Azlan Hamid

Azlan Hamid is 41 and for eleven years has commanded the room of sixty-four screens at an airport terminal. He was born in Ipoh, the son of a mechanic and a school cook, and took the technical electronics course at night while working as a doorman by day. He joined airport security as a guard, rose to camera operator and then supervisor, and is by far the longest-serving employee on the shift. He speaks of the cameras the way others speak of children: each has a name and a temperament.

He lives in a housing-estate apartment in Subang Jaya, on the fifth floor, with his wife and two young daughters. The living room has a faux-leather sofa always covered in toys, a noisy ceiling fan and an aquarium of little fish the girls won at an amusement park. He gets home at eleven at night when he works a double shift, which is almost always, and sleeps on the sofa with the television on low. The weekend is all his when the schedule allows.

He has brown skin, a broad face with a thin, well-trimmed mustache, short black hair with a receding hairline and a prominent belly he blames on the canteen. He wears the light blue uniform shirt, with a radio clipped to his shoulder, and carries the dark circles of someone who worked a double shift. He speaks in the voice of someone who has recited the same passage of the manual for years, in short sentences, verbs in place, and defends his department with a pride that barely fits his weariness.

About the morning at the terminal, his account is that of a supervisor on duty: he has been in the camera room since six, alone, with sixty-four screens, because the morning colleague didn't show up because of the rain and nobody gets in there without passing him. The lobby camera caught a girl in a white T-shirt coming up behind the man, covering his eyes and rubbing her hands over his face. Afterward, she ran to the restroom with her hands held away from her body.

Azlan knows that whoever controls the cameras is the one who should have seen everything, and that, when something is missing from the footage, the question falls on him. When the detective accuses him of deleting images, he folds his arms over his belly, looks at the nearest monitor and says to ask properly or call his boss. It may be the pride of an employee who never failed. It may be someone clinging to the post because the post is all he has. The detective will have to decide which.