I have joined a rare breed of people whose car has been stolen. No one I knew has ever lost a car. Till last week the biggest thing I ever lost was a cellphone. I really liked that cell-phone and it got stolen from the guard’s desk late at night where I was working. Yes, there are things about me that you still don’t know.; I once worked in a regular office. You know how it feels when you lose a cell-phone. So in effective I should have been angry and sad about the loss of my car.
Strangely I wasn’t.
Nothing can ever prepare you for the loss of a stolen car. This is thing that you have always heard about so you think you know how to react but you don’t. It was 4 in the pm and I was feeling lousy so I decided to venture out to a café. Maybe working from a coffee shop wouldn’t put me to sleep. I went to the market that I have been frequenting for the last five years; I parked the car almost ritualistically in the same lane where it saw the passage of time. I returned in half an hour and was talking on the phone to the girl from my cell-phone company when I realized that the spot where I had left my car was, well…empty.
Hmm.
OK. I asked myself could I have forgotten where I’d parked my car.
Nope.
Perhaps the police towed the car?
Nope. The three traffic constables stationed just fifteen feet from my car duly informed me the cops don’t tow vehicles from that lane.
Did I give the keys to someone and maybe they took the car?
Nope. I’d remember that. I was having coffee and not vodka!
By this time a driver standing next me decided that I should get proactive and go to the nearest police station. The traffic police, of course, weren’t interested. Their rationale was this wasn’t a paid parking or a safe parking (one that is inside the walls of any shopping complex, free or otherwise) and they quickly forgot that hundreds of cars where parked in the same lane as mine. I walked to the local police station who told me to go to the other one. I went. One constable from there took me along as he scouted the area. Finally I called 100 and in three minutes after that I was one of those whose car got stolen.
As the hours ticked away I started recalling what all I lost with the car. I had an original small sized Coca Cola green bottle which was now a collectible, DVDs of nearly 40 episodes of the soap on which my new UNICEF project is based on, fifteen classic audio cassettes and an old and tattered pair of jeans. But the thing I missed the most was the laptop charger which was in the car. The damn thing costs more than two thousand rupees to get a spare one!
The fact that three more cars were stolen from the same area on that very day isn’t enough to make me believe that someone whacked the car from a bust road in the middle of the afternoon in less than thirty minutes. That explains why the cops didn’t register my case on the same day. Like I said nothing can prepare you for the loss of a car…I still think I might have parked it someone else and it would show up.
