Hence to a little barber’s shop buried in the small bazaar — a little junction of scattered chai shops,fried tiffin and bhaji vendors, small painted temples,vegetable stalls, flower sellers, broken roads with cavernous potholes and cloth merchants. I stand my rusted mountain bike, outside the tiny peeling green wooden doors of the barber’s shop.
Damaged signs saying ‘wel..ome’ and ‘Sa..oon’ invite clients into the tiny space, down a couple of steps. There is barely enough room to turn around but somehow inside the owner has managed to fit two angled mirrors to the ceiling, a short wooden bench for waiting customers and two mighty swivel ancient barbers chairs with wooden arms. Next door is a shop selling baby chickens, aptly named ‘Baby Proteins’, the name proudly displayed in big, bold coloured letters above the front of the shop.
I needed a haircut badly and for some reason my eyes picked this small place instantly. I know now that the barber has been in business for over 50 years or more in the same tiny premises and I note as the mind does that his hair was as grey as mine and a kind of empathy is created by the certainty of ensuing decay to everything material. Today, the space appears gloomy and unlit without the barber.
There is another man present eating his mid morning tiffin on a bench. This man looks a lot like the owner and yet different with jet black hair. With gravy running down his finger, he is wolfing down idli and sambhar from a banana leaf.
A little Tamil and a few words of English are enough to communicate. There is convivial head waggling and wide grinning and I am graciously shown to my place in the second high revolving chair. In front and above me, and at 45 degrees to the ceiling, the two large heavy wooden framed mirrors sit silently observing as they must have done for decades, and reflecting upon the passage of time and events. The fan is plugged into the only electrical socket visible in the shop. I finally realise as I peer in the mirror that the owner has infact dyed his hair, an intense black since my last visit. He carries on eating his tiffin from his banana leaf.
A tall, thin and handsome man, with a bright vermillion red paste spot with two grains of uncooked rice right between his eyebrows is the new ‘cutter’ and begins to attend to me as I observe the theatre of life around me. The ‘cutter’ carefully takes a large, almost white crumpled cotton sheet and shakes it and wraps it carefully and with almost ceremonial precision around my neck, back and chest, over my legs. He then puffs large amounts of talcum powder down the back of my neck.
This of course immediately creates a huge cloud of white talc. Haircutting here is a very slow process, honed by years of practice, a kind of Karma Yoga in every way, involving very big combs, and big, long, dark grey iron scissors. The latter go ‘snip, snip’ with delicate certainty at the hair almost as if a garden hedge was being sheared. The whirring of the fan made sure that all the hair being sharply snipped from my head is being dispersed all around the room, along with the talc, and considerable amounts seem to be hovering around the owner and presumably settling in his tiffin. He still appears oblivious to it all.
As I, the strange foreigner in this drama, peer at the mirror, I begin to realise that something is going wrong with my hair cut. On my first visit I had to draw the length of the hair to indicate clearly how much growth I wanted but now there is little or no hair left to cover the scalp. To call it stubble would be an exaggeration, but its too late now. I am nearly bald.
The owner is now done with his lunch. I comment that my head now looks like a white coconut and this comment causes immense mirth. Hysteria prevails amongst the four of us and a wrinkled old woman pokes her head through the small green door from the street to see what is causing the commotion. Her face also breaks in a huge grin.
A special ‘American’ machine is produced and begins to purr and grind it way across the back of my neck and round my ears with precision. All the small bits of hair from the trim are now of course falling directly down my neck into my shirt along with the coagulated, gooey lumps of talc. Long empty, dusty cologne bottles on the counter tell tales of days long gone, when things were different, when there was silver on the mirrors and the special cutting machine was new.
Nothing is permanent. Everything changes. But my hair will always grow back. I will be
back again in a few weeks to my Chennai Coiffure.