Farrukh Dhondy | How thieves stole my passport, OCI card & gave back the golden scripts

Of love and good weather, give praise

For tomorrow the clouds

Could gather like shrouds

And all love and sunshine erase?

So, peace be on earth and goodwill

Though faiths instruct some to kill

And give these a cause

For murderous wars

O when will this go on until…?

From Desimation of Desi-nation, by Bachchoo

My passport was stolen at Palma airport. It was in a leather wallet with my Overseas Citizen of India card, which I had stupidly neglected to remove from it as I was going to Spain and not to India.

I carelessly tossed the whole leather wallet into a white cloth shoulder bag with the week’s edition of the satirical magazine Private Eye and several screenplays, Indian and Spanish, whose writers I was in Spain to “mentor” in “workshops”.

My clothes, junk and computer were in a drag-along hand-luggage-size case which I confined to the hold at the check-in, as I hate dragging these wheeled cases which always insist on pulling my arthritic wrists in a different trajectory of travel from mine. When my airfares are on cheap airlines like Ryanair or easyJet, the UK airports make sure the boarding gate is miles away! (Another nuisance of air travel is my utter inability to tear open the plastic packets of sugar or tomato sauce etc that air-hostesses hand out to guests. But khair...)

I got to Palma airport, passed through passport check and was fetching my bag off the carousel, having left my cloth one with the leather wallet and papers on a seat nearby. It was a bit of a wait and, spotting my bag, picked it up and, unthinking, started towards the exit with fellow passengers and just as I got out, remembered the white cloth shoulder bag I had left on the seat.

I rushed back. Nearly all the baggage on the carousel, still indicating GATWICK, had gone. There were very few people around. The seats next to the carousel were as clean as a licked platter. My white cloth bag? Gone! Taken from the seat on which I had carelessly left and momentarily, as I checked my phone for pick-up instructions, neglected it.

Panic, gentle reader! Yes, I could easily buy another Private Eye and the screenplays could be printed again, but losing the passport and the OCI card felt like losing a couple of limbs.

I rushed to the Lost and Found booth at the airport. I felt like asking them if an arm and a leg had been submitted, but thought better of it. No, no bag had been handed to them. Hah! So, it had been taken with intent, not picked up by some kind soul who calculated that its owner had left it by mistake. The wonderful attendants at Lost and Found told me to go to the police at the airport. Nothing -- no one had handed in a lost passport or a white bag with papers in it.

Nothing to do, but proceed to my screenwriting workshop venue -- a rambling hotel on the sea, 50 miles from the airport. The workshop run by Casa Indien had sent a cab and we spent an hour or so getting there. The driver had told the organisers of my mishap and I was met with sympathies.

As we drove it struck me that the person who had taken my white shoulder bag would try and sell the passport to people who could change the photographs and sell it to people smugglers. The OCI document would perhaps not fetch the same price.

But then it occurred to me that the thief or thieves had in their possession something whose value would probably not be apparent to them. Allow me, gentle reader, to explain. In the film industry, especially in the Indian one in which, in my short and happy life, I have worked very many years as a writer, editor and commissioner, when people send you scripts to read, doctor, or adopt, they also send you a legal “non-disclosure agreement” to sign. This stops you from passing the text of the screenplay or even its ideas or story treatment on to plagiarists -- of which there are many.

Perhaps this professionally enforced secrecy is justified. There is a paranoia about the theft of material.

Now in my bag there were three scripts with themes that explore, in profound, cinematic ways, novel aspects of Indian reality. One of them deals in engaging and moving ways with the problem of the pandemic of drug addiction. It’s a great screenplay, breaking with the traditions of both Bollywood and what is known as “art cinema” and ploughing an individual furrow.

Another script, which has the same mark of individuality, deals, through an enticing narrative, with the theme of female foeticide. A third script, my own, is a sequel to a film I wrote about a famous Indian female bandit, but I am not, I don’t think, allowed to say which film that was or which bandit.

The thief of my bag with these priceless scripts couldn’t have realised their commercial potential as the Lost and Found operatives called me at my workshop three days later saying they had been handed the bag with the scripts and the magazine but not the passport wallet.

Yes! Illiterate thieves had stolen the lead and abandoned what could be alchemical gold.