Monday, April 30, 2012

A Burglar's attempt on our car

This incident happened in May 2011. It was a weekend and Radhika's mother was with us on a visit. We decided to spend that Sunday evening in Thiruvanmiyur beach, People who know this beach would also know, the point where the beach road starts after the turn from Thiruvanmiyur RTO. We parked the car in the pocket road which leads to the starting point of beach road. This road is badly lit and we never knew that, this was a place where anti-social elements lurked in danger during night.

I noted this person who was sitting on a bike nearby, smoking a cigarette. Somewhere in my thoughts, I had the cold feeling that this guy was staring and when I noticed, he was turning back. We normally wont give much heed to onlookers when we come with family and so, we walked our way towards the beach. We might have spent 45 minutes there and started moving to the car. The time was past 8.45 pm. I walked towards the car, unlocked and opened the door. My wife started opening the front passenger seat door when she called out my name aloud. It was then, that I noticed something sparkling besides the seat in low lit street light. I was shocked to see that left door glass was broken and entire piece has caved into the seat. Her money purse was missing from the compartment beneath the hand brake. The nasty miscreant has broken the glass to steal the purse.
He might not have had enough time to search rest of the car. What he has gained out of that action was 700 odd rupees. We were lucky that he didn't search the back seat since there was another bag with some considerable amount in it.

Set aside what he has 'earned'; he was unaware of damage he has inflicted upon the car. Change of glass cost me 1600 rupees. I didn't get the proper shade of garware classic sun film for 4 months, which matched the shade in rest of windows; because, greedy shop keepers wanted 2000 rupees, even to fill out that single glass. I finally found a lesser greedy one who finally ended up putting a junk film which had scratches (which I noticed after he fixed it since they weren't visible with the adhesive piece on) and matched 70% to original shade for 800 Rs. The loss due to thief to the car was 3000 rupees in total.

I thank god that he didn't think of looking into back seat. Something or someone might have stopped him; of which we are not aware of; till now.

Prologue: We never parked in pocket roads after this incident. We took the car to beach road and kept it in reach of our eyesight. Always.