maybe she needs to go to the doctor. Who knows. In the grander scheme of things it is just a small loss. Like India’s loss to Bangladesh. Or Pakistan’s loss to Ireland. We were all caught with our defenses down this weekend, but life goes on. They still have chances at World Cup competition. And I’m still in the game. I’m certainly not giving up on traveling because of a six inch slash in my purse. To quote one of my favorite English phrases so often used over here, “What to do?” And the usual answer: not much. Just buy a thicker purse, I suppose, and keep traveling.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.065s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 11; qc: 28; dbt: 0.0272s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Aunt Teri
non-member comment
Keep em coming
You have the ability to put scents into writing and the feeling of humidity in your words. don't stop writing Lib, we love it.