My Partner in the Crime...

Happy New Year....

May God bless you with all happiness and success he can shower upon you...On this day, I have decided to share with you some good thoughts... Something that added into my life's "Book of Do's and Dont's"... something that added onto my virtues to grow into a better human being...

Do you steal??? Have you ever stolen anything from your own home??? Have you stolen MONEY from under your parents’ eyes??? I have…but couldn’t pursue my higher studies in mastering the art of stealing…lol!!! It is a story…and here it is…

I was some 5 or 6 years old…and my brother two years younger to me… that year, we both got enrolled into the same convent school… myself being the big sister was cool at the new school…but my brother who was going to a school for the first time, soon started hating it…more than any reason, he didn’t want to go anywhere, where his mom was not present…He was (and still is…grrrr…) a Mamma’s boy….Daily morning, it was a heartbreaking scene to see him screaming and crying when being dropped at his classroom…(afterall, he was just between 3-4 years)… seeing him crying used to make me also upset…

Soon, I had an idea to stop him from crying...Give him sweets…he loved sweets…if you give him sweets, he would stop crying (every afternoon, they used to sell sweets at my school… and my all time favorite was the orange toffee) but then, to buy sweets, you need money… and during those days there was no such phrase called “POCKET MONEY” in my house…we, children, got anything and everything that we wished for from our parents…but we were not allowed to keep money or buy things on our own… to eat sweets on a daily basis was considered NOT GOOD FOR HEALTH by MOM (how weird…) Without money, how could I buy sweets for my brother…I started using my brains…how can I get some money… uhhmm…???

During those days, my mom had this practice of maintaining a Piggy Bank…this piggy bank was kept in her room to build in some “Money Saving” nature in her children… If ever we got any money from anywhere, we were supposed to put the coins into that piggy bank…to increase the spirit, she herself used to gift both of us children with 50paise or 1 Rupee coins to remit into the so called Piggy Bank…(here, it was a powder tin with a narrow opening, which mom had cut out with knife, at the bottom of it…)..She used to motivate us to follow this practice and had promised that once the tin is full, she will open it and divide and gift the money equally to me and my brother, so that we can buy what ever we wish for….

Thinking of the Piggy Bank, I finalized on a fool proof idea to get the money required for the sweets…STEAL… steal the money you want…from the piggy bank…moreover, you doesn’t have to worry that mom would know about it… My partner in crime was my own brother… Very innocently I told him my plan and soon I started pulling out the coins from the small opening on the Talcum Powder tins…the denomination of coins that came out depended on our luck and on that luck depended the number of sweets we could buy that day… I started going to school with this money and buy sweets daily in the afternoon…give some to my brother and eat some myself...days when I got more money, I started sharing sweets with my friends too… I started acting like a big girl, to be on my own and having money to buy sweets and offering it to my brother and friends…my friends used to adore me for giving them sweets daily…uhmmmm….I WAS GREATTTTTTT…

But…all that happiness didn’t stay long…One fine day, I and my brother had a fight on some silly matter…my brother was on fault…and so naturally, mom scolded him…I was happy…He got punishment for his mistake…but then…the most terrible thing happened….Something that I never imagined…something that I never thought would happen…My brother…my little brother…my three year old brother…blurted out… “Mommmmmmmm, why u scolding only me…u should scold sis also… she takes money from the piggy bank daily and buy sweets…You scold her also…”…

I was shocked…yet I could see my mom was Dead Struck…She stood as if she couldn’t believe what she just heard…She asked, “What???”….and within no time, my dear brother presented the detailed story board of how the crime took place and how I walked around in the school with sweets in my hands and offering it to kids who begged for sweets… I felt as if the earth was moving off from below my feet…I just remember mom asking me if what she heard was true and myself trying to mutter some reply…

What followed was a small action movie… literally and physically, she was blasting me out…I screamed and cried…I pleaded for forgiveness…After the initial explosion, maybe she realized, she was over reacting (only I know, she wasn’t..uhmmm)…She took me to her side…calmly she explained how bad stealing was…and why one shouldn’t do it…and if not anybody, but still god was watching all that I was doing…and so on…I cried…I felt bad for what I did…I repented…I apologized and promised never to repeat my mistake…She kissed me and said she has forgiven me…

Be it the hard way, still I learnt the biggest lesson of my life… * Stealing is NO good…Work hard for your needs…Trying to steal it from somebody is equivalent to stealing your own self esteem * … and always remember … "The only thing worth stealing is a kiss from a sleeping child..."

Between, wouldn’t you like to know what happened to my dearrrrrrr brother…uhmmm…when I heard him blurting out the truth, I had felt like killing him… but, soon I was smiling…BECAUSE…he too got a share of the initial explosion that I got from mom…afterall…He was

“My Partner in the Crime…”