"How would you like it done, sir?"
"Short, please. Very short."
"A number three, then?"
"Err...I'm not sure. Maybe around this much?" I press the nail of my thumb into the ball of my index finger to indicate a length. Then something inside me says that probably I'd be better understood if I held my thumb and index fingers very close together to use the gap between them to illustrate the length I wanted. Immediately I feel a bit silly. Somehow this doesn't feel the right way to indicate this small a length. Held somewhat far apart it feels alright. Like when you show a kid how small a baby pygmy marmoset can be. But held very close together, the bulging protuberances of your fingers interfere with your sense of linear distance. It feels more like a dancer's mudra than a mundane measurement - or the kind of finger gestures you use to make "deer-shadows" for kids. The shape impresses on your senses more than the distance.
"Short, please. Very short."
"A number three, then?"
"Err...I'm not sure. Maybe around this much?" I press the nail of my thumb into the ball of my index finger to indicate a length. Then something inside me says that probably I'd be better understood if I held my thumb and index fingers very close together to use the gap between them to illustrate the length I wanted. Immediately I feel a bit silly. Somehow this doesn't feel the right way to indicate this small a length. Held somewhat far apart it feels alright. Like when you show a kid how small a baby pygmy marmoset can be. But held very close together, the bulging protuberances of your fingers interfere with your sense of linear distance. It feels more like a dancer's mudra than a mundane measurement - or the kind of finger gestures you use to make "deer-shadows" for kids. The shape impresses on your senses more than the distance.
Anyway Maggie, it seems, has decided that I needed a "number three". I don't think she needed to pay very close attention to my less-than-objective display of measure. We civilized humans have learned to measure, yet have a less than perfect picture of measures in our mind, yet we manage to make do with approximation and intuition. How small did I really want to go? Three quarters of a centimeter? A third of an inch? What contains more information for you, gentle reader? The intersection of cultures where I have to survive requires me to be comfortable with at least two systems of units, and like the bilingual person (which I am too) who keeps shifting between languages, I instinctively tend to translate back and forth between the two. I remember reading in my childhood, long long ago when I was entrenched in my sheltered Bengali upbringing, that people in the West tend to count with just their fingers while we Indians are more efficient and also make use of the joints of our fingers. Is that what suddenly made me revert from one way of using fingers to another? The Japanese even have a word for "spaces between objects". Maybe they have some other way of counting too? "Number three" - what exactly did that mean? I can go back home and look it up on wikipedia. The wonderful thing about the US is the access to exact information. That soothes me so much.
Maggie readies her clips and scissors as I bend my head down in anticipation.
"Hi I am Maggie, what's your name? I'll be your hairdresser today." That's how she introduced herself in that peculiarly American, uber-friendly yet businesslike, way. Maggie is a large middle-aged Afro-American woman who looks somewhat bored with her job. I always thought the name Maggie goes with Chinese women. Is that a subconscious association ? The noodle snack commonly found in India from Nestle called Maggy -> noodles -> Chinese? I could castigate myself for constructing such dumb stereotypes, except that all the Maggies I've met before have been of Chinese origin, with last names like Wu or Li. "All the Maggies"? How many? Two, three, half a dozen? I do need to castigate myself for such stereotypical generalizations.
"Hi I am Maggie, what's your name? I'll be your hairdresser today." That's how she introduced herself in that peculiarly American, uber-friendly yet businesslike, way. Maggie is a large middle-aged Afro-American woman who looks somewhat bored with her job. I always thought the name Maggie goes with Chinese women. Is that a subconscious association ? The noodle snack commonly found in India from Nestle called Maggy -> noodles -> Chinese? I could castigate myself for constructing such dumb stereotypes, except that all the Maggies I've met before have been of Chinese origin, with last names like Wu or Li. "All the Maggies"? How many? Two, three, half a dozen? I do need to castigate myself for such stereotypical generalizations.
I've always visited a barber with mixed feelings. It has always seemed so much like a Sunday morning chore (except that I do this mostly on weekday evenings since being liberated from parental control). You need to wait patiently for your turn, make small talk, submit your scalp to a stranger's razor ( those who 've heard of the "Demon Barber of Flint Street" would appreciate this one), hold your head stiff in all sorts of absurd angles under instructions barked out by the barber, and ritualistically shower and shampoo after the whole deal too! There have been periods where I have worn my hair long to avoid going to a barber's and also those preceding it where I have asked my hair to be cut extremely short so that the next visit wouldn't be due in sometime. Yet I have pleasant associations with barber shops, or "saloons" as they are called in India, too. As a kid, it would be a two-monthly ritual to walk up to the neighborhood barber's with my dad. They would lay out a plank to have me raised on the seat for better reach. That did seem special. My dad would have his hair done too in the next seat. My most favorable impressions of male bonding go back to those five-year old's days, when Baba was still both superman and playmate. My favorite part was the cool spray that would come in the end (to condition hair probably), and it would feel just heavenly on freshly razored skin at the hair lines, enough to raise goosebumps of pleasure on the back of my neck. What I like most about haircuts now is the ten-odd minutes of guiltless near inertness, that they have to offer. I can put my head down and think all sorts of things to occupy me over this time , while some other person works on my scalp. I haven't been to massage parlors and spas - now those would give me some amount of hedonist's guilt. But a haircut is really functionally necessary, right?
Maggie tries to keep up some sort of conversation while her clip is buzzing away on my scalp. I learn that she lives an hour's drive away from our little big campus town, that she is big on football and loves Indian food. The TV is indeed showing some college football, and I'm aware that her eyes keep wandering in that direction. I think of my Indian saloons, the general air of conversational chumminess, the radios playing Rafi's songs from the sixties or cricket if India had a game, the slender men who would assiduously go about their jobs, who could talk politics or cricket depending on the customer's inclinations. For a caste-and-class conscious society like India's, saloons were a strange melting pot-cum-leveller. Nowhere else can I recall upper class men shedding their superior reserve and converse so comfortably with members of the lower class. It's as if the act of submitting your head to someone else's care brought with it a sense of humility. Or that the primate act of grooming forges some sort of primitive bond between hair-owner and hair-dresser.
"How many years have you been here, Sir?", "Do you like living in this town?", "Do you have a girlfriend?" I find it mildly amusing when middle-aged women tend to be flirty in this "auntyji " sort of way. But I am somwehat exasperated at Maggie now for being a bit shoddy. She seems more interested in the football and is taking way too long to finish up. I hurriedly finish answering her with some custom-made replies before going back to my nostalgia-ridden musings of Indian saloons. I remember the saloon in my college hostel at Kanpur where they played old Hindi music and read "Dainik Jagran"s, while the "chhotu" from the neighbroing shack brought in steaming cups of milky tea. I remember being very depressed for long periods, when one day I decided to fill up the dark vacuum with a visit to the barber's. I heard an old man, a canteen worker, chat with the barber - how he has to cycle on dirt tracks for five kilometers everyday from his village to work - a village without proper roads and electricity, merely five kms away from India's posterchild technology institute. The old man said it matter-of-factly with no tone of complaint in his voice. My own problems seemed trifling by comparison. I myself would go cycling past those villages, crossing a bridge on a canal, through village roads frequented by buffalos, and would marvel at the coexistence of modern science labs with filthy segregated Dalit quarters on the margins of villages, all within a two-mile radius. The young barber tended to my hair carefully, taking some sort of pride in his craft. He was both dexterous and enthusiastic. Perhaps there is this humility and pride in the simplest of tasks in smalltown India that the consumerist West has lost? Maggie is nowhere near as patient or skilled. Probably she's just a former bank clerk who's lost her job in the recession and taken to this trade after some hurried custom-made lessons. Shyam from Nankari, District Kanpur Dehat, knows that his is a family of barbers, and styling hair his ancestral trade. He has started as a young boy of twelve and nurtures ambitions of styling the hair of Bombay stars one day. In the world of scarcity and sparse economy, of change that takes ages to seep in, of giant grinding mills of oppression, the human spirit works out a survival strategy. But more than paying encomiums to his "indomitable spirit" and celebrating a photo of his toothy grin in the Time Magazine,(in an article on how Western materialism doesn't necessarily lead to happiness) , it strikes me first, as a privileged Indian, to be thankful that Shyam doesn't take ideas from the protagonist in "The White Tiger",and doesn't slash my throat with his razor.
Maggie tries to keep up some sort of conversation while her clip is buzzing away on my scalp. I learn that she lives an hour's drive away from our little big campus town, that she is big on football and loves Indian food. The TV is indeed showing some college football, and I'm aware that her eyes keep wandering in that direction. I think of my Indian saloons, the general air of conversational chumminess, the radios playing Rafi's songs from the sixties or cricket if India had a game, the slender men who would assiduously go about their jobs, who could talk politics or cricket depending on the customer's inclinations. For a caste-and-class conscious society like India's, saloons were a strange melting pot-cum-leveller. Nowhere else can I recall upper class men shedding their superior reserve and converse so comfortably with members of the lower class. It's as if the act of submitting your head to someone else's care brought with it a sense of humility. Or that the primate act of grooming forges some sort of primitive bond between hair-owner and hair-dresser.
"How many years have you been here, Sir?", "Do you like living in this town?", "Do you have a girlfriend?" I find it mildly amusing when middle-aged women tend to be flirty in this "auntyji " sort of way. But I am somwehat exasperated at Maggie now for being a bit shoddy. She seems more interested in the football and is taking way too long to finish up. I hurriedly finish answering her with some custom-made replies before going back to my nostalgia-ridden musings of Indian saloons. I remember the saloon in my college hostel at Kanpur where they played old Hindi music and read "Dainik Jagran"s, while the "chhotu" from the neighbroing shack brought in steaming cups of milky tea. I remember being very depressed for long periods, when one day I decided to fill up the dark vacuum with a visit to the barber's. I heard an old man, a canteen worker, chat with the barber - how he has to cycle on dirt tracks for five kilometers everyday from his village to work - a village without proper roads and electricity, merely five kms away from India's posterchild technology institute. The old man said it matter-of-factly with no tone of complaint in his voice. My own problems seemed trifling by comparison. I myself would go cycling past those villages, crossing a bridge on a canal, through village roads frequented by buffalos, and would marvel at the coexistence of modern science labs with filthy segregated Dalit quarters on the margins of villages, all within a two-mile radius. The young barber tended to my hair carefully, taking some sort of pride in his craft. He was both dexterous and enthusiastic. Perhaps there is this humility and pride in the simplest of tasks in smalltown India that the consumerist West has lost? Maggie is nowhere near as patient or skilled. Probably she's just a former bank clerk who's lost her job in the recession and taken to this trade after some hurried custom-made lessons. Shyam from Nankari, District Kanpur Dehat, knows that his is a family of barbers, and styling hair his ancestral trade. He has started as a young boy of twelve and nurtures ambitions of styling the hair of Bombay stars one day. In the world of scarcity and sparse economy, of change that takes ages to seep in, of giant grinding mills of oppression, the human spirit works out a survival strategy. But more than paying encomiums to his "indomitable spirit" and celebrating a photo of his toothy grin in the Time Magazine,(in an article on how Western materialism doesn't necessarily lead to happiness) , it strikes me first, as a privileged Indian, to be thankful that Shyam doesn't take ideas from the protagonist in "The White Tiger",and doesn't slash my throat with his razor.
Meanwhile Maggie has finished and grins toothily when I tip her a dollar bill. "Come back again, Sir. I am sure (with your new hairstyle) you'll find a nice girlfriend now," she beams. I smile hoping she'd be right as I step outside into a sunny Florida spring. A new look always makes a man somewhat light-headed.
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