Pooja Chandra could not sleep the whole night. Pacing around the room, she kept wishing she had never let go of the strap of her laptop, wishing she had never got into that auto-rickshaw. Chandra, on Wednesday evening, had taken an auto-rickshaw to her mother’s place and then forgotten her laptop in it when she got out.

But Chandra was lucky as the auto driver found her out and returned her laptop. Thrilled, she gave the driver a reward of Rs 5,000.

“I never thought that I would get my laptop back, it doesn’t happen. And then I got a call saying someone had come to my mother’s home to return my lost laptop. I can’t believe it,” says Pooja Chandra, 28.

Chandra and her husband Kishor Chandra have a sound recording studio and they say that their business would have been hit had they lost the laptop.

Chandra had hired the auto for Khanpur around 7.30 pm and the auto driver told her that the auto had developed a snag and he would be able to take her to the destination. “He ferried me to another auto and when I got in, he left,” said Chandra. Chandra was with another woman and a child and in the rush forgot her laptop in the auto-rickshaw. It was an hour later that she realised her laptop was missing.

For Rakesh Kumar, realisation dawned only next morning. Kumar went straight to his home in Mayur Vihar without picking up any other customers and left his auto outside his home without glancing at the back seat. “It was just there the whole night, unprotected,” Kumar said. When Kumar went to see his auto in the morning, he found the laptop bag and after initial indecisions opened it. “I saw a laptop and then in one of the pockets found a bank passbook. I saw the address of the house and then went to return it,” he says.

... contd.