The Thief's Story: Class 10 English · Chapter 2

2.1 Before you read

Think of a time someone trusted you with something that mattered: the house key while your parents were out, the money for the class picnic, a cousin's unlocked phone. Trust like that is a gift. It is also a quiet test, because you could break it and the other person might never know.

This story sets that test before a fifteen-year-old thief. A young writer called Anil takes him in, feeds him and leaves both the door and the money within his reach. As you read, ask two questions. What will the boy do with the chance? And how will Anil answer him?

Footprints without Feet is your supplementary reader. You read its stories on your own, and the board exam tests them with short and long answers. These pages do not replace the story, so read it in your textbook first; it takes about fifteen minutes. Then use this companion to revise the plot, study the characters and practise answers.

One more thing before you read. The story is told by the thief himself, as “I”. That means we get his thoughts in full but never Anil's, as Fig. 2.1 shows. A first-person narrator is a character, not the author, so this “I” is not Ruskin Bond.

2.2 Reading the story

The story covers about a month, but almost everything important happens in one night and the morning after. We split it into four parts so that you can revise it in order. Follow the places on the map in Fig. 2.2: the boy's whole night is a loop that ends where it began.

2.2.1 Part I: A thief chooses his man

The narrator begins with a confession: at fifteen he was already an experienced thief, and a good one. Watch the small word still in his opening, “I was still a thief”. It suggests he is looking back from a later time, when he no longer steals.

At a wrestling match he picks out Anil, a lanky man of about twenty-five. Anil seems gentle and unsuspecting, the perfect target. The boy's opening move is flattery: he tells Anil he has a wrestler's build. Anil returns the compliment to the skinny boy, and the joke catches him off guard. He gives his name as Hari Singh. Like all his names it is borrowed for a month, so that the police and the people he has cheated cannot trace him.

Trailing after Anil, the boy offers his services. Anil has no money for wages, so they strike a bargain: meals in return for cooking, a skill the boy falsely claims. Home turns out to be a single room above the Jumna Sweet Shop, and the boy's bed is its balcony.

The lie is exposed at once. The first dinner is fit only for a stray dog, and Anil orders the boy out. The boy refuses to budge and keeps smiling until Anil gives in and laughs. From then on Anil is a teacher as well as an employer. Cooking lessons come first, then the boy's own name in writing, and Anil promises that sentences and arithmetic will follow. The boy is thankful, but for a practical reason. To him, writing well is a ticket to bigger things; honesty does not come into it yet.

Notice how many tricks it takes him to get through Anil's door, and how little resistance he meets. Fig. 2.3 lines them up.

2.2.2 Part II: A month of easy trust

The boy skims roughly a rupee a day off the shopping, and he is fairly sure Anil knows and lets it go. Apart from that, his duties are light: making the morning tea and running errands at his own pace.

Anil's money has no rhythm. He is a writer who sells pieces to magazines, a trade the boy finds rather odd. When a cheque is late, Anil borrows and frets; when it arrives, he lends and celebrates. Then one evening he comes home richer than usual, having sold a book, and the boy sees where the cash goes for the night: under the mattress.

Almost a month has passed. Apart from the shopping, the boy has stolen nothing, though he has every chance; he even has his own key. The trouble, he admits, is Anil's trust. His thief's logic runs like this. Robbing a greedy man is fair game, since such a man has money to spare. Robbing a careless, trusting man is no fun at all, since the victim may never notice, and where is the satisfaction in that? Here is the story's first irony: the trust that makes the theft so easy is what makes it so hard to do.

Then he talks himself into it. Three excuses do the job: his skills are getting rusty, the money would vanish on Anil's friends anyway, and he has never been paid a wage. These are excuses, and the very need to line them up shows a conscience he is trying to silence.

2.2.3 Part III: Moonlight and a missed train

The theft itself takes only minutes, timed so that he can catch the 10.30 Express to Lucknow. In the moonlight he notices the contrast between them. Anil's sleeping face is smooth and untroubled, while his own, at fifteen, is already marked with scars. A sigh and a turn from the sleeper nearly stop his heart, but he gets the notes and crawls away.

Safely down the road, he counts his haul, which is tucked into his pyjama string: twelve fifty-rupee notes, 600 rupees in all. To him it is a fortune, enough for a fortnight of luxury.

Then comes the moment nobody, not even the boy, expects. He reaches the platform (a thief does not queue for tickets) just as the train begins to roll. Boarding a slow-moving train is easy for him, yet his feet do not move, and he cannot say why. The train pulls away, and with it his escape. This hesitation is the first sign that something inside him has shifted.

Standing on the empty platform, he faces an awkward truth. A loner by choice, he has no friend to turn to, and a cheap hotel might ask questions he cannot answer. The one person in town who really knows him is the man he has just robbed. As he drifts back towards the bazaar, his mind turns to a subject he has studied for years: how people look when they discover a theft (Fig. 2.4). Anil's face, he is sure, will show no fear or anger, only a little sadness, caused by “the loss of trust” rather than the money.

2.2.4 Part IV: Rain, midnight and a wet note

The weather turns against him. On a bench in the open maidan, on a cold early-November night, a light drizzle becomes a downpour and soaks him through. He retreats to the bazaar and huddles under the clock tower. It is midnight, and even the notes at his waist are wet.

Here the real struggle takes place, pictured in Fig. 2.5. He does a different kind of sum. On one side sit 600 rupees. On the other sit the cinema money Anil might have handed him, a roof, a job and, above all, lessons that have only just begun. Theft is quick and cheap, he sees, and so is getting caught; respect is something no theft can buy, and learning is the road to it. He decides to go back, telling himself that the lessons are his only reason.

The return is the most frightening part of his night. A thief knows how to take things unseen; putting them back unseen is new to him. Anil has not stirred. So close that Anil's breath touches his hand, the boy freezes, then pushes the damp notes back where they came from.

Morning brings a role reversal: the boy oversleeps, and Anil makes the tea. Then Anil offers him a fifty-rupee note, and the boy's first thought is that he has been found out. Instead Anil talks about wages: some money has come in, so from now on the boy will be paid regularly. The relief lasts only until the boy holds the note. It is damp, and only one bundle of money in that room went out in last night's rain. Before he can think, Anil announces the day's lesson: “Today we'll start writing sentences”.

The message is clear without a word being spoken. Anil knows exactly what happened, and he has decided to say nothing. He does not accuse, lecture or punish; he pays a wage and keeps his promise to teach. The boy smiles back, and for once his smile is not a trick: “the smile came by itself”.

2.3 Thinking about the story

Board answers on this story are marked on evidence. Whenever you name a quality or a theme, support it with something a character does. This section works through the two Think about it questions in your textbook and adds the character, theme and craft notes you need for long answers.

2.3.1 The narrator: a thief who learns

We never learn the narrator's real name. “Hari Singh” is only this month's name; your textbook's questions call him that because it is the name he gives Anil. He is fifteen, quick-witted, a smooth liar and a sharp reader of people. He uses charm as a tool. Yet he is also lonely and scarred, and nobody seems ever to have looked after him. Under the swagger is a boy who longs to be someone respected.

2.3.2 Anil: trust as a teacher

Anil is about twenty-five, a struggling writer who lives simply, earns unevenly and spends freely when a cheque arrives. He is kind and easy-going, but he is not foolish. He probably notices the shopping money, and he certainly notices the wet note. What makes him remarkable is what he does with what he knows.

Why does he not call the police? Think about what Anil can work out: a homeless boy of fifteen who stole, ran, and then came back on his own in the rain to return every rupee. A police case would brand the boy a criminal and probably push him deeper into crime. Anil answers the theft with a wage and a lesson instead. The wage removes one of the boy's excuses, that he worked for nothing, and the lesson keeps Anil's promise. His silence also saves the boy's dignity, as Fig. 2.6 shows.

And what would a typical employer have done? Many would have called the police at once, or at least thrown the boy out, perhaps after a beating. Anil differs in three ways: he trusts first, he looks at the person rather than the crime, and he believes that people can change.

2.3.3 How his idea of education changes

Your textbook asks you to compare two of the boy's thoughts about learning. In the first weeks, writing is a tool for getting ahead. He imagines that someone who writes like an educated man could achieve almost anything, but his dream is vague and mostly about what he could get. By midnight under the clock tower his view has grown. Learning is now worth more than the stolen money, and what he really wants is to be a man people respect.

What sends him back? Several things together: the hesitation at the station, the loneliness of the rainy night, the future that Anil's lessons offer, and perhaps the picture of Anil's sad face. He tells himself that the lessons are his only reason for returning. The ending suggests something deeper: he has begun to value Anil's trust for its own sake.

2.3.4 Themes, title and ending

• Trust can change a person. Anil's trust first makes the theft hard and then makes the return possible. It works where punishment might have failed.
• The value of education. Learning offers the boy a way out of crime and a chance of respect that no stolen money can buy.
• Kindness and forgiveness. Anil forgives without a word, and his kindness wins a change of heart that a lecture could not.
• Conscience and redemption. The excuses, the hesitation and the return show his conscience slowly winning. This turning towards good is called redemption.
• Loneliness. A boy with no friends and no home finds in Anil the first person worth coming back to.

These are the story's main themes. The title works in two ways. It is a thief's story because a thief tells it, and it is also the story of how a thief stops being one. The word still in the first sentence already hints at the second meaning.

The ending. Nothing is said aloud. Anil shows that he knows by paying with the wet note and announcing the next lesson. The boy shows that he understands with a real smile. The silence between them is an agreement: the theft is forgiven, and the lessons go on.

2.3.5 Tone, irony and the smile

Tone. The narrator is light and wry about his own crimes. He talks about thieving as if it were an ordinary job, with skills, practice and job satisfaction, and he finds writing for magazines an odd way to earn a living. The humour keeps the story gentle, even though its subject is crime.

Irony. The story is full of irony. A thief believes trusting people are hard to rob, and the most trusting man he meets defeats him without trying. The boy has studied how victims' faces change, but it is the thief who changes. He steals so that he can live well, then hands the money back because he wants something money cannot buy. And Anil, chosen as a simple, easy victim, turns out to understand everything.

The smile. A motif is a detail that keeps returning and gathers meaning. The boy's practised, charming smile appears again and again. At first it is a tool for getting his way. At the end it comes without any effort, a sign that he has changed, as Fig. 2.7 shows.

2.4 Talk about it

Your textbook ends with four questions to discuss in class. They have no single right answer, but good answers move between the story and real life. Run the discussion below in a group, then compare your points with the model talking points in Practice 2.4.

2.4.1 Clues to the setting

The story never names its town, but it leaves clues, as Fig. 2.8 collects them. Anil and Hari Singh: names like these are common in north India. The room is above the Jumna Sweet Shop, and Jumna is an old spelling of the Yamuna river. A train runs to Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh. The town has a bazaar, a clock tower and a maidan. Together these point to a small town in north India.

So what language did the characters speak? Almost certainly Hindi or Hindustani, the everyday mix of Hindi and Urdu, not English. Ruskin Bond writes in English and gives us their talk in English, much as subtitles turn a Hindi film into English for other viewers. Local words such as maidan and bazaar keep the Indian flavour.

2.5 Board exam practice

In the board exam, Footprints without Feet is usually tested with short answers of about 40–50 words and a long answer of about 100–120 words, often a character sketch, a theme or a value question. Extract questions are mainly set on First Flight, but practising them here sharpens your reading of key passages. Each model answer ends with the key points an examiner looks for. Plan long answers as in Fig. 2.9.