Criminal Mentality Part One

At about 11 p.m. in my colony tonight, Mr.Shankar from the neighborhood heard a squeaking like that of a puppy coming from the direction of the bikes parked in G block. He called other people and made them hear it. Security heard it too.

It was an unfamiliar sound and it stopped when the people started talking about it. Mr.Shankar was certain that there was a baby dog locked inside one bike’s side carrier. He had clearly heard it coming from that direction. The puppy needed to be rescued. The bike’s owner was now to be searched for, but no one had any idea who the owner was.

Time was running out as the pup slowly suffocated on its own exhalations. Different keys were tried but none could open the carrier. One guy, in his early twenties, when he heard that someone from the neighborhood had locked a puppy in their dicky, got so enraged that he shoved the bike backwards and tried to break the carrier.

I asked them to wait a while and maybe the security would find out the owner’s whereabouts. Why break an expensive carrier unless it was absolutely required? Our youth meanwhile continued his efforts to break the lid without even replying. From his demeanor, the bike owner deserved no mercy and I thought it better to stand back than to engage with him.

Another man said, “let us not break anything. If there is a death, it would be the bike owner’s ‘paap’ and not ours.” Shankar replied that there was a reason why the squeaking of the poor puppy had reached his ears. It was incumbent upon him to try to save it. If it had wanted to be left alone to die, the puppy would not have reached out to him with his little screams.

Now in the ten minutes or so I was there, I honestly heard no squeaking. Someone inserted a key into a gap and bent the carrier’s lid a little bit, and I stuck a piece of stone to wedge in between to keep enough of the lid open to provide fresh air for the poor animal. Meanwhile the security searched for the owner.

Through the gap in the lid now, we could see something of the inside. Someone took out a torch and we peered into the gap. And inside we saw….nothing! Just a cloth in the bare carrier. Not a puppy. Not a bird. Not even a stale lunchbox. Not anything. Nothing. There was nothing inside except a towel!

So now the question arose, where had the sound come from. And looking around, it was amply clear where the sound must have come from. The bike was parked near the wall next to the drainage pipes and there was a sewer manhole just below the bike. Probably there were rats there. Their squeaking reached Mr.Shankar’s ears who could not pin-point the source but thought that the carrier looked like a juicy enough place for a criminal to hide some animal in.

“Bad people torture animal.“ Mr.Shankar is a vegetarian.

If not for the flexibility of the lid, a man would have come to his bike in the morning only to find an expensive carrier broken. And when he would have inquired, an adamant Mr.Shankar would have called him guilty of parking his bike too close to the gutter pipes. That ‘Suspicious place’.

And what of our young neighbor in his twenties? Once he heard about the abhorrent act that had been committed, he waited for no one. A grave crime had been committed, and needed to be avenged.

Funnily enough, in spite of all our efforts, the lid did not break. It was good quality.

When it was all over and everyone was leaving, Mr.Shankar stayed back, still trying to figure out how he had been fooled. He must have been embarrassed by his poor judgment but to his credit he had also made four other people hear the sound before he had taken action. In trying to justify himself now, he said that the owner had committed the fault of parking his bike on the manhole cover near the gutter pipes. It was a ‘suspicious place’ to park a bike, he said.

I casually said to him that it was ridiculous that a person would keep a live animal in his motorcycle carrier. I mean, if that animal lived, it would poop and pee, and if it died, it would leave a stinking maggot infested carcass inside one's bike. In both cases, the owner would himself have to clean the shit out. So unless the bike was borrowed, a person would not do that sort of thing. A puppy is not something you forget inside a carrier.

Shankar did not agree with me. He said my fault was that I was thinking like a gentleman. But it never does to think like a gentleman, he said. Society doesn’t work that way. We have to think like a criminal in order to understand the methods of the criminals. And to keep ourselves safe.

Wow! I had never thought of it like that. For a while I thought he was right. I am too naïve about the ways of this world. I could learn from this man.

Think like a criminal to be safe. Hmmm.....

But soon it became apparent what foolishness it all was. The man was politely sowing seeds of suspicion in me. The carrier was short-listed as the source of the sound precisely because the listener was thinking like a criminal. A reasonable man would never make such an accusation without being absolutely sure.
Shankar’s certainty moved the others to believe in him. We were ready to vandalize some unaware person’s property on his word.

I say, why should I think like a criminal to be safe from the criminals? Why should I be wary of the criminal’s methods and spend my life in distrust and suspicion? Why should I harm someone or his property without being sure I had given him a fair trial?

If I’m not careful the criminals might actually harm me, and I will suffer either indignity or loss of wealth or loss of loved ones or loss of life. But if I live in distrust, then I would fail to make meaningful friendships with people. I would live in fear of people and circumstances instead of keeping my faith in God and having patience. I would lose my peace of mind. I don’t want that.