Gurglary

This post was written on 26th august, the next day after an unforgettable theft from my house but retained from posting for some reasons. But now I've decided to post it.

Sunday, 24th August, in the dead of the night at around 12-1 a.m. a burglar broke into my house and stole my properties and it all happened while we were sleeping in blissful ignorance (gasp). It's shocking that somebody came so close to me presumably spent about five minutes yet I couldn't get a tinge of clue of his presence. It was a premeditated and a strategically planned act. And I can't believe that I have become a victim of such an act.

Upon analyzing the incident, I learnt that the act was planned long in advance. I also learnt that the stranger had spied on me for the past few weeks and waited for the right time to execute the plan. The person had sneaked his way into the school campus and observed me through the windows of my house for quite sometime. Scary! Isn't' it?

Sunday night was an unusual night for me. Normally I would go to bed at 9:30 p.m. but that night I wasn't sleepy till 11:45 p.m. as though God was trying to hint on me about the eminent theft. My wife and kids had already gone to bed after dinner. Till 10:45 pm I watched Manchester United-Sunderland football match. But even after the match I wasn't sleepy. Then I started to worry of oversleeping the next morning and getting late to school. So I decided to go to bed and force myself to sleep. I switched off the TV checked if the main door was latched and the windows were closed. I found them all closed. With a settled mind I went to bed. On the bed I still couldn't find any sleep. That night it was really difficult to beat my sleepless mind. I reached to my bookshelf and picked a book. Reading the book eventually put me to sleep. But it wasn't a peaceful sleep yet. I was half asleep half awake. I could hear the sound of the fan and feel the cold air brushing against my body. I could hear my little son coughing. Suddenly, the air was no longer cold and I was feeling hot. The room had become pitch dark. In the half awakened mind I knew that there was a power outage. The heat and the pitch darkness finally won over my sleepless mind and put me to a complete sleep.    

The next morning, my daughter woke up before anybody since she goes to school in the first shift which starts at 6:30 am. Suddenly she shouted from the sitting room 'Apa! There is a hole on our window!!!'. I quickly woke up to check. I saw the plastic net I had put over the window few months ago cut out to a size big enough for a man to get through. The sliding window was slid open and the main door was also wide open.  My wife woke up and she was horrified. We knew that a thief had broken in. Promptly, we checked for things in the house. Everything was intact in the sitting-room and alter-room. The last I checked was my bedroom because I least doubted anything to be lost from the bedroom. But to my utter dismay I found my laptop bag missing from under my study table. No sooner did we notice the missing lap top than my wife was aghast. At first we thought the thief had taken only the lap top but later we realized that we had some cash in the bag. Ngultrum nine thousand. That made my wife all the more frantic.      

The plastic net was cut out to a size big enough for a man to get through.

The cut out section of the net

I dialed 113 and informed the police. The man on the phone said that they were on their way. In the mean time I went out to check for any more destruction done to my house. I found that a chair had been propped against the wall and had been used as a climbing device. I also found the plastic nets had been cut in two more places. One in the bedroom window right above my head and the other one in the kitchen window. The thief had used these two windows to get a view of me. When I was in the sitting room watching TV he used the kitchen window and when I was in my bedroom reading, he watched me through the bedroom window. 

A chair was propped against the wall which was used for climbing 

One more cutting on my bedroom window 

Just then the police arrived and they examined the 'modus operandi' and they added one more case to the dozens they had already listed.     

On searching for any clue about the thief, I found an object that belonged to the thief in the kitchen-an amulet. I don't know whether it was left intentionally or unintentionally. It had an image of a Hindu God engraved on it and the first thing that popped up in my mind when I saw the amulet was that the thief could have been an Indian. But the police and I couldn't ascertain that the person was an Indian. We thought that the person might have intentionally left it to lure our minds to suspect for an Indian. People who came to see me speculated that the amulet thread might have snapped when the person squeezed in through the window and obliviously dropped the amulet in the kitchen.

The amulet

The incident has left my family traumatized. My wife and kids feel the aftermath. They are psychologically disturbed. My kids do not sleep without me by their side. My wife says that she feels haunted. But my wife and I agree that we are lucky in a way. The person, whoever it may be, just took away the lap top without inflicting any physical harm to anyone in the family. My wife often tells me that if anyone of us would have noticed the thief and woken up, it would have put our lives on the line.

Later that day, police were reported of two more theft cases from the college of education. That made three theft cases in a day. That day, theft became the talk of the town and it made people in Samtse stay hyper-alert at home.