Naglapura
I
resumed my walk to Naglapura and after an hour or so, passed a village. The sun
was right overhead. There was a house by the side of the road where two boys
were lazing around and I asked them the distance to Naglapura and they told it
was another 10 KMs or more.
I
resumed my walk to Naglapura and after an hour or so, passed a village. The sun
was right overhead. There was a house by the side of the road where two boys
were lazing around and I asked them the distance to Naglapura and they told it
was another 10 KMs or more. My heart sank. There was a bus coming in a few
minutes, they told, which takes me to a place from where I can walk to
Naglapura. The bus did come and I boarded and reached a small village with two
shops and a modern temple. A road ran to the right of the road, along the bank
of a tank with no water. I do not know what summer will be like. People pointed
that road as the one going to Naglapura and I started walking.
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| Naglapura |
The
topography has a pattern. The road goes up a slope that gets less and less green
and then goes down to a green patch of coconut trees. On the road to Naglapura,
there was a vantage point, one could see multiple patches of coconut trees,
source of water. I walked till I reached a village and asked around if that was
Naglapura. The woman did not know about Naglapura. I went on and there were
many children who came running seeing me (it must have been the shorts and the
backpack) They were playing on the school ground by the side of the road. I
parked myself under the tree. I almost all of them were in attire denoting “Sabaramala
pilgrimage’. That is a long distance. They explained that they instead go to another nearby
temple instead. I asked them about Naglapura and they told that I have passed
the road to Naglapura. I could not believe because there was no other road on
the way. It was another 7 KMs by walk, backtracking the same way for a while
and then taking the road to Naglapura. I was quite unhappy with myself for
having missed the road. As providence would have it, in a few minutes a bus was
scheduled to reach that will take me to Naglapura. And the conversation with
the children warmed up and they were very enthusiastic and some even wanted my
autograph. (I suspect that one of them knew what an ‘autograph’ was and he just
wanted to use it) Soon the bus appeared and there were about 25 boys and girls chorusing
‘Naglapura, Naglapura’ in unison. I was an instant VIP
The
bus retraced the road I came by for about 5 KMs and then backtracked at an
acute angle into a rugged, uncovered road. No wonder I had missed it. The road
looked nothing important.
Naglapura
has two temples, I understood later, and one of them was right in the middle of
the village. The caretaker was nowhere to be taken. There were many children
playing on the road and soon they followed me into the temple and pestered me
to take a photograph of their Barbie doll. I did. When I went into the temple, I asked them to leave me alone inside to take those photographs I had traveled this far to take.
The
construction of the temple seemed to have been stopped towards the end and the
sculptures are in various state of incompleteness. The temple has seen some
vandalism and I also found some barbed wire stored inside the temple. I could
not understand the rationale of banning tripod inside the temple on the premises
that its sharp legs may damage the soft stone but allow storage of barbed wire.
Anyway, soon I was done with my business and the caretaker arrived from nowhere. There would soon be a bus to take me back to the same two shop
village. He locked the temple and left the keys in a nearby house and soon we
boarded a bus that came in a few minutes. I changed a couple of buses and
reached Channarayapatna.
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