When a thief broke into ace crime writer Ved Prakash's house

MEERUT: Ved Prakash Sharma, a renowned writer of crime thrillers, has created thousands of crime scenes in his career spanning over four decades during which he wrote nearly 200 novels. But he had never thought he would be witness to one someday — at his own house.
On Wednesday morning, Sharma, whose 1993 best-seller Vardiwala Goonda has alone sold over 17 lakh copies, was fetched into a showroom of chandeliers and fancy lights situated adjacent his house at Shastri Nagar in Meerut and run by his son Shagun.A computer set was burnt to cinders, a few chandeliers had also melted because of the intense heat but not a single thing was stolen.
Sharma, who has written stories for Bollywood movies International Khiladi (1999) Sabse Bada Khiladi (1995) and Anaam (1992), said it did not take him much time to analyze the situation though.
“A CCTV camera had been installed hidden in a corner of the showroom. This must have been spotted by the thief. Panicked, the thief must have thought that recording was taking place in the computer and hence set the computer ablaze before escaping from the scene of crime,” Sharma told TOI.
But then, as Sherlock Homes famously said ‘there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact’, the crime fiction writer’s sharp mind clearly outfoxed the petty thief’s. The digital video recorder of the CCTV wasn't in that computer or even the showroom. It was somewhere else.
“The building in which the incident took place is adjacent to our house. On the top floor is the showroom. My instincts always told me that the right place of the DVR should be in our home, not in the showroom. The thief wanted to destroy the evidence of his presence. So, he ended up burning the computer.”
Police have already been provided with the CCTV footage and an FIR has been filed at Medical police station against the as-of-now unknown thief.
The family came to know of the incident after neighbours told them about smoke billowing out of the showroom. The writer’s son, Shagun, told TOI, “When we arrived at the scene of crime, the room was filled with heavy smoke. There was a lot of heat, because of which chandeliers had melted and computer system along with table on which it was placed had turned to ashes. Thankfully, windowpanes did not break because of the heat, otherwise the whole place could have turned into an inferno fanned by the air outside.”