Some money and breaking of trust

Two serious things, one is trust and another is money. Do you want to be trusted by others, obviously you want to. But it’s not that easy, one moment, one fault and everything is gone.

It was another summer day. I was preparing for my next day's exam. It was tough for me to understand some topics of Image Processing, though I have to cover those in that short time as some secret sources informed me those are important for the test ahead.

Everything was going normal except something bitter. I left that to think as it was unsolvable.

A week before that day some money was stolen by somebody from my mother's purse. It was not a small matter for her. As it was kind of a saving for a long time. She is a house wife, and she was hoping to buy something for her daughters for the next puja by that money. Our father and we three were unaware about it. It took away my mother’s sleep. She looks angry or depressed for quite sometimes after that incident. We are five in the family, me, my elder sister, my younger brother and our parents. Other than that we have our paternal uncle's family in the same campus. They have two sons. One was 16 and other was 13 at that time. We did not share a great bonding, but whatever we had could be called nice. They were brats. They always talk cool things. We were not similar with them, but we were good cousins.

After some days she shared it to her children. It was kind of strange because we never thought of a theft in our own house. First we had no one to doubt but gradually we felt our mother’s money was stolen by one or by both cousins. Reason was simple. They were freaks about branded things, branded shoes, branded Tees, branded this, branded that. Their entire childish requirements were hardly tolerated by their parents.

We could not do anything. We could not go for a personal investigation as it could damage the relationship between our families.

Passing days made the situation even worse. Those boys almost stopped coming to our home as they could also felt that our family knew what they had done and they could be caught anytime.

We, the children and our mother discussed about the matter and we found that it was useless to think further in that subject as neither we could charge them nor went to their parents fo get our money back.

We just started having a keen look at them and moved on.

But our mother could not do that. Sometimes she woke up in the late night and talk to my studying brother that she felt worse because she loved those kids and because she had not shared it to our father, the whole thing was so indigestible for her.

And in a week she fell ill due to a really low blood pressure. We knew why all those were happening. We were silent and let that time spent fast to forget the whole matter.

Soon she recovered.

But this story went in a different direction. When I was preparing for my engineering finals and my sister was busy in her law studies, our 15 years old brother shared it to one of his friends without letting us know. That boy is close to him, a neighbor and kind of a relative to us too. He is three years younger than me and I used to take him to school when my brother was not born. In my childhood I used to treat him as my brother. In my later life because we went to different schools that bonding did not remain same, but he became good friend with my brother. He was good with the cousins too.

He was surprised that we did not take any step and closed the matter like anything.

He suggested my brother that we should do something not only to get our money back but to teach those kids a lesson not to repeat such things in the future.

It was not that easy and who had time to think so much.

In this part of the narration, I would like to mention one interesting thing. In our place, some people are called 'Ojha'. These people practice dark art, worship goddess 'kaali' for power, learn magic and astrology. Some people believe them and spend money on them to get answers to their questions. In India, you can find such people everywhere and there is no one who does not have fear or belief on them.

That friend discussed the whole thing with my brother and suggested a plan he had in his mind. He approached my sister and spoke about that.

The plan was, he would say them that we had a theft in our house and for that we already had approached an 'ojha'. That 'ojha' had already indentified the thieves and he would soon visit our home and neighborhood to catch them in front of everyone. If they had kept the money in their house, it would be easy to catch them for such a skilled person. The only way to escape from him was to keep the stolen money or any goods brought by it anywhere else. He would also ask them if they had done that. If they would agree then he would offer them to keep those things until the 'ojha' finished his job.

My sister and brother were shocked to hear such things from him. They were quite curious whether that would work.

But it did.

Oh god.

But it should not happen just a day before my exam. After executing 90% of the plan means after our cousins gave him the money, he with so much excitement came to our home. At that time our parents were not at home. I too went to them to know what was going on.

We sat and looked at the money and till then did not get what to do next.

We called our cousins, and show them the money and sat until they said something.

They did not.

I threw the money on one of them and shouted at them for at least one hour stating the mental stress my mother had to bear after their deed. At the end we all had tears in our eyes as that would be the end of the relationship that we used to share.

They stole some money, broke our trust.

That was not the end.

It was followed by the disturbing encounter of the whole matter with their parents, my father, their sorry session with us and off course, my parents emotional burst on them.

It happened two years ago.

I guess some more years would be required to forget this bitter memory.