Greater losses

“...that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance......It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.
So Small God laughed a hollow laugh and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune.”
-Arundhati Roy in ‘The God of Small Things’

The words above are one of those precious ones by a thought provoking writer, which found a permanent place in my memory. And these were the sentences I remembered when my train journey from my home town to Hyderabad at the beginning of this semester culminated in a mini-tragedy.
The issue was none other then the loss of my valuables like laptop, jewelery etc from my bag in the train. The thief made a thorough search of my bag while I was sleeping and made his/her escape. I realized it only when the train reached Secunderabad and my friends and I immediately got down to register a complaint with the railway police.
The police, like they are popularly portrayed in cinemas, were not overtly rude or bullying. But from the beginning itself we could see that they were far less than keen to accept an FIR from me. They never said so in words but many obstacles in my way. I was made to write the complaint letter at least thrice before being told that my language was bad! The general tone was that it was a wastage of time for me to log in a complaint as it was nearly impossible to find something small as a laptop which might be anywhere by then.
Almost an hour later, they told me that it might be better if I made a complaint at the Ongole station as it was likely that I had lost my items before the train passed through that town. Exasperated and mentally tired after everything, I took back my complaint and agreed to post it to Ongole while mentally trashing the idea.
At the time, I was enraged by the attitude of the police officials but later I began to look at both sides of the coin. I remembered seeing the photos of missing people outside their office and wondering about them. They, after all, were people…irreplaceable.
It was a with a sense of futility that I thought all this. At one level, I felt like that small boy, relatively happy and went ahead kicking the stones on the ground in contemplation. At another level, I also thought about the danger of people, especially officials making it an excuse to not follow up on things. For every loss, there will be a bigger loss; for every crime, a greater one. And that is the truth about India. But is that an excuse for letting things be? Is that an excuse for police dismissing the ‘smaller’ cases? How small is ‘small’?
The loss of my things seems immaterial. But what remains are the unanswered and seemingly unanswerable questions. I also think of the faces of the people on the station walls. And I wonder what greater losses would their families compare their loss to? How would they find their relative happiness?