The Thief Who Came Home

Sukrim got out of prison on a Tuesday, and the very first thing he stole was an orange.

Not because he was hungry—at the gate they had given him a wrapped portion of rice and bus fare. He stole the orange from a cart in front of the penitentiary because his hands, after four years, had forgotten how not to steal, and the orange was already in his pocket before his head had a chance to intervene. He stood on the sidewalk holding the stolen orange with the feeling of a man who had just failed in the first minute of his freedom, and he almost returned it, then realized that returning a stolen item to a crowded cart would look far more suspicious than stealing it, then decided to just eat it, then felt guilty, then—and this is the important part—slipped the exact price of the orange onto that same cart when the vendor wasn't looking.

Stealing an orange, then secretly paying for it. That was Sukrim. That was the entirety of Sukrim, really, in one motion: a man whose hands were wicked but whose heart never joined in, who spent twenty years stealing little things only to regret them in even littler ways.

He took the bus to his hometown. He went home to see his mother.

During his four years inside, the one thing that kept Sukrim sane was imagining this scene: he knocks on the door, his mother opens it, and—after chewing him out thoroughly, of course, she had every right to be angry—she hugs him and says, finally you came home. He had already practiced his remorseful face. He had prepared his apology, revising it hundreds of times in his cell, until it was perfect.

He knocked. His mother opened the door. And his mother said:

"Who are you looking for, son?"

Sukrim stood there as the perfect apology evaporated from his head.

"Mom," he said. "It's me. Sukrim."

His mother—smaller than he remembered, paler, with kind and completely empty eyes—tilted her head. "Sukrim," she repeated, tasting the name the way one tastes a stranger's cooking. "Which Sukrim? I'm sorry, I am a bit forgetful."

The next-door neighbor, Mrs. Inah, who had heard from her fence, came over to explain in a low voice. It had been like this for two years. Senility. The doctor at the clinic called it a long term that Mrs. Inah couldn't memorize. Sometimes his mother remembered things from fifty years ago perfectly—the names of elementary school friends, the price of rice back in the day, songs no one sang anymore. But the recent things, the new things, yesterday—all of it slipped from her mind like water from cupped hands.

"She doesn't even remember her own son anymore," Mrs. Inah said, then hurriedly covered her mouth, realizing how cruel it sounded.

Sukrim nodded. He didn't cry. He was a thief; he knew how to make sure his face didn't betray him. He simply stood on the porch of his childhood home, clutching the remainder of a stolen orange in his pocket, realizing that he had spent four years imprisoning himself just to come home to the only person in the world waiting for him, only to find that she had, in her own way, left first.

This is what a sane person would do in this situation: he would sit down, explain patiently, show photos, replay memories, and try to call his mother back to the surface.

Sukrim tried that for three days. For three days he said, "Mom, it's Sukrim, your son," and for three days his mother looked at him with the exact same empty kindness, and once—this was the most agonizing—his mother grew terrified, backed into a corner, and whispered, "what do you want, I don't have any money," as if her own son were a thief breaking into her house. Which, if Sukrim were honest, technically he was, and that made him laugh bitterly in the bathroom that night until his laughter turned into something else.

On the fourth day, Sukrim stopped trying to be Sukrim.

It came to him as a thief's idea, because Sukrim only had a thief's brain, and a thief's brain asks one question about everything: what can I take from here? Only this time, for the first time in his life, the question reversed. It wasn't what can I take. It was: what can I give back to a woman who has lost almost everything, including me?

His mother didn't remember having a son named Sukrim. Fine. But his mother remembered the old things. So Sukrim sat down, on the fourth day, and instead of forcing his mother to remember him, he asked:

"Mom, did you ever have a child?"

And his mother's face lit up.

"I did," his mother said, and for the first time, her eyes weren't empty. "A son. His name was..."—she frowned, searching—"...Sukrim. Yes, Sukrim. A good boy. Very smart, he was."

Sukrim, who was not a good boy and was not smart and was sitting right across from his mother, said, "Oh really? Tell me about him, Mom."

And his mother told the story. About Sukrim—his mother's version of Sukrim, the Sukrim who lived in the old woman's head, who turned out to be vastly different from the real Sukrim. The Sukrim in his mother's memory was a boy who diligently studied the Quran, who was top of his class, who once bought his mother a bracelet with his very first paycheck. Parts of it were true—Sukrim did once give his mother a bracelet, though that bracelet, he would never confess, was stolen from the market. Parts of it were entirely false—Sukrim had never been top of any class except, perhaps, the most frequently arrested. But his mother told the story with such pure pride, about a boy who was so good, that Sukrim understood something that made his chest tight.

Dementia had stolen his mother's memory. But before stealing it, dementia did something strange and almost merciful: it edited. It discarded the disappointing version of Sukrim—the one who got arrested again and again, who made his mother cry at the police station, who was last seen by his mother from behind bars—and kept only his best version. The version that gave the bracelet. The version he was supposed to be. His mother's mind, in its collapse, had guarded the only part of Sukrim worth guarding.

And Sukrim, the thief, sat across from that treasure—a better version of himself, preserved intact within the mind of the only person who had ever loved him—and for the first time in his life, he decided not to steal it. He decided, instead, to guard it.

So Sukrim became someone else.

He didn't claim to be Sukrim anymore. That only made his mother scared, or confused, or—worse—sometimes it almost made his mother remember the things better left forgotten. So when his mother asked, "who are you, son?", Sukrim answered with the noblest lie he had ever woven:

"I'm the new neighbor, Mom. Mr. Sukrim... er—Mr. Krim. I'm helping out around here. Your son asked me to."

"My son? Sukrim?"

"Yes, Mom. He entrusted you to me. Because he's working far away right now. A good job, Mom. He's successful now."

And his mother's face would light up again, and she would say, "yes, my son is indeed smart," and Sukrim—Mr. Krim—would nod and sweep the floor and cook and replace the dead lightbulbs, doing for his mother all the things a good son was supposed to do, disguised as a stranger hired by a good son who never existed.

The cosmic joke of this whole affair was not lost on Sukrim. He had spent his life in disguise—disguised as a buyer before stealing, disguised as an innocent man in front of the police, disguised as everything he wasn't. And now, for the final and greatest job of his career as a fraud, he was disguised as a kind stranger, all to protect an old woman from the truth that her son wasn't that good. The most honest disguise of his life was pretending to not be himself.

Sukrim's days, after that, became strange and sweet and agonizing.

Every morning he woke up in the room that used to be his, and became Mr. Krim. He cooked for his mother, and his mother praised him—"you cook so well, Mr. Krim, almost as good as my own cooking used to be"—and Sukrim held back a laugh, because that recipe was his mother's recipe, which he had memorized from peeking decades ago. He sat with his mother on the porch, and his mother would tell stories about the great Sukrim, and Mr. Krim would listen with feigned awe about himself, occasionally adding details.

"He says he owns a big house now, Mom," Mr. Krim said one afternoon, building a better version of his own life, brick by brick, for an audience of one.

"Oh really?" His mother's eyes sparkled. "Thank goodness. We used to have it so hard, Mr. Krim. I only sold cakes. But I always told Sukrim, don't be a thief even if you're poor. A thief..."—his mother shook her head—"...a thief steals from people, but what he steals the most is from his own mother. He steals his mother's pride. I always told him that."

Sukrim swept the already clean floor so his mother couldn't see his face.

"Good thing Sukrim wasn't like that," his mother continued, smiling. "Good thing my son became a good man."

"Yes, Mom," Sukrim said, with his back to his mother. "Good thing."

There was one afternoon when it almost all fell apart.

Mrs. Inah, the neighbor, who couldn't bear watching this charade drag on, pulled Sukrim to the fence and whispered angrily. "How long are you going to keep this up, Krim? That's your mother. She has the right to know her son came home. You're conning her every day!"

"I'm not conning her, Mrs. Inah," Sukrim said quietly.

"Then what do you call it? You're claiming to be a neighbor. You're saying you're successful when you just got out of prison. It's all a lie."

Sukrim was quiet for a moment. Then he said something he didn't know was inside him until it came out:

"Mrs. Inah, all my life I stole from my mother. Not money—I never stole her money, she didn't have any. I stole something far more wicked. Every time I got caught, I stole her pride. Every time she had to come to the police station, that look on her face—I stole that, I humiliated her in front of the whole village, over and over again, for forty years. I am a thief who stole the most from the victim who loved me the most."

He swallowed hard.

"Now she's forgotten all of that. She's forgotten everything I stole from her. And for the first time, Ma'am, I have a chance to give back. I can't return the years I ruined. But I can make sure that, for the rest of her life, she only remembers the good things. I can give her the son she was supposed to have. That's the only precious thing I've ever returned, Mrs. Inah, in my entire life. Please don't ask me to steal it again."

Mrs. Inah stared at him for a long time. Then, without a word, she went into her house, and the next morning she placed a plate of cakes on Sukrim's fence, and never again asked him to stop.

Months passed. Mr. Krim became a permanent fixture in the village—a middle-aged man caring for the old woman at the end of the alley, who was extraordinarily patient, who was supposedly hired by the grandmother's successful son in the city.

Sukrim, whose brain remained a thief's brain, channeled his criminality in ways he never expected. He stole again—but now he stole flowers from the city park to put on his mother's table, and stole recipes from the neighboring food stall for variety in his cooking, and once, he stole time from death itself: when his mother had a high fever in the middle of the night, a penniless Sukrim carried the old woman on his back, ran three kilometers to the clinic in the dark, and paid for the medicine by—he would never confess to this either—pickpocketing his own wallet from the future; that is, pawning the only valuable thing he owned: the bracelet. The bracelet he had stolen and given to his mother all those years ago. Which somehow was still there, in the drawer, kept by his mother for twenty years as her most prized possession, a gift from her good son.

Sukrim pawned that stolen bracelet again to save the life of the woman who kept it. The full circle of one petty theft, across forty years, finally redeeming itself.

His mother recovered. She never found out about the bracelet. And if one day she looked for it and couldn't find it, Sukrim had prepared a final lie: Sukrim took it, Mom. As a keepsake overseas. He said it was so he'd always remember you.

A lie which, upon reflection, was the only true thing he had ever said.

His mother passed away on a quiet morning, in the season when the rains had just begun, almost a year after Sukrim had come home.

She went in her sleep, peacefully, without pain, in a clean and warm house cared for by a man she thought was a kind neighbor. And in her final days, when she was very weak, there was one afternoon that Sukrim would keep in his chest as the only treasure he never stole but was given to him.

That afternoon his mother looked at him for a long time, while Sukrim fed her porridge. Looked at him in a different way. And his mother said, softly, almost whispering:

"Mr. Krim."

"Yes, Mom."

"You..."—she stopped, and there was something in her eyes, something rising from a very deep place, from beneath all that had been stolen from her—"...you are so very kind to me. Even though we are nobody to each other."

"I was just asked by your son, Mom."

His mother smiled. And then she said the thing that made the spoon in Sukrim's hand freeze in mid-air, the thing he would never know whether it came from senility or from something deeper that survived beneath the senility, something that didn't need memory to know:

"My son," his mother said quietly, still smiling, her eyes looking straight into Sukrim's, "is not actually working far away, is he, Mr. Krim?"

Sukrim couldn't answer.

"It's okay," his mother whispered, and her light, aged hand rose, trembling, and touched Sukrim's cheek, exactly as it had done twenty years ago, before everything. "It's okay, son. I've been pretending too, you know. For a while now. So you wouldn't be sad."

The two of them, as it turned out, had been disguised from each other.

For months Sukrim thought he was protecting his mother from the truth. And for months, somewhere beneath the fog that took his name and the price of rice and the old songs, his mother had recognized her son—maybe not every day, maybe not as a fact she could hold onto, but as something older than facts, something known through the touch of a hand and the way someone saves the best side dish and carries you three kilometers in the rain. A mother recognizes her child not by memory. But by the thing that remains after memory runs out.

And she, knowing this, chose to play along. Giving her son the gift her son thought he was giving her: the chance to be a better person, without the burden of his entire past. Two people, in one small house, each pretending in order to protect the other from the truth, while that truth—that they knew each other, forgave each other, loved each other past everything that had been stolen and ruined—sat between them the whole time, warm, unspoken, and whole.

Sukrim hugged his mother, finally, for the first time since coming home, and cried—not as Mr. Krim, but as Sukrim, the real son, who was flawed and regretful and came home late but came home anyway. And his mother hugged him back with arms that barely had any strength, and said, into her son's ear, the words he had saved up for four years in prison to hear:

"Finally you came home."

Sukrim didn't steal anything else after his mother was gone.

This wasn't because he suddenly became a saint; change in a person like Sukrim doesn't arrive like a lightning bolt. His hands still sometimes itched at the market, still were sometimes faster than his head. But every time, he remembered one thing, and his hands would stop.

He remembered that there was one time in his life when he stopped stealing and started giving back, and that the greatest theft he ever aborted was the easiest theft of all—taking the better version of himself from his senile mother, and replacing it with the truth. He could have done it every day. He never did. He guarded that treasure, the only treasure he ever guarded, until its owner took it away with her.

And in that village, people still sometimes call him Mr. Krim, because not everyone knows the real story. And Sukrim lets them. Because that name, which he fabricated as a lie, had become the only name in his life he earned by being good—and an old thief knows full well that one thing you earn honestly is far more precious than a thousand things you steal.

On the porch of his mother's house, which is now his house, there is still a plate of cakes from Mrs. Inah every Friday. And every Friday, Sukrim sets aside the last piece—not for himself—and places it on the table, where his mother used to sit, for someone who is no longer there but who, he is absolutely certain, still sometimes comes home. At the right times. Through paths that do not require memory.