Two Minutes Older: A Hair-Raising Tale

My face in the mirror was a flashback to a more shudder-inducing time – a time of padded shoulders and acid-washed, pegged jeans. My eyes ought to have been decorated with glittery, bright eye-shadow, because god knows, everything else about my face screamed ‘Eighties!’

And I was even grateful. I had thought that nothing would induce me to revisit the eighties with the gusto that everyone around me these days has the bad taste to display, but I was wrong. It was either this look or a buzz-cut.

Blame it on my cellphone. I was brushing my hair with a curling brush when my phone rang. At first I continued to brush my hair and talk. Then I tucked the phone under my chin and got on with the other stuff. This is when disaster struck: the phone slipped from under my chin, and to save it, I let go the brush, which also slipped, tangled in my hair and stuck faster than fevicol ka jod.

I don’t really know why people say it’s the happy times that whizz by before you know they happened. It must be disasters they were thinking of because all this happened before I could get a blink in. For the next half an hour, I did what I’m told some hairdressers do with hair (I with less success than they) – I teased, cajoled and finally issued threats. I tried water (bad idea) and conditioner (even worse). I asked my mother for help, shed a few futile tears and then called my local beauty parlour.

They were champions. They asked me to come immediately, and promised to sort it out.

Picture me driving through the streets of Hyderabad with a brush dangling from my hair. If people laughed, though, I didn’t notice. It’s more likely that they were stunned, as if they’d been gifted a lifetime supply of happiness and didn’t know what to do with it.

At any rate, the people in the parlour were very polite. They greeted me with their usual delight and ushered me upstairs, where a very calm young man waited to deliver me from the clutches of my brush. It took an hour and a half, two strong people, a lot of commiseration, gratuitous advice for the future and many, many questions. And I went through it with no anaesthesia. I assure you, not even childbirth was so traumatic.

At the end of that time, I was like putty in the hands of my saviours. The young man suggested an oil massage to soothe my scalp and I agreed. He said he’d give me a haircut that would mask the sad depletion of hair at the top and I was speechless with gratitude.

“Luckily, you have naturally wavy hair. I’ll just give you a cut that’ll add volume,” he said. I felt flattered, as if my wavy hair was the result of natural talent and hard work.

The massage helped. It lulled me, if you really want to know. By the end of the shampoo and conditioning I was in a state of bliss that made nonsense of my recently concluded ordeal. When I was sat down in the chair, I didn’t so much as look at my face in the mirror. In fact, I forgot to notice anything until it was much too late. A few minutes later, I had bangs.

Bangs. You know? Like those women in Dallas or Dynasty. Or those photos from back in school, the ones you prefer to hide away so your children can never see them and thus have nothing to hold over you when the time comes to bargain with them.

At the time, it didn’t look bad. Not as bad, at least, as my shorn, battered and discarded hairbrush. I took a deep breath, thanked my hairdresser effusively and left. It wasn’t until after the first wash when I witnessed each particular hair stand on end like that fretful porcupine in Hamlet that I felt I should just pack my mirror away, put ‘Karma Chameleon’ on loop and wallow in my misery properly. If I can blink and miss this, I’ll know everything they say about happiness is true.

_

An edited version of this appeared in today's The New Indian Express.

Unseasonal Tales #1

4am. A sudden, long roll of thunder wakes me up. I unlock my cellphone to check the time. And groan. I went to sleep only a couple of hours ago. I stagger to my computer to turn off the UPS, which is going to go into a terminal beep any second now. The second I hit the bed, the electricity goes off. I feel so smug at my prescience that I can no longer fall asleep. What the heck. I have to wake up in an hour in any case.

10am. I was looking forward to today. I was going to pack my son off to school after more than a week and get down to some serious work. Instead of, for instance, blogging. But no. After making his lunch by candlelight, waking him up and nagging him until he moved his butt fast enough; after sitting in the car waiting for the school bus; after returning home and heaving a sigh of relief, I get a call. His teacher wants me to pick him because the school's policy is, no school for two weeks for those with chicken pox, never mind what the doc says. Rain is beautiful only when you don't have to drive in it. But all's not lost. There's electricity, at least for now. After six hours, the rain's finally let up. And I can tell you haircut stories.

**
The year was 2003 and the month was January. If the year was new, it didn't feel like it. Instead it carried with it all the sourness of the last few months. December had been the worst. I had finally quit my job(s) and hooked off to Goa early in the year with an old friend who had become - though I didn't know it until it was too late - unbelievably weird. Returning to Delhi, to an empty flat with too many doors and windows, I wanted to run away again.

In those days, my lifeline to sanity was S. So I called and he said, Come to Bombay, no? I'll look after you. You can chill, watch movies with us and sleep.

So I went. If S was shocked to see how I looked, he concealed it admirably well and cooked for me and cooed over me. I drifted through the first couple of days, catching, every once in a while, a glimpse of K's and S's life: hand modeling, scripts, some talk about an impending Vipassana course at Igatpuri. When should I leave, I asked S. Stay as long as you want, sweetie. I'll go only after you leave. Somewhere in my head, I was ready to make some decisions.
One morning, S and K, watching me hunt for a bun-pin/pencil/anything that would hold my hair away from my face, asked if I had ever considered having a haircut. I immediately felt mid-way down my back to see if all was intact. What had they done while I was asleep?!

K started telling me about this place called Juice. Some talk about how all the guys in DCH had got their haircuts there. I was deeply suspicious. How much does a haircut there cost, I asked. About 5-600 if it's a trainee, but I'll ask, said K. I don't want one, I protested. But I may as well have shut up, because before I could work myself up into the necessary state of indignation, an appointment had been fixed. With a trainee, for 6pm, Juice, Bandra. Being broke, and not really in the market for a drastic change of look, I piped down only after S said he's sponsoring the haircut, so would I please shut up now.

At least, he didn't say it quite like that. He said, as he stubbed out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, I'm going to quit smoking. Oh? I asked. Vipassana. There's some hash left. You want some?

Now, considering I was in as austere phase in my life, which included, among other things, no alcohol or cigarettes (the vegging had happened earlier) I can't really remember why I said yes. Perhaps because what it would be like would be not very different from what it already was like, just, maybe, more muffled. Muffled was good.

Yes, I said.

In a very short time, the Rizlas were laid out and S asked me to roll. Now, I can do emptied out cigarettes and suchlike but I've never managed to roll a decent joint with papers. And this was not 'joint' as in singular; this was one gigantic lump of leftover hash that S would throw away in a few days if we didn't finish it now. And it needed three papers.

K declined to participate. I looked at this huge cone of paper and was already beginning to feel giggly. Half an hour later, it was time to leave for Bandra. We were in Kandivli, and were going to go by train. So naturally, I wore the most frivolous skirt and top and three inch heels. And a bag that a child could have snatched from my nearly nerveless hands. But I was filled with deep affection for the world that I knew would return my love several times over. No one would touch my bag.

At the station, no sooner had S got our tickets than he saw a train arriving on the far platform. Come on! he said and we all started to run. Up a flight of stairs, down another one and all along the length of the platform up to the ladies compartment at the end. I don't know why it had to be the one at the end, and not the one in the middle but I was happy to follow where S and K led. Just in time K and I made it and S must have hopped on elsewhere.

All that adrenaline - I could hear my heart beat in my ears and listened as it matched the train's heartbeat. I ought to have been amazed by how I'd run all that way without once tripping over the three inch heels or twisting my ankle. It didn't occur to me to ask why we had to run or why we couldn't have waited for the next train. If this was drifting, it was of a very energetic variety and if I had been on the Titanic I might have yelled into the waves.

At Juice, the girl looked at my hair and started a long discussion with me about what kind of a haircut I wanted. Just take it all off, I said. She looked shocked. I thought I'd said something very witty but choked down the giggles. At some point between her analysis of my hair and K's responses on my behalf, we decided I needed to get a shampoo.

Now, I don't know about anyone else, but shampoos at these places are most uncomfortable. But this time, even with my head jammed into place I didn't want it to end. Heck, I didn't want anything that was happening at any given point in time to end, but was happy enough to move on to the next thing when it happened and didn't want that to end.

Finally, when I sat in the chair looking at the mirror, I was ready to say several interesting things. My hair may have been just one of the things I wanted to talk about, but I cannot be sure because I was at once voluble and sleepy after the shampoo. The girl listened and if that was a small smile quickly suppressed, it didn't matter because I was smiling back at her and we were now complicit. I closed my eyes and let her get on with it. The scissors snipped and snacked at my ears and I could feel every lock of hair as it fell away from my head and curled up on the floor. One time the girl told me to keep my legs uncrossed and evenly placed on the floor so that both sides would be cut evenly. She's a trainee I said to myself, we have to make allowances. I hope to heaven I did not say it aloud. Some haircuts take a very short time, but this was not one of them. It seemed to go on and on and on. Every small change it made to my face was fascinating.

Eventually it was over. The girl blow-dried my hair into a small bouffant and brushed the small bits of hair off my shoulders. I turned around and saw K's and S's faces.

That was when I felt, for the first time in months, deliriously happy.

And the hash may or may not have had something to do with it.