The creak of our gate alerted Amma to my return from the barber shop. When she saw me, she wordlessly took my hand, opened the gate and dragged me back to S V Saloon.
I had been given one clear instruction before leaving: “Stylish-a oru crop irakunum”. “There should be one stylish crop on your head.” Clearly, I had failed that mission.
I never understood why she was so insistent on me having a stylish haircut. It was well known I was headed to the same fate as Appa – a shining bald head.
“Hereditty,” I was told by an unusually merry Amma one Sunday while she oiled my head. How could such a funny word cause permanent hairfall? The science was beyond me. But I had begun to slowly remove myself from the desire to control my hair’s fate.
Amma, not one to give up, would religiously malish my head with full strength, as though to challenge the hair, “How you’ll fall now I’ll also see.”
Venkatarama’s saloon
I did remember this malish when I stood outside the glass door of the saloon, and rehearsed the dialogue Amma had given me. “Sir ondu style-ag iro haircut madi, nim thara crop irbeku.”
“Sir, do one stylish haircut please. Like yours, it should have a crop.”
I continued murmuring as I went in.
But all three chairs were occupied, and our man Venkatarama was busy lathering my bad-tempered neighbour, Doctor Uncle, with a generous serving of cloud-white shaving cream. He was relaxed and peaceful, his permanent frown seemed to have left his forehead.
Venkatarama was the only barber in Yelahanka New Town at the time. There might have been others, but if somebody said “cutting shop”, everyone knew they meant the silver door-ed S V Saloon.
The structure was not remarkable, but our barber was. He had hair that looked like many swirls of ice cream had been stacked horizontally above his forehead. A neat partition on the left side of his head.
Many years later, I realised that this was among a few saloons that didn’t have pretty white guys as posterboys for the shop. He was the only advert he needed.
First crush
As I waited for Doctor Uncle to finish his shave, I sat down on the wooden bench behind the chairs. The mastheads of various newspapers stared back at me. I was a boy of nine so my interests were usually reserved for the comics in the back pages. But that day I couldn’t move past one of the first pages.
In front of my eyes, there suddenly appeared a large splash of a woman clad in a bikini, a blue top, and striped underwear. With her left thumb she seemed to be gliding the underwear over the hip as though it was an obstacle. Like it didn’t belong on her body.
I drank up that image in a large gulp and noted the words, “Into the Blue”, in large white block letters hovering nearby. (Years later, after the internet came home, I would type those words into the search bar and find out that my first newspaper crush was called Jessica Alba.)
A tiny click from one of the chairs is all it took to ditch the newspaper. I covered my tracks well so only Jessica Alba’s face was peeking out. I didn’t have it in my heart to completely hide her from view.
Mr Venkatarama tapped me on my arm to break my trance.
I walked and raised my hands up obediently so he could lift me and place me on the wooden plank they usually put across the handrests for children. This was done so our little heights didn’t make him hunch over.
He then sprayed water from his blue spritzer, and began cutting my hair. Lulled by the crisp sound of his sharp scissor – it escapes all attempts at onomatopoeia – I almost fell asleep, Jessica Alba safely burned into my mind’s eye. It didn’t even occur to me to evaluate my haircut. I simply raised my hands up again and was delivered to the floor after he was done.
But, as Amma’s green bangled hand clinked with each step back to the saloon, I was cursing myself for having let Jessica Alba’s face peek out and distract me. My desperate hope was that the reason for my forgetfulness would never come out. I did not want to (shudder) become another victim of the newspaper’s temptations like Arjun.
The Jennifer trap
Nobody actually saw the infamous newspaper event except my friend Vikram. He lived four houses down from our house, and was a big part of life in 10th ‘B’ cross. He was the sharpest among us. Amma believed this was because he played chess.
One day, a seed of suspicion was planted in his mind when his younger brother, Manoj, took three newspapers from the pile of old papers.
The elder brother knew that way lay temptation. He had himself thoroughly savoured a photo of an almost topless Jenifer Aniston wearing only a tie in one of the papers Manoj held in his hand.
Manoj, it seems, was prepared for scrutiny. “We are going to paint and we don’t want to dirty the floor, Arjun’s mother only asked me to bring’.
That last detail defanged our Vikram. This was a mummy-approved activity. More importantly it was an Arjun activity. Every mother wanted her son to be Arjun’s friend in the neighbourhood. So he let him go.
Come lunch time, Vikram was sent to fetch Manoj. As he entered Arjun’s gate, he found the door ajar. A million probabilities raced through his mind, but an ajar door must always be investigated. He walked in quietly and the following scene unfolded before him.
Manoj had spread out the newspaper on the floor and was actually painting. A tree or some such thing. Vikram suffered a pang of guilt at having doubted his brother. They are, after all, just a pair of five-year-olds.
Arjun, however, had laid out the newspaper on the bed and it would seem was circling something small with his index finger.
Craning his neck, Vikram realised that Arjun had found the formally but barely dressed woman and was violating the image by circling her breasts like so — circle circle circle.
Vikram stifled a gasp. That’s when Manoj got up to let out a sound of surprise. “What are you doing da?” he asked, stretching each word with righteous indignation.
“Ey please da Manoj, please don’t tell anyone da,” begged Arjun, finger still on the paper.
In a moment of camaraderie, Manoj brought out his index finger and placed it on the other side of Ms Jenifer Aniston’s tie, and reassured his friend with the words: “I too likeee”.
That very evening, they were both rechristened with the word “newspaper” by Vikram.
From then on, all it took to shut Manoj and Arjun up in any argument, or annoyance was a mere mention of the word “newspaper” and circling the air with his index finger.
What ra, Pranava?
For sure, I didn’t want anyone to have that kind of power over me. So when Amma pulled me into S V Saloon, and shouted out to Mr Venkataraman, my first response was to scramble the newspapers to hide Jessica Alba’s face. Amma looked at me slightly confused, but she was back on track quickly.
“What the hell have you done ri, huh?” she asked him.
Mr Venkataraman hurried to inspect my head, worried about having inadvertently cut me. Once that worry eased, he slowed down, as though now inspecting a piece of art he had produced. “Nothing has happened, no? He is looking smart. What is the issue madam?”
Amma was furious. “What did I ask for and what have you done?”
“Neev mathura hero thara cut madkondthira, nam magan ge mathura uncle thara madthira al ri,” she asked, raising her voice. “You cut your hair like a hero, but for my son you cut it in some uncle style!”
Everyone in the saloon was looking at poor Mr Venkataraman who had ignored everything else Amma has said and is lingering on “hero”. Bugger was fully blushing. He chuckled as he rubbed the back of his head, “Seri seri madam, bedi, you just need to tell me what kind of haircut you want.”
Amma looked at me, expecting me to produce the rehearsed line but only a few puffs of air bubbled out. She looked at me as though those little puffs were insults to her entire family line.
I looked at Amma hopelessly. There was pin drop silence in SV Saloon, not a scissor dared to scissor. She slapped me as though it were a mnemonic. It did not work, I just began to cry.
Mr Venkatraman, god bless his soul, came to my rescue. “For this and all, why are you hitting the child madam?” he said and picked me up, displacing a teenager from his seat. “See now how I’ll cut,” he said.
He began moving about the chair with an almost mechanical ease. There were no conversations at S V Saloon that evening, everyone aware of Amma standing outside with her arms crossed, as though admonishing everyone in the saloon.
Only the crispiness of the scissor and the occasional water spray was heard. I had never experienced a silent saloon, and never have since.
I cried quietly, and cried even more when I realized that even at this serious moment Jessica Alba had not left my mind. What ra, Pranava? After he is done, Mr Venkataraman neatly parted my hair to reveal a line of scalp that is bone white.
“Hmm,” Amma huffed a huff of approval from outside.
I sniffled as we left the S V Saloon. “Enough,” said Amma, with a finality I dare not cross.
To make up for the saloon incident, we stopped at Sri Manjunath Bajjis. Among the plastic chairs strewn about, I spied Doctor Uncle's newly shaved face reading the newspaper and relishing a menshinkai bajji. And what item of news was the good doctor consuming? I’ll tell you only this: I also joined the doctor, unbeknownst to him, to consume the same page when I received a hard thwack on the back of my head. “Tharle,” she said and chuckled. “Pervert”.
Pranava is a Bengaluru-based teacher and writer. They love to take long walks, drink chai in new places, and eavesdrop on conversations in the hopes of stealing a line to put in a short story.
