Baal Baal Dekho
OR
How the Hair Gel Came into the Picture.
Nupur's hair was a major bone of contention between Orindam and his daughter. Orindam liked it long and straight and shiny, like his Sunita's - for in just about every way except her attitude Nupur had taken after her mother. Nupur on the other hand had only one criteria for her hairstyle: whatever her father didn't like was perfect enough for her.
Onu had never followed her on a visit to the parlour before, but this time she insisted. Of late she'd been getting incredibly picky about what she wore and how she looked, and Onu wondered if there was a boy somewhere in the horizon.
If there IS, don't depend on me to help you get him! As it was he was beginning to develop a bit of a crush on her himself. He hoped it stayed a crush and didn't get any further, he'd had enough of that kind of trouble already. Half of this funny feeling in the pit of his stomach must have been because they were under the same roof and with each other half the time anyway.
Pasand and pyar, that was his mantra these days. Pasand is what you're going to be having now, pyar is...
Let's not even go there, he'd said to himself.
"Maybe I should get it streaked this time," Nupur said, smirking, "that's give Pops a nightmare to surpass all nightmares."
As if you're not a nightmare all by yourself, Onu added nastily, and then regretted the thought. Who was Nupur harming, anyway, by experimenting with her hair? Except for herself.
"Why do you need to put your hair through all that when at the end of the day you're slogging to maintain it?" Onu replied instead. "It would be nice seeing you do something that doesn't have you secretly sobbing over the sight of half your hair on the floor, you know."
The look on Nupur's face was more shock than irritation, and in seconds she returned to the poker-face mode he now knew her so well for. It was as if Onu had hit a nerve.
Maybe it was a good thing to see that side of her again. This new Nupur, who was attentive and sometimes tender and terrifically conscious of the way she looked (she stopped wearing shorts in the house altogether, opting for pajamas instead. The last time he saw her wearing shorts she had looked uncommonly shy). She was getting under his skin and he wasn't enjoying a single moment of it.
Oh, what he would give to have their old prickly sometimes-I-feel-like-playing-soccer-with-your-head relationship back. Living in the same house with her was now a royal pain and the worst part was that he couldn't even blame her for it.
The parlour was one of the lesser known ones in the neighbourhood, and Nupur's favourite stylist was a German woman with a bit of an overbite, a very deep voice and - according to Nupur - amazingly soft hands. No matter how ridiculous the hairstyle was, Nupur always considered her the salt of the earth for the way she massaged her scalp.
Adelaide, the hairdresser, always started the regimen with a thorough hair-wash that could go on for twenty minutes: the longer it went the better. Her fingers were nimble and pressed gently over soft spots on the scalp in a way that would make Nupur hum blissfully. Onu couldn't blame her - how many times had he enjoyed that now-forgotten privilege? When was the last time Laboni Ma or his mother had rubbed oil into his scalp to make his hair as thick as it was? When was the last time he felt soft hands running through his hair, teasing out the stress and the pain from soft-spots he hadn't even known existed? When had the familiarity of those hands last lulled him to a deep sleep?
He looked at his hair in the large mirror in front of him, noting how lank and limp they'd become. He hadn't bothered much with his hair...all his life his hair was something the women handled, and now his Spartan treatment of shampoo-thrice-a-week reduced it to nothing more than a rough dark mop.
"Need a haircut, squirt?" the Irish redhead behind Adelaide asked him, cocking an eyebrow at the bird's nest on his head. "Or a spot o' gel to make it shine?"
He wasn't even listening. Eventually the redhead shook her head and went inside.
Funny enough, it wasn't even his mothers who had given him that last blessed massage...his most blissful one to date...
It had been another day of Ramlila practice followed by another hour of serving pizzas. Given the ice-creams he'd been caught eating on a dare, that hour ended up being spent more in washing the dishes till his fingers were red. By the end of the day his head had been pounding so much he'd landed up in Laboni Ma's house rather than his own.
In a heartbeat, Taani, who was alone in the house for once, had got him to sit down on the floor and brought with her a bottle of amla kesh thel to put on his head.
"Mmph...it's okay...no need..." he'd protested weakly.
"My foot!" Taani had said, a funny look on her face, a sad, wistful look...like she knew something he didn't yet, "you can't even speak straight! Out of your 99 kgs weight, 80 percent goes for that fat head alone!"
Despite his protests she'd banged the bottle on the table, yanked his head downwards and ordered him to keep quiet.
Taani had definitely learned to do a good massage from both his mothers. She knew exactly how to spot an area that was tight with nerves and how to smoothen them. But half of it wasn't really about what she'd learned from them: it was her intuition...that innate instinct that told her how best to comfort people.
He couldn't recall the hours - or had they been minutes? - that had passed as she rubbed her fingers through his scalp...because for a moment it was as if he was suspended in space and floating...as if there was nothing to worry about, nothing to care for...as if the fingers laying gentle pressure over a spot that had throbbed a lifetime ago, seemed to be the only thing that mattered...
The world was at once white and black and filled with colour, and out of that colour emerged a face...a face framed by hqir as black and thick as his own...
When he had finally woken up, he'd found his head resting silently on Taani's lap, her skirt soaked in oil. She smiled sleepily back at him and told him it was time for his bath.
"Look at what I've done to your skirt," he'd said mournfully. Great job, Geela Ganguly, he'd scolded himself, you're buying her a dress...doesn't mean you spoil the ones she already has!
"Oh well," Taani quipped, "we should be greatful it's not Mahabharat we're performing then."
Onu wasn't entirely headache-free enough to get the joke, and it showed. Taani rolled her eyes.
"If I were Karna and you were Parasuram you would have cursed me into becoming an insect."
"No I wouldn't," Onu replied, "I'd have been way nicer than that. I'd have cursed you to die under a hailstorm of roshogollahs instead. And if that's not a sympathetic curse I don't know what is!"
Two years...two years and all he had of her were memories of her touch. Nupur could purr blissfully in the comfort of Adelaide's ministrations, but strangely - in a parlour of all places - Onu started feeling incredibly homesick.
It was hard to forget. She was hard to forget.
And somewhere in this secluded corner of a parlour that smelled of gels and creams and shampoo, he could catch the scent of jasmine, and knew at once that it wasn't real.
It hurt less than he had expected it to: gone was the searing, burning pain that haunted him day and night...now it was nothing but a dull ache. One he was too scared to even touch.
Not even the sight of Nupur in a very fetching step-cut that somehow made her look prettier than ever before seemed to make things better.
Mishti,
The closest I can find to oil at all is this hairgel Orindam uncle sometimes uses, and I used too much of it the first time round. Nupur said I looked like a sackful of goo.
I know this sounds silly, but I needed to feel something moist on my hair again,like the old times...I needed to feel someone's hands on my scalp again, even if it was my own.
Motu.
P. S. I like Nupur's look. A lot. Let's not get into how much I like it because then I'd end up telling her that myself. No way. SO embarrassing.
P. P. S. The gel actually doesn't look half as bad. It has this neat, structured look about it. I know I could go to some random supermarket, buy oil and use it on myself, but it wouldn't be the same.
P. P. P. S. If you were Karna and I was Parasuram, I definitely wouldn't be saying hum toh curse detay hain khaaney ke liye!
Edited by Elizabeth Darcy - 13 years ago
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