Weight of the Word

Enforcer.

The word hung in the humid air long after my father had driven away, heavier than the thud of Besi Mari’s body against the brick. It wasn’t just a job description. It was an identity. A role carved into bone and blood, passed down through whispers and warnings in the back alleys of Kuala Lumpur. An enforcer doesn’t negotiate. An enforcer doesn’t explain. An enforcer acts. And in acting, he becomes less than human, a tool, a mechanism, a blunt instrument of someone else’s will.

To my seven-year-old self, the word sounded like armor. Enforcer. Strong. Decisive. Untouchable. I thought it meant my father was important. That he mattered in a world that often made me feel invisible. I didn’t understand then that “enforcer” is a title given to those who have surrendered their right to be anything else. He wasn’t a father who enforced rules; he was an enforcer who happened to be a father. The role came first. The humanity came second, if it came at all.

I watched him slide back into the driver’s seat, his expression unchanged, as if throwing a man against a wall were no different than shifting gears. That was the horror of it: the normalcy. For him, violence wasn’t a rupture in the fabric of daily life; it was part of the weave. He had been trained to see people not as souls, but as variables compliant or non-compliant, useful or obstructive. Besi Mari had been non-compliant. So he was corrected. Like a typo. Like a loose bolt.

And I, sitting beside him, began to internalize the grammar of enforcement. I learned that problems are solved through force, not conversation. That respect is earned through fear, not trust. That love is conditional on utility. I didn’t know the word “enforcer” would follow me into adulthood, shaping how I moved through relationships, careers, and my own sense of worth. But it did.

In high school, I became an enforcer of social hierarchies, manipulating friendships to maintain control. In my twenties, I enforced boundaries so rigid they choked out intimacy. In my career, I enforced NDAs and logistics with the same cold precision my father used on Besi Mari. I wasn’t throwing bodies against walls, but I was pinning people emotionally, demanding compliance disguised as professionalism. I thought I was being strong. I thought I was being safe. But I was just repeating the script.

The truth is, enforcers are never free. They are bound by the code of whoever hired them or, in my father’s case, by the unspoken code of survival in a world that taught him softness was fatal. He enforced because he believed it was the only way to protect what was his. But protection without tenderness is just another form of captivity.

Besi Mari knew his place. My father knew his. And for years, I thought I knew mine too: to be useful, to be quiet, to be strong enough to never need saving. But strength that serves only to enforce is hollow. It builds order, but it destroys connection. It maintains control, but it erodes trust.

Now, when I hear the word “enforcer,” I don’t hear power. I hear loneliness. I hear a man who forgot how to ask for help. I hear a son who learned to mimic that forgetting. I hear the echo of a body hitting brick, and the silence that followed.

I am done enforcing. I am learning to listen. To yield. To hold space instead of taking it. To be present without being imposing. To be Saransh is not a title, not a role, not a weapon, but a person.

Because the world doesn’t need more enforcers. It needs more witnesses. More healers. More people willing to stand beside the broken, not above them.

My father was an enforcer. I choose to be something else. Something softer. Something truer. Something human.