The Haircut
by Preeth Ganapathy
‘Give me
a haircut,’ my husband told me one fine,
sunny morning. ‘Salons are closed because of
the lockdown and this is getting unmanageable.’
He pointed to his unruly mop of hair.
I could not,
for the life of me, imagine myself ploughing
through a mass of hair, causing stray wisps to
fall on the ground like confetti. But, I was glad
my husband felt that I could don yet another hat.
Only, I hoped that he would not need one, after
the haircut.
I scoured
every nook and cranny of the house to find a pair
of scissors and comb, most suited for the
assignment. I got right down to business with the
lofty aim of being a successful novice
hairdresser. My husband sat on a grey plastic
chair. I threw a sparkling white towel around his
bare shoulders.
’Let it
not look like as if a starving rat feasted on my
hair while I was asleep,’ he said as if
doling out a software requirement.
‘Fret not.
You are in safe hands,’ I assured him, just
the way my hairdresser did when handling a
difficult client. ‘Take a deep breath and
enjoy,’ I added for good measure.
I uttered a
small prayer as I armed myself with scissors in
my right hand and comb in my left. I felt
like a warrior about to enter the battlefield
with a bow and arrow. ‘Lift the strands of
hair with the comb and cut only the excess,’
my husband offered some last minute words of
advice.
I began
snipping the hair at the back of his head. Our
toddler son perched atop his stool, watched from
the sidelines in uncharacteristic silence. After
a few iterations, I was satisfied that the back
was trimmed short and directed my energies
towards the sides. ‘You have to trim both
sides equally short, so they don’t look
uneven,’ my husband voiced his opinion.
‘Please
don’t tell me how to do it,’ I said
with mock irritation. Minutes later, our son,
decided that he had had enough of watching the
game like a passive observer. He probably thought
that he should help his mother and began
alighting from the stool.
‘Don’t
come down, there are cockroaches all over,’
I said, afraid that he might start sampling the
fallen hair on the marble floor.
‘Play
with your Spiderman toy in the room,’ my
husband said, at the same time.
Our son
decided to get back on his stool and we heaved a
sigh of relief. He continued to sit there till
the end of the messy hair cutting business.
‘There’s
more hair on the floor than on my head,’ my
husband said, peering into the mirror that I held
out in front of him. ’But, great job,’
he said immediately when he sensed that I was
about spew invisible fireballs of anger from my
nostrils.
At that moment,
our son said ,‘Papa looking good,’ -
his first full sentence and my joy knew no bounds.
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