Stabbed in the Bag

I was recently robbed. In, as they say, broad daylight. I let a stranded commuter (or so I thought) hitch a ride on my pillion seat. He alighted at what seemed a funny place for a commuter to alight - no buildings or bus stops or road junctions nearby. Much later, when I fished out my wallet from my backpack to pay a shopkeeper, I noticed something seriously amiss. My wallet had contained many thousand rupees and a twenty when I tossed it into my bag at home. Now, it contained only a twenty. Very smooth.

It was clearly an opportunistic pinch - all my cards and other important stuff were intact. The only thing missing were the big bills, which I'd just withdrawn a couple days back, since I'd intended to do some shopping for the home.

My mind was such a whirl of emotions, that I had to sit down with a coffee to disentangle one from the other and make sense of where I was. The first thing I felt was betrayal. It's not about the money, I told myself, it's the feeling that I was doing someone a good turn and he turned around and harmed me. The next thing that bubbled up was righteous anger. How dare he invade my privacy! What gave him the right?

Then came a deep sadness. In one flash, the thief had spoiled my cheerful camaraderie with the city I'd grown up in, and whose ever-changing face I'd grown to love, for better or worse. Never again would I offer a ride to a stranger, no matter how deserving. Instinctively, my mind began recollecting the kind deeds done to me by strangers in other places I've lived in, and struggled to find a recent incident of kindness I'd experienced here. That was the final emotion that lingered - one of bitterness.

I suddenly paused, and searched for a feeling that I knew should have been there, but wasn't. It's not about the money... hold that thought!

I felt no sense of loss.

Which was funny, because I was quite the penny-pincher, sometimes to the point of selfishness. And this was the largest amount of money I'd been separated from in my entire life, but I felt not a pang of deprivation. My mind never dwelled on the amount, nor on the things I could have done with it. I wondered what it meant, this realization that I could take that much cash or leave it alone.

It was much later, as I was lying in bed, that I realized what it meant. My accountant had been persistently, though good-naturedly, lecturing me every year to set aside some money for charity. And although I'd researched the causes I felt strongly for, and the organizations that did good work in them, I'd always postponed the actual giving to another day, since there was always something else that I wanted to do with the money at that time.

I signed the cheques the next day. Another first for me. A person who didn't even know me, had changed my life in a matter of hours.