“Rihana! Rihana!”…called out the gaudily clad and made, desperate-to-look-young Gujju aunty opposite me, and launched into an expert diatribe on how exactly she wanted her hair done. A few murmurs later it was decided that the tails needed to be shorter by a couple of millimeters. She confirmed with an emphatic “yeah…we’ll need that much anyway”. Next to her a young girl in her teens was stealing furtive glances at a hunk sitting next to me, getting his eyebrows done. They had both held their positions since I had arrived, through an hour long waiting period and the inexplicable microscopic chiseling away my “personal service executive” (PSE) , decided to do on my non-existent hair which had already taken another hour (they’d still be there when I leave after a good 2 hour long haircut).
“Sir…we’d need to give it 20 minutes of steam, so it sets in well”, quipped the PSE (wtf??). So I was left there, unable to move my head, with a bowl inverted over my head and hot steam rising through, a position I’d never put my enemies through, all because I had made the horrible mistake of walking into a branded “saloon”, to get a haircut.
It used to be easier, this hair-cut stuff. Every month, on a pre-fixed ritualistic Sunday, Papa would take me to our good old middle-class Nai. His massive metallic chair would get adjusted for our puny heights with a wooden plank kept over the armrests. The holy process would then begin with the mandatory official warning: “Don’t move your head or you’d get your ear chopped off”. Invariably though, since 9 AM used to be the screening time of “He-Man”, our heads would involuntarily home in on the TV. Papa meanwhile would share every single sheet of his newspaper with all other parents waiting for their children. With the efficiency of an assembly line, the baby-cut was churned out and the Nai would move on to his next victim. Not before, however, he’d had an opportunity to whip out his ustara or razor, and wipe out the remaining traces of out of shape hairlines. The sole Old-Spice after-shaves weren’t meant for children as Alum bars would be used to clean up any mess. The blade even didn’t demand changing…these were times before we knew of AIDS.
In my younger days I used to think that Nais were the smartest people around. You could enter a “Nanhe Hair-Artiste” shop and strike a conversation on any given topic in the world and find the Nai equal to it. They were also infamous in the north for being a cunning and wicked caste. And not without merit was this dubious title gained. While they might not have been necessarily wicked, Nais were the best diplomats you could have found anywhere. You’ve got to be if you have to smile at the faces of all kinds of people, bad-mouth every single one of them same people and still be in everybody’s good books! A smart comment about how good your hair look here and there, and a strategically placed “Kyo kya facial karwaya tha na aapne? Kyo Chhotu…chamak nahin rahi hai chhore ki skin aaj?(So…did you get a skin treatment…it seems to be shining)”, and the poor fellow had fallen into the trap of the great schemer.
And then behind your back, your darkest secrets would be chopped down with slurps of a hot tea, with their other “shining skin” clients. They were after-all the male equivalent of dais. The single most important source of gossip and the goings-on in the society. Every time Papa and I went for our Sunday appointments, Papa would find himself amidst a rich (for it was so detailed and seemingly well-informed) conversation on whose business was about to go bankrupt and who was going to be raided next by the income-tax department.
While I found it mildly demeaning in the days of old, it was perhaps the need which had made them seem like the scheming lot. Whatever they were, it was a promise of a fully entertaining 30 minutes at the Nai’s which made you go again and again to that charming little bugger on a chilly - sunny Sunday winter morning. Somehow, a 3 hour long, Rs. 900/- worth hair-cut just doesn’t cut it, no pun intended. The boring plastic smiles of “PSEs” who I am sure must take one look at us and think, “Come in you moron…you must be one…if you think I can make that look any good”. The air-conditioned room full of girlie perfumes of all those hair-styling products just can’t replace the whiff of early morning tea and smell of fresh newspaper. And the 50 year old 20-something Gujju aunty is no replacement for the goofy kid next door, who’d be holding those ancient hair-style charts and picking the good old wedge-cut!
“So sir, how would you like your hair done today? I think I would leave it tailing at the back and look for slopes on the side” chimed my PSE, in spite of having my whole of 3 cm long hair right in front of his eyes.
“Just get it short”, I said.
“Just get it short”, I said.
No comments:
Post a Comment