The story of a benevolent thief

On a fine sunny morning a few days ago, I was awaken by a commotion going on in our house. Instead of hugging me with the usual charming words, my mother asked me whether I had seen my father's bag the night before. She was referring to a small brown bag which my father carries on his way to work. I went to the study and found my father searching frantically for his bag. I joined him in his efforts but could not find anything. He said that when he had first come to the study that morning, the cover of the bed had looked as though it had been tampered with. Moreover, not just one, but two of his bags were missing. When all our efforts proved futile and my father was absolutely certain that he had not left his bag at his office the previous day, we concluded that it had been stolen after all. The brown bag had his identity card, a diary containing the phone numbers of fifty million people, other important papers, a cheque book andthe duplicate keys of the main gate of his bank, but no cash. The other bag, a big black one, was absolutely empty.

My parents thought of lodging a complaint with the police station although they knew that the bags would never be found again. They also decided that the broken window of the study would have to be repaired on the very next Sunday. We suspected that the bags had been taken by the thief with the help of a long stick, as anything else had not been broken. After that, they both left for work. My father had to see to it that the payment from that cheque book was stopped and pay the money to order new keys for his office gate.

At about 8 o' clock that evening, our calling bell rang. Imagine my surprise when one of our neighbours handed me that same brown bag! She said that she had found it lying beside the drain behind their house but had not found any other bag. She had found my father's identity card in it and had thus come to return it. I checked the contents of the bag and found that none of them were missing, not even the keys! It was clear that they had been tampered with because they had all been shoved together into one pocket of the bag. I informed my parents over the phone and they were equally stunned.

That night, we decided that the thief was rather benevolent. He had not found any money in the bag. So, it had turned out to be pretty useless for him. He did not touch anything else and thus saved my father a lot of trouble.He could easily have thrown it into a dustbin or the drain or somewhere quite far from our house. But, he left it at a place where it was quite easy and natural for someone to find it out. The funnier part was that he took the big black bag, probably to carry other things which he would steal in future!