IF YOU ARE GOING TO STEAL, STEAL BIG

                                                     by Neville Raymond

             One time, when I was a kid of five or so, living in Calcutta, I was out with my mother in the New Market. 

            As we stopped to browse at a little toy stall, I fingered the tchotchkes on display and managed to slip a few of them into my pocket. 

            Little painted cars, airplanes, submarines - objects worth a few annas at most.  

            On the way home in the car I took them out of my pocket and showed them to my mother.  

            She immediately bade the driver to turn around and return to the New Market.  

            And then she walked me back to the shop in question and made me give them back to the owner. 

            It was a lesson in stealing I was never to forget. 

            But then, starting at the age of seven, my mother would make a practice of driving me to Howrah station, putting me on a train, and bundling me off to a boarding school some twelve hundred miles away, at the foothill of the Himalayas, for nine months at a stretch.  

             She did this over and over, year after year. 

           

            She stole my joy, my trust, my security.

            She stole my happy-go-lucky childhood. 

            She stole the stars out of my night sky. 

           

            And no one ever took her in hand and made her give them back to me.