So, this is something which happened last to last Sunday in our PG and it’s a very interesting case if you look at it like that (I don’t know why police is not taking any interest in finding the culprit..) A little background on the structure of PG first. We have four floors in our PG where the ground floor is with the owner, the first and second floors are for the girls and third floor is the terrace, which remains locked all the time except when some girl wishes to use it for clothes drying or something. There is one main gate to enter the house, followed by a balcony and then a wooden entrance to inner livable part of the house which leads to the staircase and entrances to subsequent floors (There is one more wooden entrance to the main house on the ground floor from the balcony, but it’s not for our use, obviously, coz it opens in the main house). Till that time, no CCTV cameras were installed in the PG.
On Sunday, 6th September 2015, we all were in the mood of waking up by 10:00 a.m. since it was a holiday. As fate would have it, one of our friend on 1st floor, let’s call her A, got really sick. She had to ask for some meds from another friend of ours at around 1:00 a.m., whose room is on 2nd floor, let’s call her B. B’s roommates C and D were with her too. B couldn’t stop worrying about A, so she went to A’s room to check on her at about 1:30 a.m. B decided to stay with A. But C and D didn’t lock their room, so that, if B decides to come back to their room anytime, she wouldn’t disturb their sleep. Everybody slept by 4:00 a.m. in the morning but since A was having severe headache, she slept at 5:30 a.m. A and B locked A’s room before sleeping.
At around 7:20 a.m., D woke up to find her laptop and phone missing. She went with C to ask B if she took her laptop with her to watch movie in the night. Negative. So by 7:30, whole PG was in upheaval because now there were two laptops and one phone missing from a room on 2nd floor. In between 4 and 7:15 who all came in to and went out of PG? Well, according to the owner, he opened the main door (which leads to staircase) at 6:00 a.m. in his first statement, 6:15 a.m. in 2nd statement, 6:30 a.m. in third statement and 6:50 a.m. in some other statement. In the meantime, a servant entered the PG at 6:50 a.m. to wash the dishes in the kitchen at first floor. During this whole time, the owner says he was sitting in first floor’s balcony in one statement and went to washroom in between for sometime in another statement. A garbage collector also came but he rang the bell and took the garbage in one statement and he rang the bell to ask for money, since it was starting of the month in the second statement. We, 7 girls heard our floor’s bell ring once near 7:00 a.m. but nobody went out to see who the person was (everybody was sleeping, duh!). Some girls also heard the owner saying something about some plumber coming, but we didn’t hear it again from him.
In all the hustle bustle, police came at 9:30 a.m. to repeat only one thing, that this is internal work, either some girl, or the servant. Now, we know that girls are incapable of doing something like this since it’s impossible to take two bags full of laptops and hide them somewhere coz there is no such space in whole of PG. We have minimal space in cupboards and bed boxes and it would definitely be stupid to steal laptops and keep them with oneself.
Nonetheless, our rooms were checked three times. The servant was slapped 2-3 times too (which is, well, normal in India, I think). It took 3 days to complete FIR process, and the police isn’t talking straightforwardly with the girls (They were pretty straight in telling us that we shouldn’t have any hopes of finding the stuff).
The solution? We have been trying to ask the owner to take at least some responsibility (His 60 years of age does give him benefit of doubt but it still is, no way, wise for a girls’ PG owner to open the only entrance to the house, then go somewhere leaving the gate unguarded, allowing a male servant to work unsupervised and then tell everybody that it was their fault that they kept the door to their rooms unlatched and he has no liability to it) and compensate the girls in some way (The electronics were worth 100k rupees, the bags also contained hard disks each. Imagine the poor girls losing all their data at once).
The police has been no help at all. D has visited police station four times and B twice but to no avail. No dog squad, no fingerprinting. The police visited the house once, only once. The cameras were installed on last Tuesday, after everything had happened although the police came and issued directive to all PGs to have CCTVs in January 2015. The locks on the doors of individual rooms were installed 3rd day after the incident. FIR mentions total cost of stolen goods as 20k rupees (Are you kidding me? Even an illiterate would know that laptops cost more than 30k and here you are evaluating two laptops at total of 20k? Phone and hard disks are nowhere in the scene)
The main questions remain:
1. Where did the plumber disappear from the scene?
2. Why was only room of B, C and D targeted? How did the person know that door of their room is open?
3. Who would take risk of climbing up to 2nd floor whereas the door of owner’s house was also open and he had his laptop and keyboard on the table? It would have been very easy for someone to enter and flee from there, if the culprit was, say, the servant or some outsider.
4. Even if some girl did steal the laptops, how did she manage to smuggle it out of the PG?
5. Why is the owner denying everything, when he is also clearly at fault? We have been sleeping with doors to our rooms unlatched before too, not even a single coin displaced from its place. Now such a big theft has occurred. Does he know something which he is hiding from us?
6. Why didn’t the person steal anything else? Their handbags were lying around too, nothing else was touched.
We tried to confront the owner but he has been avoiding the whole thing by asking, what steps should be taken in the future. The real question to ask is, what if one of C and D had woken up the time the thief entered their room? What if he/she had hurt any of them? What would the owner have done then, that he is avoiding the responsibility now?
The truth? Nobody knows. And I am pretty sure, we’re never going to find out. But we saw the ugly face of this world, people who are supposed to be guarding you are backing out, just to save their fuckin’ asses, when they should be the ones holding responsibility. Not even a shred of guilt….. This is what the previous generation is teaching us, and then we blame the system….
Since the episode has happened, us, the 12 girls are living in fear for their lives. The atmosphere has deteriorated. Right now, we’re scared to leave our rooms unlocked even for seconds. This has become such a huge mess and has impacted each girl mentally, a lot. We aren’t able to eat properly, sleep properly. And there is no body to turn to for help…..
PS: I know this is a petty issue compared to other things happening around the world, but I just felt like writing this to sort out my thoughts on this and seek advice, if any reader of this post knows what can be done about this whole incident, one being us, the girls leaving the PG (even though we know the things stolen can’t be anyway retrieved).
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