They resembled nursing home residents rather than inmates. All of them were dressed in ill-fitting orange uniforms, loosely dangling by their lanky stature. Judging by the pristine condition of the fabric, perhaps these were handed to them not so long ago.
I stood by the corridor just where I can barely see them conversing—with whom I can’t yet tell. This part of the building was particularly dark and narrow. In front of me were two people standing in line: a man in his mid 40s and a woman just around my age.
As the queue advances, I start to see the room where the inmates are. This room is directly perpendicular to the corridor where I saw them from. Strangely, the proportions of the room gave the impression that the room is “long” in that the width of the room is so much narrower compared to its length. The oddness of the room is complemented by the awkwardly placed wall decor and the purple tinted windows just opposite the corridor. Facaded by the windows were sounds of drizzle and occasional thunder.
As the cool air seeps in, I was greeted by a very unserious ambience. All of the inmates—four of them—were giggling about something childish. I suspect it had something to do with the poorly illustrated human genitalia that hangs on the wall—in case the officers needs to explain what counts as fat, thin, tall, short, and so on, though I’m not too sure now that I think about it.
The officers responded to them mechanically, by continuing the biometric data scanning procedure in a commanding tone. “Height?” The first officer asked the inmate first in queue, who sat at what appears to be a repurposed dining table. The inmate then bore an expression of bewilderment, as if he wasn’t aware that it was his turn to have his fingerprints scanned—he most certainly wasn’t aware. He responded shortly after, followed by about a dozen of questions.
“Weight?”
“Age?”
“Occupation?”
Garbageman, responded the man. That was the one of the two responses I could recall, followed by “cataract” when asked whether or not he had any prior illness.
As I began filling out my identity form, I noticed that one of the inmates, the youngest of the bunch, was staring at me intensely. He couldn’t have been any younger than 30. He had a faded tattoo imprinted in his left calf, contrasted by the religious cap which he wore with a proud grin. At that moment, I began noticing that all of the inmates were barefooted. And all of the officers were in flip flops.
Only when the TV started playing the intro of some romance drama did the inmate stop looking at me. For a few seconds, the conversations stopped, but soon everything was inaudible again. Only God knows what these people did—or maybe he doesn’t. From time to time, I heard one of the officers giving them unsolicited advice out of pity. Other times, the inmates were ridiculing the police station’s lack of functioning air conditioner—which wouldn’t have helped in this kind of weather anyway.
By this point, I was sharing tables with the inmates, joining their awkwardly arranged queue alongside the table. The two people in queue in front of me had left the room a while ago. I became the only person present who was neither an inmate nor an officer. I just needed a copy of my biometrics.
I put my fingers on the scanning device once it was my turn. From the TV, I heard what I assume was a scene of a medically critical person. The beeping of the alleged heart monitor was painfully annoying to my ears.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
By the time I finished, all of the inmates had already left. The two officers remained in the room. One of them was responsible for inputting my data into the computer. I heard the beeping for the final time.
Beep.
It was a long one.
