Havildar (Retd.) Tejpal Singh

Tejpal Singh was born in a village of soldiers, the kind of place where every second household had a son in uniform and a photograph of him on the mantelpiece, and where enlisting at eighteen was considered not so much a career choice as a matter of course, the way a farmer's son takes up the plough. His father had served before him, an infantry havildar in his own time, and Tejpal grew up measuring his own height against the notches his father had cut into the doorframe of their house, each notch a year closer to the age at which he could finally sign the papers himself.

He joined in 1976, trained hard, and made havildar in nine years, a respectable pace by any measure, and served across three postings in his eighteen years — two of them unremarkable in the way army life often is, long stretches of drill and duty and letters home, and one high posting towards the end of his service that he speaks of, when he speaks of it at all, in the barest and most general of terms, as ‘a difficult time, but every soldier has one.’

He married Amarjeet in 1980 during a long leave, in a village wedding with two hundred guests and a band that played until well past midnight, and their two children grew up largely on the strength of his letters and his infrequent, treasured furloughs, a childhood he still feels some quiet regret about, though he would never phrase it in those exact words to anyone, least of all his children, who are grown now and settled comfortably enough to have mostly forgiven whatever needed forgiving.

He retired in 1994 with a clean record, a pension, and a chestful of the ordinary decorations that come with eighteen honest years, and found, within six months of retirement, that a life without a parade ground in it did not suit him at all, which is how he came to answer an advertisement for a security supervisor at the newly opened Sunrise Mall, a job that struck his old army friends as a considerable comedown and struck Tejpal himself as, in its own modest way, still a command.

He runs his nine guards the way he once ran a section, with a morning inspection at two in the afternoon precisely — the mall's slowest hour, chosen deliberately so that the boys are fresh rather than tired — checking shoes, checking the crease of a uniform, checking that identity cards are worn exactly as prescribed, and addressing even the youngest of his guards, a boy barely twenty-three, as ‘jawan,’ a term of address the boy finds both bewildering and, in time, rather flattering.

There was an evening in 1997 when a fire alarm went off falsely during the Diwali rush, and while the mall's own management dithered over what to announce, Tejpal simply took charge of the nearest exit himself, organised the guards into a human chain to keep the crowd moving without panic, and had the entire ground floor cleared and accounted for in under four minutes, a feat the mall's owner still mentions whenever a new tenant asks who exactly Mr. Singh is and why he is treated with such deference by staff twice his rank on paper.

He is unreasonably strict, by the guards' own cheerful complaint, about identity cards, dustbin placement, and the precise hour of the tea break, and unaccountably gentle whenever a guard's mother falls ill or a young recruit's wife is expecting, quietly rearranging duty rosters and, more than once, quietly contributing from his own pocket towards a hospital bill nobody asked him to pay.

He keeps a small diary from his service years in a drawer at home, its pages containing, among ordinary entries about postings and pay and leave, two names he has not spoken aloud in a very long time, and the diary itself has not been opened, by his own admission, since the year he retired, though he has also never once considered throwing it away.

His moustache is waxed each morning with the same brand of cream he has used since 1981, his shoes are polished each night regardless of how tired he is, and the crease in his trousers is, by mall folklore, sharp enough to have once been used, only half in jest, to settle a bet between two off-duty guards.

Ask Havildar Tejpal Singh, retired, what he thinks of guarding a shopping mall after eighteen years guarding a border, and he will draw himself up very slightly and say that discipline does not know the difference between a border post and a gate number, that a jawan is a jawan wherever he is posted, and that Sunrise Mall, since he took charge of it, has not once in six years had a security lapse worth the name, a record he states as a simple fact rather than a boast, the way another man might state his own date of birth.