The Story Of A Pocket Thief

By Naseer Khan

He was in the middle of public wrath in the bus stand, liberally thrashed and swash buckled, with a few weaker ones pulling his already ripped and torn shirt collars. A sort of sadistic catharsis with people from all the directions hurling around him, kicking him in the buttocks, rolling and twisting back and forth his hands, clutching his muscles, slapping him in his face, spitting, abusing and cursing with all sorts of slurs and innuendoes. All this happening in a public place in the general bus stand amidst the din of hawkers and tinkers, betwixt beep, horn, flash and glare of shopping complexes at a stone’s throw near the district hospital, to the north west of the court complex in the west of the police station at 60 degree south of mini secretariat under the feet of a famous darsgah.

Public is a strange crowd led by the instinct as fire by wind and one of the unnatural but ubiquitous instincts is to hurt someone and don’t allow anyone to hurt you in turn. Probably bearing the bruises of amputated rights, they had ultimately find something to let loose and swindled a lot; a kind of a poor thing , a pocket picker caught like a stag by a pack of hyenas, not even trying to attempt an escapade from their clutches . He was beaten but hard as his body exuded pain, anguish and angst against the access of strokes to satisfy justice. He had committed an offence and offence demands retribution. It wasn’t a process of going through the drudgery of due course of law, but justice pronounced at the spur of the moment, not unduly delayed and delayed justice is justice denied. However, the punishment was neither fear nor equal.

He had picked up his spot. A timid woman in brown pheran, a long gown of a sort that we hug as the last twig of our cultural tree that God knows better is said to have flourished in an unrecorded golden age of our nation. He had clinically cleaned it, incised the pocket hanging a side way by timidly sitting beside her in the minibus. He made use of big bumps and velds in the road as his hand went up and down as the bus almost rolled over the patchy roads .Even if the road were smooth he would not have failed in his task. He was known to have some sort of a black art that would hypnotize a person while he would work it out. Ḥe had performed many feats that had earned him the reputation like that bad big wolf in American fairy tale as bad big boy.

For he was big Gulliver like, tall and Bony like great Gul palwhan (a man from Hajin Bandipora) yet honest in his dishonest intention. He had learnt it, the art of reading faces like books. He looked for his prey. This time the poor woman had been suffering from his surgical strike. He picked her pocket; it was of course an immaculate cut! He would count the booty at his own hiding as the leopard takes its prey at a safer place. Yet he never thought it a freebie but decent money earned in an indecent style while risking his neck, not as easy come easy go fashion but with a definite planning and strategy. Nonetheless, having done it a score of times, he couldn’t escape unhurt, both in body and soul.

His presence had been ominous… With nothing at stake around him, not even the undeserving reputation, he could be seen on the passenger shed in an all Weatherly poise. Hands submerged inside tight pockets, head watching like a prowling lion, hair hanging and lifting like a flag stag, his chest is burning the anger as smoothly as the filter paper is consumed by the flames and eyes eager like an eagle, arms on the thighs, hands akimbo waiting for Nothing. And between this nothingness, he would pick something for a sport. No sooner would he enter the bus stand the tongue would get unlocked and alarm bells would ring. In drivers and shopkeepers dialect, the word of caution would be declared. But he cared it damn a little bit so long things would nicely end up as proverbial ‘all is well that ends well.’

But this time he was unlucky, caught red handed while he was through this misadventure when he was about to wipe out his hand. A hawkish eye had picked him up, seated just to the next seat. He was an adult in his middle, a staunch man with curly fat moustaches snailing around as clean as slate face. He boxed him all around, and then punched his ear before kicking him out to the mercy of the public who surrounded him as the flood does the slums. The victim played her card and lashed him a stroke at his head with her high heeled boot, breaking it into a jet of pink thick blood oozing around his mud tinged face, the ultimate ablution for his sin yet they continued beating him black and white until they were exhausted by their own fury and gave it up almost shell shocked that he didn’t moan or cry hoarse but beared the brunt of the strokes as mildly and calmly as would an abnormal mind injured in senses do. His eyes beaming in the flash of screenshots taken to capture him caught in the flux of public. He was caught and beaten, his crime recorded to sell it as a household item of sadistic pleasure, his name scrolled and trolled in the locality. Yet he looked more horrible with his defiance of his tears and by the nonchalance of his behavior as everything they meant, meant either nothing for him or just a pageant of duplicity and hypocrisy. Not even the blood that drooled around his dried up eyes. And they left him calling him a dog bone that had got harder with each beating. Surprisingly, two policemen on beat didn’t bother to interfere.

Crowd having done with it left to mind their business. The broken yet defiant pocket thief raised his neck, his gaze terrible with the albumin like a white dove. To me he didn’t look a thief but a crusader, his face radiating as the dipper lit it up. He looked straight into our eyes asking us to confront if we could dare? His eyes defeated any understanding of what he was up to. Eyes that looked holding a storm and a sea. Eventually, he broke the ice as his ice cold eyes melted his tongue as does the fork in the furnace:

“Why don’t you leave me or beat me. You thieves and hypocrites. Haven’t you beaten a pocket thief, a big bad guy, a stinky soul? Come, smell me out.., my linen is dirty with the little thefts I committed, my hands uncanny with the dirt of sins done in the broad daylight. Yet my conscience is clean… I allowed the beating until all got their fill. I am a disrespectful open thief. But you are worse thieves. Why don’t you beat the commissioner who gets thick commission along the files, that SSP who sells torture in the town, that engineer who sold the college bricks, that chairman who auctioned the employment, that pseudo intellectual who stole my poem and published in his name, your dignified thief, your intellectual fraud, your public representative who sold you lock stock barrel. Well you can’t because they are hidden and thrive, hunting in the sacred offices and ceremonial places. You won’t beat them because you have no courage and you back them. I made an open theft. Knew a wrong is a wrong and will never make a right… But what are they selling, scripts and revealed verses as relics, go and beat them, can you. Can you? “

With this he broke into a stream of tears, tears mixing up with his blood dripping down his face washing him all the way to his mouth. He drank the holy water and fell to his right against his shoulder. Water, water. There it was my wife holding my head in her soft hands. You had a nightmare. It is all right. He felt my pulse. A pause, I took a sip or two and pulled out a paper and pen from the drawer.

Naseer khan is assistant professor at Department of Higher Education.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.