Hair and gone

I’m very selective about who cuts my hair. When for the first time I got my hair cut (being a Sikh, I had long hair once) monthly visits to a barber became a hassle because I walk with crutches. My elder sister decided to become my hairdresser, and she cut my hair till she got married. Since she wasn’t trained in the art, my various hairstyles used to perplex many people. That was a squally period of my life and my hairstyle was the last thing that could bother me or the people who were extremely close to me.

I started visiting the barber when I joined college. It saved me one way of walk because while coming home from college, I could take the auto rickshaw to the barber shop. I would ask the driver if he could wait. If yes, well and good, otherwise I could always walk home from the market. That was the central market of Nauroji Nagar. There used to be a barber there called Prem Nath. The matter was different if he was not there, otherwise, if he was busy, I would insist on waiting for him despite the other barbers in the shop sitting idle. Of course this perturbed the other barbers but once I began liking a particular barber (I mean, the way he cut my hair) I changed him with great discomfort. People around me often attributed my this attachment to my barber to some weird fetish of mine.

The same happened with the barber in the Green Park hair salon; his name was Faqruddin. When we moved to Sarita Vihar, my biggest loss was Prem Nath and soon I could make braids of my hair — they were so long. Once, I don’t remember why, I had to go to the Yusuf Sarai market and on my way I noticed a salon that didn’t have stairs. My seventies hairstyle — my hair falling on my shoulders and eyebrows, etc. — had really begun to get me down. So as soon as I sat on the chair, I told the barber to cut them as short as possible. The crew cut he orchestrated was simply thrilling and henceforth commenced our 2-year long association. Faqruddin, unlike Prem Nath, reciprocated my preference for him and he rarely kept me waiting whenever I went there, and I too used to cover a distance of 40-50 kilometers (by then we had a car with a driver) just to have a hair cut. One day he disappeared and nobody in the salon had a clue where he had gone.

Then we found a shop in Sarita Vihar itself and the owner agreed to send the barber to our house. This time it was a barber called Raju. He often complained that when he visited our house he missed the customers at the shop (although most barbers are hired by the shops, I think they also receive tips from regular customers), so I started calling him on Tuesdays when most barber shops are closed due to some religious issue. I liked the way Raju cut my hair and my special affinity to him, and his certain way of talking earned him the nick name of “Raju Darling” in our household — of course he never knew that. Raju believed in maintaining multiple streams of income so he had many clients — mostly ladies — outside of his barber shop employment. Tuesday used to be (hopefully, still is) the most profitable day for him because that day he visited many of his clients for cutting, trimming, coloring, and all sorts of beauty related facial and hairy contrivances. His industriousness didn’t just stop at that. From some export factory he also use to fetch garments to sew during night, with the help of his wife. I really liked the guy for his entrepreneurial zeal.

His visits to my abode and hence his access to my cranium ended with we moving to NOIDA. He came once, but then he was untraceable, and hence, the current state of my hair.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, my elder sister used to cut my hair. So I thought, if she could do it, why could not my wife, Alka . Even if together we couldn’t achieve the right kind of result, anything was better than having Amitabh Bachchan’s hairstyle. After a persuasion of an entire week, last night she relented and at 3:30 in the morning we began our hair-raising, umm…hair-erasing foray. She first employed the conventional method, that is, using the comb and the only rusted pair of scissors we have. For good 20 minutes, everything looked neat and for a while I even thought we could give Raju a run for his money. Then Vasu, who was crawling around on the floor, protested loudly for being neglected for such a long time and Alka had to pick her up. This gave yours truly a chance to play with the scissors and within 5 minutes my hair looked like, as Alka put it later on, as if a crow had pecked at it to its heart’s content. So much skin was visible that we decided to do away with all the content. For that Alka happily used my Philips electric shaver. Although in between we had to recharge the battery, I went to take bath, for the first time in life, with no hair on my head.

I think this proved to be a blessing in disguise because I’m really liking my new hairless look. Although Alka says I look like a WWE wrestler I think this eliminates for ever the trouble of seeking different barbers and getting used to them. Every 15 days now I can shave my head. I even like the feel of air upon it.