Mutiny in the Ranks

I swear 'Guards' are worse than children.

We have 3 day and 3 night guards and the shift rotates weekly. There is a 'head guard' on each watch. One, named Hari is excellent does a great job, keeps his head down and gets on with it and the other, Dileep, just stomps around and is, as far as we can see, officious and pretty useless.

There had apparently been some sort of conflict going on within the ranks and the head guards had had to report some of them for sleeping...Dileep has been caught sleeping several times himself and was the one on duty on Christmas Eve (see T'was the Night Before Christmas Post

At 3am one night last week...our doorbell rang. What the...? Imagining a real emergency we leapt out of bed, well Ian did, I'm never good at getting up any time of the morning so I crawled. It rang again...PLEASE DON'T WAKE THE CHILDREN! There stood one of the younger guards and he had woken us up especially to tell us that Dileep was asleep. What? You all sleep! Why wake US up to tell us that? Why not wake him and cover for him like you all do? Ian went through the motions with Dileep again and as we tried to get back to sleep we could hear some sort of row going on.

The next morning I returned from the school run to find chaos, both shifts were still there and Hari is shirtless and in tears. Someone had rubbed his shirt with poisonous leaves, he had put it on and immediately his skin had begun to burn and itch. I sent him inside for a hot shower and an anti-histamine tablet, then had to go out again. Thankfully when I returned he was feeling much better and happier and he tells me that he suspects the young guard who had woken us up. I checked with the gardener and there are none of these leaves in our garden so someone had brought them here intentionally.

By Midday the Inspector had arrived apologising profusely for the trouble and informs me that 'young lad' has been fired, although anyone in India will know that this means he'll actually just be moved onto a new job, probably just around the corner! All the rest were told in no uncertain terms that if anything like this ever happens again they will go, except of course for Hari.

And while I'm on the subject of Hari I ought to tell you how he loves to play with Ellie and Luke and takes such precious care of them that I was moved to ask if he had children of his own. This was his reply...

"Err Madam I have a son, he is 7 months old but I have never seen him". WHAT? Turns out that his wife lives a 2 hour flight away, the last time he was able to see her since their marriage was 18 months ago, he returned to his job here and she fell pregnant. She had the baby and, get this, Hari has not even seen a photograph. He talks to them everyday and hopes and plans that in a few months time they will have enough money for them to move to Chennai and be together.