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Cutpurse capers
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Is stealing as addictive as gambling? It must be...
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THE THIN woman sprang up the steps of the bus with a sense of purpose. She had a flexible baby in her arms, and running hot on her heels was a 12-year-old girl. It was 8.30 p.m., that lull between the late evening (back-from-office) squash and the late night (catch-the-last-bus) jam. It's a time when there's plenty of standing room, and the driver puts on his favourite cassette or FM station, and the yawning passengers have a distant look in their eyes and dinner on their minds. The sudden movement in the front of the bus caused a slight current to run through the dozen-seated women, and I, dreaming by the window, nearly failed to sense it. It was when the woman next to me muttered "careful with your bag" to her friend behind her that I pricked up my ears. She had spoken in my mother tongue, and I responded to the warning as though it had been directed at me as well. I intuitively connected it with the newcomers and began to watch them with heightened interest.
The thin woman would not stand still. She kept juggling her baby from one hip to another, adjusting her pallu, and taking restless steps this way and that. She sat down briefly and got up again. Women shrank back every time she neared them. The girl positioned herself at the head of the aisle like a teacher about to take a class and surveyed her audience. Her mother now leaned heavily against my neighbour who squirmed with discomfort, leapt up, and dove into a vacant seat, allowing the woman to sit next to me. I grew acutely conscious of the unzipped bag in my lap, which had a wrapped, framed painting protruding out of it. A goodly sum that I'd withdrawn from the bank lay within a zipped-up inner compartment. The bag rested against the iron bar of the seat in front of me.
The woman placed the child on her left hip, her pallu creating a curtain between us. Her left hand held the iron bar and played with the side of my bag in a rather obvious manner. I looked at her pointedly. Next, her fingers, which gripped a small cloth purse, opened to release one of the loose coins in her palm. It was her turn to look pointedly at me. I ignored her. She tried to catch my eye, gestured at the baby, and mumbled: "It's fallen down." I clutched my bag to my chest, turned my eyes to the floor, and said coldly: "There it is. Take it." I fervently hoped she was a thief; if not, I was being extremely crass.
At the very next stop the thin woman snatched up the coin and darted away, hustling the girl in front of her. The instant she got out, 12 women set up a loud chorus: "This is what they do, how bold they are, not much rush in the bus, that's why she couldn't get anything, she sat next to me also and tried her tricks." Clearly, all of them had had a brush with pickpockets on the run. The thin woman, whose actions would have gone unnoticed in a crowded bus, had literally taken centre stage. Did she believe that nobody was watching her performance? Her brazenness made me wonder whether she knew she was being scrutinised and simply didn't care. It was her profession, and she had a daily target to achieve.
The conductor, meanwhile, had been supremely unaware of the silent drama. "Howda? Howda?" he kept saying, open-mouthed, as the women educated him on the modus operandi of pickpockets. What they said vindicated my feeling that she was not afraid of getting caught: "They just put their hands inside your bag even if you're watching." "That much courage they have, is it?" said the conductor half admiringly. "I was wondering why she should spend five rupees to go to the next stop. They had only to walk that distance." And then his eyes grew round as he looked out of the window just one stop later and spotted the three again! "Hoi, they've reached here, appa," he shouted in amazement. "How?" The women explained to him that they had rushed out of our bus only to charge into another, and alighted at the next stop. Bus-hopping was a vital though expensive tactic for they had to escape before someone raised an alarm or recognised them, whether or not they had struck gold.
The woman in front of me said: "These days it is ladies more than gents who do this." She was full of righteous indignation. "Why can't she take up coolie work? She'll get Rs. 50 a day." I wondered: is stealing as addictive as gambling? It must be, or else how do you explain Enron and their ilk — men in suits who're no better than unlettered pickpockets, filching compulsively with no worry of capture? I thought of the thin woman in her desperate fearlessness, scratching out a living the only way she knew how, and the quiet, pliant baby she used like a stage prop. And then I thought of the adolescent girl following in her footsteps — an understudy waiting to play the lead role someday.
C.K. MEENA
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