The Guard !

I would watch her every day I enter the closed gamete of existence. Mine, hers and many others. She would be pacing, at other times. It made me feel smitten as I learned she never sat for the entire 12 hours instead just be on her legs. Standing or pacing. Never resting always on her alert, lest anything awful happen.

She came to me one day with back pain, that was the first time I saw her sit and lie down while I gently examined her. I advised her to see a specialist, I know it would take months for that to happen in this part of the world ...so I called up my friend in radiology.

She had multiple disc prolapses and she made me promise it would be a secret, she was scared if the authorities were aware she would be out of a job. She was the breadwinner of the entire family. Her daughter was just fifteen and already a mother herself. These things happen in the most advanced and powerful places and unlike our country, no NHM or NRHM or ministry of health and family welfare exist to burn their heads over any of it for their big fat paycheque, unnecessary research units conducting nonsensical affluent meetings in state after state with meaningless programs and namesake real work. The child services and social services were never aware of baby Tisha, and I was the last person to do harm to people by being righteous in the wrong way.

She greeted everyone with a smile and never made the inmates feel they had at some point done a wrong and is trying to get it right. She never paid heed to the golden line between normal and abnormal and drew hard boundaries when a family took a minute more with their dear one nor when a lover brought some sweets to his ardent love.

She trusted me that I would never compromise her good intentions. She used to say" I wanted to study nursing ...but I left school in seventh grade, I left home because of my mother's third husband who was a drunkard and tried to molest me.

I worked at the different warehouses, and cleaning companies, all versatile jobs ...Just minimum wages.

Till my back started hurting me.

Then I found this job."

I have felt her strength when I have called many code whites to handle inmate struggles. One time it was a suicidal attempt, the other time rage over the phone, many times I have taken hits along with staff under me but we knew this was part of what we signed up for.

But the last time I saw her was different, no I saw her a year or so later..but then it was different I was in myself in psychic shock and she just healing from what caused her to leave the job, yet she continued as a security guard.

It was my manager's plot to bring the most dangerous female to my unit, straight after I was nominated as the best. She was jealous and humiliated ..my manager.

The lady inmate told me she would hit me and fix me for good as she did with my kind ...but I never took it seriously until she caught me a day I was about to leave the unit, that was the time I learned one human being can finish the other with bare hands, I was hit badly, and my consciousness was sinking but I was in the iron clutches and I wanted to breathe that was the time I saw the security guard, friend rushing ...but after a while, in my blood red eyes I saw the inmate pull the scalp part and hair of the guard and punch her on her face. Blood was everywhere when others rushed to help...The security guard friend reached to me and held me who was lost into the abyss...

After a year I saw the same guard at a workplace I went for an interview. She looked a bit disfigured yet her eyes shone and her lips had a curious smile, never complaining always forgiving and considerate.

We never bad-mouthed anyone. We hugged each other deeply ...she was duty bound so was I, but felt proud of the great woman who did guard with heart and soul.