The Mystery of the Missing Camera

Our story begins at 4:00 AM on Sunday morning, with a word.

“Lua!” Uhg. Your name just doesn’t have the same ring when it wakes you up at 4:00 AM.

That morning we had decided to go on the six and half kilometre walk from our house to Sohayl’s mother’s house. We had to go early to beat the heat, and besides that, India is magnificent at that time.

All my thoughts were on you dear readers, as I scrabbled for my camera. I looked for it in its bag. Odd – it wasn’t there. I looked through my suitcase, and underneath my bed. It was nowhere to be found. I knew I hadn’t misplaced it anywhere else; my camera should have been in its bag.

Now, we flash back to the previous Friday, at the timelier hour of 8:00 AM. I was walking around the office to give our dog Snow White some water, when I heard someone say, “Didi!” Didi is something like “sister”, and its something I’m often called by the children in the streets who shout, “Bye Didi,” as I walk passed.

There were two little girls at the gate. They tried to say something to me in Hindi but I wasn’t able to understand, so I communicated to them that Sohayl would be along in a minute. Sohayl had just gone to drop his kids off at school and arrived shortly. It seemed that the girls’ parents were at work and they had just discovered that their school was closed, or something like that. Since the girls are in a children’s class held at our office they came to us. So we let them into the office and they read picture books and Sohayl bought them some food. I didn’t think much of it, but afterwards Nicole mentioned that although the girls had said they had no food with them, they managed to spill that same non-existent food on her office floor. And apparently they found out that a relative of the girls had been home that day. So something was fishy.

And then on Sunday my camera was fishily missing. There were also some other things missing, including Arestu’s mp3 player, and my webcam. It was pretty clear that we had been robbed.

Today Nicole phoned the mother of the girls up and told her that the angry American who lived with them (That’s me. Canada isn’t very well known.) was going to call the police on them. At lunch time when I was back at the house the mother and her children came to talk to Nicole. Since I was supposed to be an Angry America, and didn’t want to mess up the act I decided to go to the backroom. They talked in Hindi but I could hear the mother of the children crying, and Nicole told me she had given them a bit of a lesson in morals, and a description of the Indian penal system.

I got my camera back, which is the most expensive item. In fact a camera like that would be worth about 13,000 rupees if you converted it directly and you can eat a meal on less than 25 rupees, that’s over 500 meals. Of course they probably couldn’t get that good of a deal on it. Hopefully they’ll find the other items and return them, however they might have already sold them. Apparently one of our cleaning ladies saw the mother bargaining something with a guy at the local photo shop, so either I was lucky to get my camera back because of a failed negotiation, or my webcam has gone far away from me.