Review: The Pickpocket’s Letter

Anil Nijhawan, The Pickpocket’s Letter, (‎Blue Horizon Publishing, 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243252262-the-pickpocket-s-letter

A young pickpocket becomes a champion of love

Young Deenu dictates into his Sanyo tape recorder an impassioned letter to PM Modi. ‘You must look deeper into why there are so many abandoned children in this country’, he says. Sanju types the transcripts for him, on the promise of ‘more juicy bits to come’.

Deenu has experienced it all—raised in an orphanage, kidnapped and beaten by gangsters at age 14, forced to steal for his daily bread, s**ually ab**ed by staff members in return for chocolate bars, slapped for speaking out, in thrall to people with ‘different agendas’. He doesn’t know his real name—Deenu is a nickname. He lives in Kolkata, but he used to live in Bengaluru, where he ‘had a steady job working as a pickpocket’.

There is a villain, the evil trafficker Vikram, who ‘wants to make keema out of’ Deenu, and a mission—a pocket-picked wallet sets Deenu on a journey to reunite two separated lovers. If only he could be reunited himself with his lost mother. In a world full of hate, Deenu is loving.

The Voice of the narration is that of the child Deenu, which is charming. We see the streets of Bengaluru and Kolkata through his eyes. His good-heartedness takes for granted the poor conditions and care, the poverty, the abuse; fleeing from ‘the RTP’ (robbers, thieves and pickpockets); the children suffering ‘like the crunching of cockroaches under… feet’. The police are no help with his problems—they only try to extort money from the victims.

This makes it all the more heart-breaking to us. If not for this relative degree of separation, we’d not be able to bear reading it. All the little stories about life on the streets—tragic stories they are, but Deenu makes them humorous. Each little scene is colourful. The details are wonderful, tragi-comic and heart-warming. There is an intricate climax to the story, where everything seems disastrous for everybody, but Nijhawan manages to give us a hopeful ‘triumph over tragedy’ happy ending. I almost cried.

There is liberal use of Hindi words, which I had to look up in Google, but I didn’t mind as they lend familiarity to the foreign (to me) setting and paint the scenes as through the characters’ eyes.

Like PM Modi, we must learn of the sufferings of children like Deenu. It is our responsibility to fight for a world where every child grows up in love and security.