Cock on the Bedside Table

Dave calls me up out of the blue and asks if we want to go to Hampi. I mention it to the wife. “Can’t you guys think of anything else?” She retorts. Hampi with an 'a' honey, I tell her. Oh, the women of today – they have a one track mind; not that I’m complaining!

We set off in Dave’s Scorpio. The car is packed with seven of us and his luggage rack is put to good use. The bags piled up on top limits our speed somewhat but we still make good time. Our plan on leaving early to avoid traffic works and before we know it, we are checking into the Hotel Malligi in Hospet. The hotel is set among what appears to be the ruins of Hospet but you leave the squalor behind as  you enter the gates. The rooms are spacious, the food is acceptable and the service is superb. They have a full bar – they even stock Johnny Black – and at prices that I havn’t seen since I was in high school.

Come evening, we are driving around the ruins of Hampi. A police car coming in the opposite direction stops us and asks us to turn back. There has been too much mugging lately and they don’t want us driving around lonely roads in the dark. It’s a sobering thought and we turn right around.

Hampi is impressive : Huge temples carved out of solid stone. A lot of it has been done by just one king over a span of 20 years. I wonder how many men it took to make all this; what looks like ruins today must have been teeming with activity a few hundred years ago. What must have been a rich and vibrant empire has been reduced to almost nothing now. It just goes to show that whatever wealth you may amass it will still be in ruins in a few hundred years.  I change my life motto : Don’t worry about building stuff in stone. Get stoned instead!

The queens bath is impressive; it’s as big as a football field. Either she was a big woman or there were many queens. I suspect that it is the latter. There is also a bunch of musical pillars. These are stone pillars that emit musical noted when hit with a stick. Different sections contain different sets of pillars that are set to different scales. Simply amazing!

All that walking in the heat is draining and I fall into an exhausted slumber (some may call it a drunken stupor ………….. and they may be right) I am woken early the next morning by the cock that the wife keeps on her bedside table. I don’t know where she got it because she picked it up when I was away in Singapore a few months ago. I was agast when I came back and found it staring at me. “Can’t you at least hide it away where it can’t be seen, honey?” I ask her. “No,” says she. “I need it here every night”. I resign myself to it even though I hate it. And get your mind out of the gutter – it’s just an alarm clock that cries ‘cock a doodle doo’.