Hair today, gone tomorrow!

I enter. I look. I want to do the u-turn and scram like there’s no tomorrow. Beat it. Shoo. Thoughts implore me to make it for the door and out, but I stand my ground.

It’s been two years since I’ve been growing my hair and now my locks fall below my shoulder blades (why am I even thinking about blades here). Though I had sported long hair right from my college days, I’ve never grown it long enough to sport a pony tail. This is the first time that I’ve grown my hair this long and it’s an awesome feeling to let your hair down when there’s a breeze blowing or go headbanging when at a rock concert. Now, as I stand inside the salon, I wonder if I’d do the right thing to chop it off. The barber (or the hair stylist, whatever term each of us is familiar with) with his pair of scissors looks more to me like a barbarian wielding a sword. As I wait my turn, a part of me tells me that I’d do better to get the job done tomorrow. However, I was glued to the seat and when my turn came, I moved animatedly to the seat where there’d be some action. I couldn’t disguise the contempt in my voice when I told the barbarian to chop it off. Having told him how I wanted my hair cut, I gasped in horror as the first snips took away huge chunks of me, off me. I simply closed my eyes and relaxed (or at least tried to) even as my ears picked the frenzied hacking and slashing sounds taking place in the vicinity and transmitted them to my brain like some journalist reporting ‘Breaking News’ LIVE. Every time I opened my eyes, I could but feel remorse for the guinea pig reflected by the mirror. Now there was no looking back and when I actually tried, the barbarian rebuked me for behaving like a three year old. After what seemed like an eternity, his job done, I saw him appreciating his work of art like a gardener who had finished working on a hedge. Though I wanted to comment on the same, words failed me; the damage was long done. And somehow, I thought it wouldn’t matter to him. Never before did I think that my face resembled the moon for its shape and now when I looked in the mirror it looked mooner than the moon.

After the tryst with the barbarian, the first person (and not the only one) to express shock and disbelief at my appearance was the one I’d least expected to. My mom.