An Indian Haircut…..

I need to do something with my hair!  While living up at Holden Village, a remote Lutheran retreat center in the North Cascades, I saw no reason to cut my hair at all.  I wasn’t going anywhere into the outside world anyway, so I let my freak flag fly and grew it out.  Then I stuffed it up under my hat and kept letting it grow.  After a year we left Holden and went up to Alaska for the rest of the summer.   I saw no reason to cut it then either because, well, it was Alaska and everyone looked like they had a part on the Duck Dynasty TV show.  After I got back to Minnesota I saw an episode and decided I didn’t really like the Duck Dynasty.  I didn’t like the look and I sure didn’t agree with their politics so the long beard and the “almost” pony tail had to go. 

By the time I landed in India my head was still looking pretty sharp.  At least I thought so until the humidity got mixed up in my head and turned curly hair into kink and frizz.  It was ok after a shower, for a few hours, but by the afternoon my head had the look of a used brillo pad.  Most men here, Indians and expats, keep their hair short, so I thought I’d step into Sony’s Hairdresser for a high and tight.

Sony is a few blocks down the road from school.  On the right side of the street is a tall fence that keeps the leopards inside of a natural refuge called Aarey.  At least that is what I hear, and rumor has it that a leopard took a ten year old child last summer, but I am on the human side of the wall so what can go wrong?

There were at least five young men sitting in the shop when I walked into Sony’s air-conditioned shop. None of them were getting a trim so one of them moved out of the barber chair so I could take my seat.  Sony asked what kind of cut I wanted, he understood English, and went to work trimming and cutting.  I watched from the mirror as more and more and more of my hair cascaded down the apron onto the floor and it began to appear as though I was getting the marine jarhead look that I have not seen on my head since the last inspection, on the last day, in the US Army, in 1974. 

The next part of Sony’s haircut routine is a hot shave.  He understands English well enough so I was not worried about losing half of my beard.  I lost half of a mustache in an Egyptian barber shop a few years ago.  The Abdul who cut my hair did not speak English, and although I thought I had mimed a trim correctly, he cut off the mustache before I had time to protest.  Mustache gone, take the beard, too.  Sony, on the other hand, got it right and the hot shave felt pretty good.  Oh… and the razor was right out of the package.  No nicks, no blood poisoning.

The best part of the one hour service was the massage.  He started with the scalp, the face, and worked his way down my neck, back, and arms all the way to the tips of my fingers.  He snapped my knuckles and moved up the way he came down.

When he got back to the scalp he stopped and put on an electronic vibrator.  This is when things got really interesting.  He started with my scalp again and started moving down.

When he got as far as my ears he stopped,  stuck a vibrating fore finger inside, and pushed until it felt like he had gotten as far as his third knuckle.  I know that this is not possible, but it felt like he had gotten pretty deep, and I swear if he had stuck his other finger into the other ear the fingertips would probably be touching each other.  None of this is a pleasant thought, but it felt great!

When my hair grows out again I will be sure to go back to Sony for another four hundred rupee full treatment.