HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW!

I had a hair cut yesterday! Yippeee! Hoo hoo! Hip Hip! (Cartwheels, cheerleaders kicking heels in the air etc.) I know what you are thinking, have you gone mad? It’s a hair cut, that’s all. That’s all?! What do you know about hair cuts? Let me introduce you to my hair.

It’s been my constant companion for the last 20 years or so (I remember my Mom got my head shaved when I was in Class I, some long overdue religious obligation (God must be a taxonomist on the sly, all that hair would serve well as a stuffing!). It used to fall in a hugely messy way till my hips, meaning it was nearly two and half feet long! This was hair my mother had nourished for twenty long years in the time honoured traditions of Tamilnadu. It was subject to weekly tribulations with long hours spent massaging, cleaning, scrubbing with assorted herbs and washing it, presumably in order to make it behave. But, my hair – it was admirably resistant to such attempts. I mean, I haven’t seen too many things in life, that made my mother tired, but my hair did, in a way I haven’t ever been able to replicate. It was just solid and stubborn in its inherent frizziness. I did admire my hair for its attitude to my mom, but what irked me all these long years was a similar attitude to poor me. I mean, I had given it space, the freedom to grow as it pleased (which it anyways did, I just gracefully acquiesced) and what did I get as reward? Tangles, hairloads of them! The kind which would break a wide toothed comb, the kind that refused to bow to the deepest conditioners, thickest finishing creams. I mean, I never subjected my hair to the tyrannies my Mom did, but when the bottle passed from Mom to me, my hair was just as unyielding. It was still 2.5 feet long, thick enough that I couldn’t gather it together in a nice, graceful motion that many of my friends had perfected, and FRIZZY!

I struggled gamely, through four years of undergraduate study with my braid trailing me (not being Rapunzel, I didn’t find a knight whom I could haul up to my dingy little hostel room – bed, me and little else!). My morning hair-combing ritual went like “Ouch!”, “Oh No, I’ve lost the strands again! “, “Aaargh!” “Goddamned hair, who wants this much of it?” Of course, most of it was interspersed with many, ahem, unprintable words. I would run the comb through exactly 2 cms of my hair, before it encountered a huge knot – what ensued was a battle for (comb) tooth and knot, invariably resulting in knot being dishonourably discharged from my scalp. It was violation of any human-body parts’ rights my hair might have had – but I was waging war and like Lochinvar, I figured all is fair, with comb and hair.

Then came the momentous occasion when I decided to do my post-graduation in London (Yes! You read it right, this is London, UK not London, somewhere-in-the-wide-expanses of Mid-western USA). Giving in to my persistent and persuasive efforts, my Mom decided I could get my hair shortened in order to manage it better “all alone” in the UK. After much deliberation, the length of hair that could be “sacrificed” at the altar of modernity was decided as (hold your breath!) 2 inches. The sacrifice was performed at one of the best beauty salons (or parlours, what’s the difference?) in Madras with my very anxious and (so) meddlesome Mother supervising it (she was actually crying when the scissors made contact with hair).

Since, then thanks to the rather malefic effect of Bad Bad London, I have had multiple hair-cuts of successively shorter hair. But, much like me, it retains an inherent fuzziness that’s still untameable and gives me a very “charmingly” hassled (even when I’m not, which is anyway rare) look all the time.