Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Mirror, mirror......




If your bathroom mirror always looks clean, it means that there are no women staying with you. Those who doubt the credibility of this fact are recommended to check before you say nay. However I must also consider a few nit-picky house keepers who would not let the mirrors stay like that. For such households, an inspection of a hair brush (especially the cylindrical ones) would reveal it all. A few such revelations were on the bed, belly up and staring back at me that day, as I looked down in disbelief.

I was losing hair, I had dandruff and my comb was being used by the two ladies at home; a daughter who had straight hair and her mother who had wavy hair. In spite of the assortment of hair brushes and combs that were strewn all around the house, these two ladies had some sort of devilish plan wherein they would always use MY comb. Afterwards the comb was discarded with all that long/wavy/straight hair entangled around it like a grizzly puzzle.

That day, I spent more than 15minutes trying to get that comb looking like what it was supposed to. It was at the end of that distasteful job that I discovered the aforementioned facts. Soon, I was convinced that the hair loss was due to the dandruff which of course came from the women who used my comb. Trying to convince them not to use my comb was not even a thought. I knew by then that you can’t keep a comb away from a woman for too long. That was against the laws of nature. I had to find another way.

The coward in me who hated confrontations with hair-brush-wielding women found a peaceful way to tackle the dandruff problem. The salvation was always an obvious choice right across the street. The saloon was open till midnight. I walked in. One of the barbers looked at me and smiled like a vampire who spotted a teen-some virgin.

After finding out how much it would cost to get rid of my problem, I was seated on one of those familiar steel chairs. The coiffeur nudged the chair with his knee and it swung towards the mirror and I found myself looking at myself. I noticed that the mirror didn’t look very clean. But that didn’t really matter. It wasn’t my mirror.

The coiffeur inspected my scalp and reacted like a guy who stepped on poop. He made a face and I felt insulted. I agreed to undergo a 30 minute special treatment. The first part included a shampoo wash. Afterwards he proceeded to massage in huge amounts of smelly oil. Then came approximately 2 pounds of hair cream. After the first cream, came a second coat of cream. It made my head look small and my over-sized ears look bigger in the mirror. I thought I heard the guy on the next chair smirk. I looked at me again. I looked like a big ice cream cone with eyes. And then, it started to itch. I grabbed the arms of the chair and clawed the steel.

The coiffeur disappeared and soon came back pushing something that looked like a plastic helmet on a stick. Then he propped it up with the helmet sitting a few inches above my head. The next 10 minutes were spent steaming my scalp which had the world’s largest itch ravaging through it. I grit my teeth and clawed more steel.

What he brought out next filled my heart with happiness. It looked like a giant hair-brush fixed on a machine. Those rubbery spikes were meant to massage my scalp and clean it off all the dead tissue. The mere thought of that send goose bumps through me! I got ready for the ultimate head massage! He plugged it in, flipped the switch and the whole building fell into darkness.

There was complete silence for a few seconds. Then the hailstorm of abuses started. All of them were from Kerala and no one can beat us when it comes to belting it out.

I heard someone asking my coiffeur whether he had ever gone to a school. The reason was revealed to me slowly. The machine was faulty and there was a note left on it warning the users. My beloved barber had either not seen it or chose to ignore it. The circuit breaker had tripped, I still had 2 pounds of cream on my head and the itch had returned with its cousins. Plus, I could feel the condensed steam slowly flowing down under my collar, onto my back and proceeding further down.

After 5 minutes of darkness, dampness and desperation, the lights came back. But the machine was not going to be used. There was no spare machine as well.

My beloved barber found a small round plastic comb and started to massage my scalp. He looked irritated. His hands were sapped of all energy. The massage was far away from what I had hoped it to be. Once he was done with it, a lot earlier than I thought, I felt the water that had flowed under my collar had hit a flat surface and had started moving horizontally. The itch had relocated.

When I walked back home, I covered the big damp patch on my posterior with an old newspaper.

My bathroom mirror is dirty as usual. The comb is still full of long/straight/wavy hair. The dandruff is back. It can stay. 

The Great Plan

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