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.
