She was small. And very quick. She had stolen from us before but at the time we did not know who it was. Calcutta is an incredibly overpopulated city teeming with life in all its myriad forms. The rich, the poor, the strong, the dying; they move among each other like so much debris in a fast moving stream. There were four of us, re-lining some pipe deep under the ground so that they could receive an adequate sewage system. We were working in a poverty stricken section of this disheveled metropolis. Every morning I watched the dying and the dead pulled from the streets so as not to impede the flow of traffic, I watched as horns blazed at frail bodies too weak to crawl away without assistance. What is it like to sleep in your own filth? To welcome death as a release? To be contained in a caste system in which your very existence determines your standing and your standing determines your existence?

The first time we noticed something missing we marked it up to simple negligence on our part. A couple of hand tools here and there. No big deal. The second and then third time the thief struck in so many days convinced us that we indeed had a thief among us, irregardless of how much we tried to keep an eye on our tools. We simply just could not lock up our gear as we needed a variety of them throughout the day in a job so specialized that it necessitated our visit there in the first place. As time passed we became vigilant in our efforts to catch this thief. Throughout the afternoon, I would intermittently look up and scan the mass of people within our area, searching for an individual who would fit a horribly misconceived stereotype of delinquency, though at the time we did not find fault with the visual template we constructed in our heads. People who met our gaze were immediately assigned an inherent measure of guilt depending on how we viewed them. I searched for this elusive antagonist in vain; though tempted as I was to simply mark the thief’s success to deviltry, I finally spotted this 50-pound anomaly through the most unlikely of circumstances…

At the end of one grueling day, we noticed that once again we were missing a tool. Cursing our inability to catch this denizen of the underworld, we loaded our gear into our large vehicle (similar in size to a UPS van). As I entered the cabin, the wind picked up right when I opened the door and the work permit on the dashboard fluttered out and directly flew under the van. I bounded down and dropped to my knees to retrieve it when lo and behold, I stared into the face of a small girl lying under the van, clutching our missing tool in her dirty hand. Without hesitation I began yelling to my comrades. I found her! “Found who?” was the reply by my comrades. The thief, I yelled! She’s under the van! Tools were dropped as my comrades dropped to all fours from their respective positions. She began to panic as we began to draw a net around her; we began interspersing our comments with threats and exhortations: "Come here you little fucker! Be a good girl and come on out. Here honey, we are not going to hurt you, crawl out." I locked eyes with her as she looked at me and then to the other side of the van, she exhaled deeply and made a break for it. I began screaming to my friends to get to the other side. She scrambled out as we turned the corner. The chase was on. She was no amateur; knowing that she could not win a foot race with us she dived into the ever-moving crowd where we could not see her. She disappeared from view but we were able to track her quickly by noticing the moving heads of the adults who noticed a small girl in full flight glide past them. We panned out and dove into the crowd, watching the sea of flesh part as we pursued our prey. Scott was the first to reestablish a visual on her and shouted out to me that she was doubling back, running toward a series of hundreds of vendors selling their wares. She crawled under numerous tables, much to the consternation of the vendors; all the while I was trying to calculate where she would come out while being pursued by my comrades. I sprinted ahead and jumped on top of a large table sparsely loaded with caged chickens as my friends herded her like an errant sheep. With impeccable synchronicity, she exited right below me, not noticing as I quietly jumped down and closed the gap between us quickly. I reached out to grab her when she looked back, saw me, panicked and made a hard left down a small flight of stairs leading to some fishing docks. I grabbed her and as I drew her to me, she lost her footing and tumbled down but thankfully I was able to cocoon her close me as she fell. Unfortunately I also tripped down the stairs while trying to ensnare my quarry. I immediately wrapped my arms around her and turned my shoulder and back to the ground to cushion her against the fall. I hit first and she seemed to bounce a foot off my chest into the air. My comrades came running up, breathless from both exertion and excitement as I sat her onto the ground. As we surrounded her she promptly shielded her face, evidently expecting a flurry of blows. This bothered me, this action was obviously indicative of her being beaten in the recent past. She slowly looked through spaced fingers at me as I smiled and rubbed her head. Trembling she lowered her arms and just looked at us. Scott kneeled down beside me and said, “So this is the thief that has been stealing from us the whole time.” “Yea,” I replied, “evidently she would stay under the van after nicking our tools and would simply wait for us to drive away and then get up. A very patient thief.”

She was painfully skinny and her clothes (or what was left of them) were ragged and torn. She struggled to hold on to her femininity, evident by the rings fashioned out of discarded paper that she adorned her fingers with. I picked up the tool that she dropped, hoisted her up on my shoulders and walked over to a small stand that was selling roasted chicken. I pushed some money into the vendor’s hands and wrapped up a sizeable meal into some napkins and thrust it into her tiny hands. Still riding on my shoulders, I could hear her above me consuming the meal with no small measure of ferocity as I made my way back to our work site, making sure that I put distance between her and the angry vendors who glared at the diminutive girl who had disturbed their wares only shortly before. Several hundred yards away I let her down, and after a brief interval in which she stared at me, she quickly danced back into the crowd, furtive glances thrown in my direction, all the while consuming what the casual observer might ensue as a last meal.

We went back to work, jokingly passing the day talking about the recent episode. As the sun began to set, we secured everything and went back to the hotel. The next morning, while repairing the robotic camera/cutter we had in use, I looked up from the back of the van and saw the little girl cautiously approaching me, holding something in her hand as she struggled to climb into the van……