A thief was overcome with remorse after realising that the house he stole valuables from belonged to a famous Marathi writer and returned the valuables he had decamped with, police said on Tuesday.

The house from where the thief stole the valuables, including an LED TV, belonged to Narayan Surve and is located at Neral in Raigad district, police said.

Surve, who died on August 16, 2010 at 84 years, was a celebrated Marathi poet and social activist. Born in Mumbai, his poems vividly depicted the struggles of the urban working class.

Surve’s daughter Sujata and her husband Ganesh Ghare now live in the house. They had gone to Virar to be with their son and their house was locked for 10 days.

It was during this period that the thief entered the house and stole a few things, including the LED TV set. When he returned to pick up a few more articles the next day, he noticed Surve’s photo and memorabilia in a room.

The thief, who was obviously well-read, was filled with remorse and returned all the items he had picked up. He pasted a small note on a wall, asking for the owner’s forgiveness for stealing from such a great literary figure’s house.

Sujata and her husband found the note when they returned from Virar on Sunday, police inspector Shivaji Dhavle of Neral police station said.

Police are carrying out further investigation based on the fingerprints found on the TV set and other articles, he said.

Before Surve became a famous Marathi poet, he had grown up as an orphan on the streets of Mumbai, then survived by working as a domestic help, a dishwasher in a hotel, a babysitter, a pet-dog caretaker, a milk delivery boy, a porter and a mill hand.

Through his poetry, Surve glorified labour and challenged the established literary norms in Marathi literature.

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