Kleptomania (?) ctd.....

V called T the next day. T was in Islamabad . Then, V asked her if she had heard anything new about my bag. T said she hadn’t and explained how she had looked for it everywhere that day too. V listened to her go on for a while and then interrupted her. She told T that it was really weird but someone had come up to us and told us that it was her who had taken the bag.T asked her who had said it and how can we be so sure. V decided to call her bluff. She told T that we know for sure because that person saw her leave with my bag from the museum.There was silence at T’s end . V felt encouraged and went on saying that the dean at the college had told us to report the matter to the police. This did the trick. T suddenly blurted out an apology and confessed to taking my bag!! She now wanted to know what we wanted her to do. V told her that I wanted my bag back. She said she’d come back to Lahore the next day and meet us at the college. I was very relieved.

V and I went to meet T at the college the next day. We saw her standing in the parking lot and went up to her. I didn’t see her holding my bag! I thought maybe she had it in her car or something. I was wrong. I asked her where my bag was and she said that she didn’t have it! She said after she’d taken it, she got scared and she threw it in one of the labs upstairs. I felt like killing her for not telling us about this the day before! She said she thought one of the lab attendants may have picked it up. V didn’t agree with this because we had gone upstairs within ten minutes of realizing that the bag was missing to check the labs. We had told all the lab attendants to be on the look out too. I didn’t know whether to trust T anymore.

T said she wanted to look for the bag in the labs once more….which was plain stupid because if she had indeed thrown it there it really wouldn’t be sitting there waiting for us to find it! I told her she was pushing my buttons now and that she should honestly let me know what she’d done with my stuff. She, then took out a cell phone from her bag and handed it over to me. Apparently, she had stolen that cell phone from another girl the day before she took my bag. She said if she had my bag with her she would have brought it just like she brought that girl’s cell phone. I was really confused…I had no idea what to do. T was willing to pay me for the damage done but begged me not to tell anyone about this. I wasn’t going to do that… I told her I won’t advertise this to the rest of our class but I had to let the dean know about it because we had reported the matter to him. It would be his decision then.

I still wasn’t sure about whether I should take the money for my stuff from T. I wanted her to pay but not with the precondition of me forgiving her and forgetting all about it. The matter had to be reported to the college authorities. What bothered me the most was that she seemed so unperturbed….it almost seemed as if paying what was a considerable amount of money was no big deal to her. V and I were deliberating over this when she interrupted us saying that she had lots of family issues and needed psychiatric help. She then went on to say how she had been to a couple of psychiatrists before and they had all…check this…sexually harassed her!!! She said she was willing to get help this time round only if V and I  went with her. We weren’t surprised when she brought this up because A (the girl who had originally suspected her) had told us how she had concocted such stories when she was caught stealing from her room. We told her that even if she was telling the truth about all this.....she had lost all credibility and it just wasn’t possible for us to believe her. She needed to get her family involved if this had really happened to her.

I decided on asking her to pay me back for my cell phone, stethoscope and torch. We took her to the respective shops to check on the prices and get an estimate. These were all expensive things and amounted to over 25,000 rupees. T ended up paying me 15,000 rupees because I decided on settling for a cheaper cell phone model than the one that was stolen. The stethoscope I had was too state of the art and so I ended up getting a simpler cheaper version for that too. Of course I got the same torch that I had because that was the absolute best. I sincerely hoped this would shame T into never stealing again. I met with the dean and told him about everything. He said he would set up a meeting with T and decide what to do with her now. T wasn’t kicked out of college. She was given a warning and all the hostel wardens were notified about this. About 3 months after this incident I got my national I.d card back in the mail. It had been in my wallet and someone had probably dropped it in a post box. I remembered telling T that whoever took it should at least have the decency to return my I.ds. I didn’t confront T about this because it would have been an exercise in futility. Since we were in the same class and I still had a year left, I ran into her often. We didn’t talk but what struck me as odd was that she would look me straight in the eye….it was always a cold ,stony look with no remorse whatsoever.

Every time I read about kleptomania, I am forced to think about T. Her defense was that she had kleptomania and I think that amongst her promises of never to do it again saved her from being kicked out of college. A couple of my close friends who knew about this thought the dean shouldn’t have let her go like that….they said she didn’t deserve to become a doctor. I think she may have changed for the better…at least I hope she did.