An intruder in my house

This account was written on 26th august, the day after an intruder broke into my house but was retained from posting for some reason. But now I've decided to post it.

Sunday, 24th August 2018, in the dead of the night at around 12-1am. a stranger broke into my house and stole my laptop and some money. It all happened while my family and I were sleeping. It's shocking that someone came an inch close to me and presumably spent about five minutes yet I couldn't get a clue of his presence. Upon recalling the incident, I realise that it was a premeditated and strategically planned act. I also learnt that the stranger had spied on me for the past few weeks and waited for an ideal time to execute the plan. Scary! Isn't' it?

Sunday night was an unusual night for me. Normally I would go to bed at 9:30pm. but that night I wasn't sleepy until 11:45 pm as though God was hinting at me about the eminent theft. My wife and kids had already gone to bed after dinner. I watched the Manchester United-Sunderland football match on TV until 10:45 pm. Even after the match, I wasn't sleepy. Then I was worried about oversleeping the next morning and getting late to school. So I forced myself to sleep. I switched off the TV and checked the main door and the windows. I found them all securely closed. With a settled mind I went to bed. However, that night it was really difficult to beat my sleepless mind. I reached to my bookshelf and picked a book which eventually put me to sleep. Yet it wasn't a peaceful sleep. I could hear the sound of the spinning fan and feel the air from the fan. I could hear my little son breathing. Suddenly, there was a power outage. The room had become pitch dark. The fan stopped running and the air in the room was no longer cold. The heat and the pitch darkness finally won over my sleepless mind and put me to sleep.     

The next morning, my daughter was the first to wake up as she goes on the first shift of her school which starts at 6:30am. Suddenly she called out frantically from the living room "Apa! There is a hole in the  window!!!" I sprang out of my bed to check. I saw the plastic mesh I had put over the window a few months ago cut out to a size big enough for a man to slide into our house. The sliding window was open. The main door was also wide ajar. My wife woke up and she was terrified. We knew that a stranger had broken in. We promptly checked our things in the house. Everything was intact in the living room and alter-room. The last I checked was my bedroom because I least doubted anything to be taken from there. But to my bitter surprise, I found my laptop bag missing from under my study table. At first, I thought the intruder had taken just the laptop but later I realized that I had some money in the bag. That made my wife all the more frantic.      

The plastic net was cut out to a size big enough for a man to get through.

The cutout section of the net

I dialled 113 to inform the police. The man on the phone said that they were on their way. In the meantime, I walked out to check outside my house. I found a chair propped against the wall that had been used to reach the window. I also found the plastic nets had been cut in two more places. One in the bedroom window right above my head and the other one in the kitchen window. The intruder had used these windows to keep an eye on me. When I was in the living room watching TV, I was being looked at from the kitchen window and when I was in my bedroom reading, I was being looked at from the bedroom window. The person had been very tactical.

A chair was propped against the wall which was used for climbing 

One more cutting on my bedroom window 

Just then the police arrived and they examined the place and asked me some questions. Upon searching for further clues about the burglar, I found an amulet on the kitchen floor. I was not sure if it was left on purpose. It had an image of a Hindu God engraved on it. I speculated that the intruder could have been an Indian from the border town of Chamurchi. But the police and I couldn't be sure about it. We thought that the person might have left it intentionally to lure our minds to suspect an Indian. Friends and neighbours who came to see me that day speculated that the amulet string might have snapped when the person squeezed in through the window hence dropping the amulet.

The amulet

The incident has left my family traumatized. My kids do not sleep without me by their side. My wife says that she feels haunted. Nonetheless, my wife and I agree that we are lucky in a way. The intruder just took away the laptop without inflicting any physical harm on anyone in the family. My wife often tells me that if anyone of us noticed the intruder, we would have been hurt. Later that day, police were notified of two more incidents of theft in the college of education. That day, theft became the talk of the town making people in Samtse stay hyper-alert at home.