The Stolen Bicycle
by Vimala Ramu
(Bangalore, Karnataka, India)
With me being a late sleeper and my husband being a ‘very early’ riser, there are very few hours in between for a thief to make a successful entry into our house let alone to help himself to a few things. In spite of this, few thefts have taken place in that ‘golden’ hour that is between 1 am and 3 am. I believe during this time both late sleepers and early risers will be in deep sleep (so says the psychology manual of the thieves).
Once my granddaughter decided to junk her cycle which she and her sister had outgrown. She locked the cycle and kept it in the compound for easy disposal. After a couple of nights we found it missing.
The thief must have jumped over the compound wall silently (as we locked the gate also in the nights) and must have carried away his booty, the cycle, triumphantly marveling at his extraordinary luck. As it was a condemned item, no one bothered much about its absence at home.
Two days later my brother’s wife who lived on the next street commented casually that someone had left a locked bicycle in her compound and it was lying there unclaimed for the past two days.
Immediately we surmised that the thief probably a thin, scrawny specimen must have felt it too cumbersome to lug a locked bicycle and carry his operations in rest of the houses. So he must have decided to abandon it then and there and talk of coincidences, the place he chose to get rid of it happened to be my brother’s house!
The bicycle was eventually brought back from there and was disposed off in the manner planned earlier.
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