77/ 100 Idli

Idli – a South Indian and Sri Lankan rice cake popular as a breakfast food. The cakes are made by steaming a batter consisting of fermented hulled black lentils and rice. (Wikipedia)

During our last trip to India we visited the ‘tech-hub’ of this gigantic country, Bengaluru (or Bangalore during British colonial times). We were flying north from Kochi to Varanasi and all the flights stopped there anyway so, we figured, we would make a weekend of it and stay somewhere completely different.

Everyone told us we would hate Bengaluru. They said there was nothing to see, that it was famously busy (it actually was) and that it was not at all suited to tourists. Well, I have to say, they were all wrong. Or perhaps we are just not your regular tourists. We did spend more than three hours in just one bookstore / cafe to be fair… Most of the next day was spent at the fabulous Museum of Art and Photography and walking through the park. I also found lots of dogs to photograph there; many with names, especially in nearby Cubbon park where they were playing with their owners whilst enjoying a bit of freedom from the monotonous traffic and concrete cityscape towering impossibly above them.

On our last night I had decided to pop out to forage for some food and was scanning the area close to our hotel for cafes that weren’t overly expensive, but also unlikely to cause our stomachs problems as we had a flight the next day. Whilst hovering over streets on Google Maps I saw a place pop up just around the corner from our hotel that was called simply ‘Idli (dog)’. See for yourself: https://maps.app.goo.gl/WTVQYVoMQ8SEWkox9

For a little while I sat there on our bed, looking out of the extraordinarily dirty hotel windows onto the back of a hideous half-built apartment block, feeling very lazy and deeply distracted, trying to figure out what caused the random clean streaks on the outside of an un-openable window on the fourth floor of a hotel with no balconies. It was dark, I was tired and, frankly, I couldn’t be bothered going out again.

We had some bananas and biscuits that would do for dinner, so why leave? Then the anxiety kicked in. What if I really regretted not hunting for Idli? But then what if I went and never even found Idli? What if Idli was just sitting in a dark corner and I wouldn’t even be able to get a photograph anyway? What if the thing that made the clean marks on the outside of the window somehow broke into our room and made some more clean marks in the mould of the shower cubicle?

In a very serendipitous turn of events it was at that exact moment that the charging light on my camera went out, signifying that it was all ready to go again. Fiona also said she wanted a rest and I could hear dogs barking outside. Grabbing just my phone and my camera I ventured out into the pitch-blackness of Millers Tank Bund Road and set off to find the mystical Idli, all the while trying not be run down by the myriad of vehicles that clearly didn’t require any lights whatsoever.

Believe me when I say I was so pleased I decided to venture forth. I made several photographs of different dogs (to be posted in the very near future), I didn’t get run over, I didn’t fall into any of the weirdly deep holes scattered around the pavements there and I was saved from a nasty strangulation accident by two nurses, who had just left the Jain hospital, who screamed at me as I almost walked straight into a nearly invisible wire hanging across the pavement at neck height.

Idli wasn’t hard to find at all. At almost exactly the spot she was marked on the map I spotted a dog so massive that she was unmissable. Resting on the pavement outside the Bismillah Chickan Center (not my spelling) was Idli with her unmistakable patch on one side of her face. I made a few photographs, upsetting the equilibrium of the street which resulted in Idli standing up (not an easy thing to do I can assure you) and causing her fellow pack to all run up to her, barking as if to ask what was going on. They then all left to bark at other dogs, and then bark at each other and then just bark because they’d forgotten what it was they were supposed to be doing.

During the commotion Idli, having expended a great deal of energy lifting her considerable heft from the pavement, plodded over to the Chickan Center and barked until a young chap arrived to throw a large bowlful of raw chicken scraps onto the floor in front of her. She slurped all of that down and then completed her supper with an old chapati laying next to a rubbish pile.

Seeing all this food reminded me that we hadn’t eaten. Annoyingly, though, I had forgotten to bring my wallet and as no chicken scraps were left for me to eat, I had to walk back to our hotel, past shops full of steaming bowls of biryani and kebabs, to my biscuits and banana.