Miss-understandings

The delivery person calls my phone, telling me that he has a package for me at the campus main gate and will come over in two minutes to deliver it. I open my main door and wait outside on the porch. While doing so, I notice some dead insects and dried leaves on the porch. As I wait, I pick up a broom from inside and start sweeping the front entrance. The man shows up as I am sweeping. He hands me over the package and says, "Ask madam to go online and fill out the short survey." I nod my head. But wait, madam? Who is madam? Apparently, I got mistaken as the domestic help while sweeping my own home.

.

I usually stay back in the office till late night, working as well as indulging in non-essential work sometimes such as watching movies. More than once, a security guard makes a round at around 2 am to make sure all offices are locked. He taps on my office door; I open the door and tell him that I will be working some more. He nods, looks at the name plate outside my office door and asks me my name. I point to the nameplate and tell him that is my name. Confused, he asks me which professor I work for. I tell him the name of the professor (my name again). He asks me what my name is. I repeat my name. Suddenly, realization dawns on him and he says, "Sorry sir, sorry sir, I thought that you are the research assistant!" (In Indian English, you say things twice or more for extra emphasis, yes yes, sorry sorry, ya ya, no no, aiyyo aiyyo). When I work late at night in my office, I frequently get mistaken to be a research assistant. And on realizing that I am the faculty, I magically become a sir.

.

Sometimes, I keep a straight face and play along. Like when a cleaning staff had once asked me why I don't have children, I made a face and said, "Babu doesn't show interest!" Her expression was priceless. I find these episodes hilarious!

.

And just like that, while enjoying my anonymity (many staff on campus still do not know who I am) and in between playing kaajer mashi (domestic help), the disinterested professor's childless wife and a nocturnal research assistant, I completed three years here recently!

 

sunshine

That deadly concoction of motherly love!

One of the big, big things about living in desh (country) is that I am only one short, direct-flight away from baadi (home). Given the law of averages, this had to happen after 12 years of hopping trans-continental flights for 36 hours and going through multiple immigration and security checks. I have visited home about ten times in less than a year now, and every time, I come back with bags full of cooked food that lasts me a few weeks. If you ever want to know what you could and should not bring in an airplane, ask me! But more on that later.

This time, I came back from a crazy mom slaving in the kitchen for days to cook up a feast-to-go and running after me to take it all. My Aviation-IQ went up after a comically dark stint with the mango, and if there is one piece of advice I could give, it is to NEVER take aam pora’r shorbot concentrate (raw mango concentrate) in an airplane.

Amid a crazy morning after momma and grandma painstakingly packed me food for an army, she looked at me with puppy-eyes to take that raw mango concentrate that I was resisting, the one she had prepared with a lot of love and spices (pepper powder, mint, and a gazillion other things). I was arguing that I will not carry anything in a yellow water bottle with something she made to shield me from the 45 degree Celsius weather and prevent me from getting heat strokes. I have extremely low karma ratings as far as being a nice child is concerned, so I finally gave up.

I don’t know all the chemistry that went into whatever happened, but that bottle passed airport security miraculously. That same bottle would have led to a 3-hour long interrogation in a dark room in the US, leading up to them labeling me a budding terrorist and denying me entry for the rest of my life. But I digress here.

I boarded the plane and settled in with a rather steamy novel that I was going to read in the next few hours. As I was stuffing my backpack in the overhead bin, something prompted me to take that bottle out, lest it leaks. I imagined everything that could go wrong, and the worst circumstance that came to my rather unimaginative mind was a loose lid and spillage. I placed that bottle in between my feet while the airplane took off.

I knew there was a pop-sound as soon as we were airborne, but I thought it was someone goofing around and recklessly popping open a can of soda. Looking back at life in slow motion, most things often make perfect sense. Within the next 5 minutes, just when Jack was about to kiss Stella after 2 months of abstinence following a one-night stand, there was a louder pop-sound. This time, I looked below, and to my horror, the bottle had popped open with enough pressure to spit raw mango pulp all over my white clothes. An onlooker would have wondered how scared I was of flying that I could shit all over myself publicly in the middle of the day, the one of the semi-liquid kind, with telltale signs of the yellow spillage all over me.

I rushed to the restroom, the bottle in hand. It broke my heart to throw it in the trashcan, but I could not have salvaged it. I spent the next 20 minutes wiping the yellow goo off my clothes and sat through the rest of the plane ride shivering from wearing wet clothes as well as getting dirty, judgmental looks from the passengers. The swag with which I had entered the aircraft was all gone. I sat nervously like a mouse for the rest of the ride, praying that I do not hear another loud pop-sound from the restroom with some poor soul inside freaking out with their pants half-on and the pilot rerouting the airplane because there was yellow goo all over the ceiling.

Looking back, I can see why it was a bad idea to bring something that releases gas in a pressurized cabin. Mom does not fly, but I do. The rest of me and my food made it safe, and in case you are dying to know, it had chicken curry with posto, jhinge posto, potol posto, uchche bhaja, lau er torkari, lichu, jamrul, ruti, half-a-dozen gondhoraaj lebu, and even the bhaja jeere moshla for the mango drink. All this because I have a crazy mom who gets powered up listening to stories of people carrying things like ghee made out of barir gorur doodh (unadulterated milk from a cow someone keeps in their home), kilos of maach bhaja, and dhoka’r dalna, and tries to outshine them!

sunshine

Kedarnath

I've never seen my ma obsess about gods and goddesses, not even a fraction of what my grandparents did. Yes, she offers incense sticks to a laminated picture of Ma Kali every day, and that is it. One's relationship with god, or the lack of it, is a very personal thing, and I am glad she never followed socially dictated norms of letting the entire world know that she is praying.

So it surprised me when she very enthusiastically told me, Kedarnath jachchi! (Going to Kedarnath). It's a holy pilgrimage place in the Himalayas. We have never been there, so it made sense for her to visit. Maybe she was really happy about my new job and move to India. Who knows? People do change with time, although, she could have visited and thanked god in less expensive ways by going to our neighborhood temple or maybe Tarapeeth or Dakshineshwar Kali Mondir or someplace more accessible. But Kedarnath Badrinath? It seemed a bit of an overkill, but then, one's relationship with god is personal! Who am I to judge?

To add to the confusion, she said that she is very excited to see Sushant Singh Rajput. Now I have no idea who this guy is, so I just assumed he is a cricketer who plays for the Indian cricket team. Ma is even less interested in cricket, and too many things seemed wrong in this conversation.

"How far is Kedarnath from there? Are you going with baba?" I asked. I am still trying to understand the logistics, wondering if she is taking the train or flight, and who else is going.

"No, I am going alone."

I am even more confused by her sudden show of bravery by traveling the world alone now!

"It's walking distance, and Tuesday morning shows are half-price."

And just like that, everything suddenly made sense. It was never about god or cricket. It was about a movie called Kedarnath playing in the neighborhood movie theater.

"Ufff, You are growing old rather fast! Tube light ekta," ma told me. Well, I might be getting old real fast, but I am relieved to learn that no supernatural spirits have possessed my ma, and she is just the same! I would be very worried if she suddenly started visiting holy places looking for god or developed an interest in cricket.

sunshine

A fin(garlic)king tale of crazy things I’d do for good food

Over the years, I've taken many things back home. Fancy chocolates. Interesting kitchen gadgets.

This time, I took home two pounds of unpeeled garlic! Yes, you heard me right.

My visits to Kolkata mean lots of good, rich food. I sometimes eat two breakfasts or two lunches on the same day. And all that food means my grandma chipping her nails while peeling a lot of garlic. If you have seen the almost two-dimensional, stick-thin garlic pods in India, you'd know how hard peeling garlic is. On the other hand, the garlic pods in the US are fatter than almonds and walnuts. The best thing I could bring home was garlic (my idea, completely).

Naturally, people at the US airport were not happy, although they should not care, since I was leaving, not entering the country. They eyed the garlic with a lot of suspicion. They ran it through scanners, tested with litmus lookalike papers. They might have wanted to ask me to chew some of them too. In their long experience of all the weird things they have seen people transport, the humble, innocuous garlic had never made the list. They did not ask me anything directly, but were holding up the line and had mobilized a tiny army of people to figure out what the hell was all this garlic doing here?

“I am attending the holy garlic festival in India this year. Have you heard about it?”

I got skeptical looks.

“You should look it up. Very pious festival. They ward off evil spirits.” As I said this, I held out my hands in front of my eyes to do a nomoshkaar.

And so, they let me go without any more questions, and off I flew thousands of miles with all the garlic.

The amount of good food I got to eat increased manifold as a result, and it might not be entirely my imagination. It did turn out to be a holy garlic festival in India after all. My own, holy garlic food festival at home.

sunshine

From the dental diaries

November, 2016.

The walk back from the dentist's office this evening was long, introspective, and evoked a deep sense of sadness. I needed some time to let it all sink in. It started innocuously enough, when a crown came off, taking me to my first dentist in the US (I always saw dentists in India). The visit opened a can of worms in my life. I went back again today for a full X-ray. We ended up chatting for more than 2 hours. I was interested in knowing everything to the root (pun unintended). Long story short, I have undergone major tissue damage and bone degeneration over the years. So I will be regularly visiting the dentist at least for the next 6 months, if not a year. The visits will not be as chatty as today's, but will involve several invasive procedures, some with partial numbing, and some, full.

Apart from being terrified about degenerating health, dealing with pain, time involvement, and money, in that exact order, I feel an overwhelming sadness to the core. All this was preventable, had I started seeing a dentist like this 10 years ago. But being afraid of going bankrupt on student insurance, I never did. I always went back to India to get my teeth checked. In air crash investigation videos, they always tell you two things- one, a significant number of crashes are caused by human error that were preventable, and two, a plane can never go down based on one malfunctioning; it takes a series of events gone wrong like a chain reaction to bring a plane down. My thoughts are on similar lines.

In a 4-page long questionnaire they asked me to fill out the other day with questions ranging from dental history to mental history, I honestly wrote, "I am terrified of dentists. My apologies." I was not lying. Since age 5, I have had a history of experiencing traumatic dental incidents. At 6, a doctor had pulled out the wrong (and healthy) tooth without numbing me first, by mistake (he was old and had poor eyesight). In my late teens, I had my first root canal that involved a scary looking man with huge, hairy hands pinning me down for hours every Sunday morning. A few years later, I shifted to a female dentist to do away with the huge and hairy hands shoved in my mouth, only to have hands that smelled of cooking spices that induced a strong gag reflex in me. The gag reflex never went away, but only got worse over the years. The recent one was no better. I have been terrified of dentists all my life.

The sad part is having to go through all the pain every few years, spend huge amounts of money summing up to tens of thousands every time, and then learning today that I have lost massive bone tissue over the years. The root canals were never done well, the gutta percha fillings from 16 years ago didn't go all the way to the core. The crowns never fit properly and needed to be redone. The upper right wisdom tooth has grown at a precarious angle, hurting surrounding tissues. From angles that I have never seen myself before, my mouth literally looked like an airplane crash site.

Was this preventable? Possibly. I have only two responsibilities I take pretty seriously- staying alive and staying healthy. I brush more number of times than anyone in my family does. I don't do drugs or alcohol or soda or nicotine, I try not to do stupid things, get run over, speed while driving for cheap thrills, or voluntarily put myself in danger. Yet I have had freak accidents and lived with injuries that occurred inexplicably. The dentists addressed injuries but never did preventative care. Even the one last year, who said that he cleaned my teeth, lied through his teeth. The injuries were all there for me to see through a series of more than 24 X-rays I brought back with me, for posterity, thanks to Dr. Roentgen.

Am I upset? I am devastated. Losing teeth is losing a part of my body that I can never build back (unlike shedding the uterine lining, nicking my skin, or breaking a nail). I feel violated. It's not that I did not act on time. I never even knew until today that there was a problem.

I am prepping for a long and cold winter of suffering, bleeding, not talking, surgeries, sutures, implants, associated headaches (I already have one since morning), and a long recovery period. The optimist in me sees that I don't have oral cancer (they checked for that too), I live in an English-speaking country (imagine if this was Germany!), I have some form of insurance, am otherwise healthy (or so I think, god knows), and will eventually heal. But I keep wondering, was this not preventable? Because if it was, I would have camped outside the dentist's office in a heartbeat and made sure that today never happened. Sometimes, things in life do not add up, leaving you confused, with so many unanswered questions.

sunshine

Every day after that day

48 hours since my bombastic entry into Greece. My first armed robbery (armed because they stole my valuables from literally under my arm). Hundreds of messages from friends and family wanting to know how I am doing. How am I? I am okay. Trying to cope after coming dangerously close to having to sell a kidney. I feel 10 times heavier. I have splitting headaches and nightmares. When bad news comes in little installments over a period of time (like an impending breakup or obesity), one gets more time to prepare. But when the same dose of bad news happens in 60 seconds leaving you almost bankrupt, the mind does not know how to respond. It was traumatic to take another metro after that.

But then, there are many good things that happened after that. The Indian embassy gave me a temporary passport in 2 hours. I met Sara, a fellow traveler from Singapore. Together, we did some sightseeing in Athens and hiking in a nearby island. Disaster was about to strike again when while hiking, we were chased byan angry donkey and had to run downhill for our lives after huffing and puffing and hiking for 40 minutes. We never made it to the top again, the donkey blocked the trail. Robbed by Greek thieves and then death by a donkey? There would be no dignity for me after that.

Now the big question that was plaguing me was, should I or should I not go to Malta next? And the even bigger question. Will they or won't they allow me to take a plane to Malta on a handwritten, temporary passport? I decided to leave it to my fate. What saved me is that they did not steal my German residence card. That would have jeopardized my entry even to Germany as my new passport has no visa. Between stealing a passport and stealing a residence card, they somehow cushioned my loss by stealing the passport.

The people at the airport were a little intrigued by a new passport with no stamps. I decided to shut my mouth until being questioned. A handwritten passport could have been a problem. But I boarded the 6 am flight. When the security people at the airport in Malta wanted to check my passport again, my heart stopped. They could ask me to return. They did not. They said, "Oh, you have a new passport? No problem, the residence card is good enough."

All this seemed to have happened a lifetime ago. Greece and Malta later, I came back to Germany, applied for a new passport, obtained one, and flew eastward ho to Kolkata for a few weeks. The mangoes and litchis have been cushioning my sense of loss so far.

sunshine

Robbed

Less than an hour into landing in Athens, I was robbed off my passport and many hundred euros in broad daylight inside a crowded metro. I have been traveling alone for many years now. I have traveled close to 25 countries so far, and many of them on my own. I usually stay at hostels and fit in easily with an international crowd. I am not shy or awkward and stay extra alert while traveling. I can read maps and I can navigate my way around even in obscure little towns where I do not speak the local language. I usually show up at airports an hour extra ahead of time. I usually get two printouts of documents kept in separate places. I stick to the crowded parts of a city, do not venture out at night, and never go for a drink with people I have just met at hostels. In short, I do all that I can to stay safe and not get drugged or killed while traveling, and in general. Then how did this happen to me? It's a useful (and very expensive) experience to share.

After landing in Athens, I bought a € 10 one-way ticket from the airport to Omonia. This required me to take the blue line from the airport to Syntagma, and then change to the red line for two more stops to Omonia. I had a trolley suitcase on my left and a small handbag on my right. I got down at Syntagma to change to the red line. When the train came, a group of men and women got on the train from the same door as mine. They were a part of a big gang. But this, I realized later. The moment I got on the red line metro, these people kind of surrounded me and did not let me move. 

"Omonia, how many stops? Next stop?" one of them asked me naively. They were all standing too close for comfort. 

"Two" I said and tried to move away. The crowd would not let me. Have you ever played kabaddi? You will know what I mean. They closed in on me. A man on my left held my left hand rather amorously. I jerked away my hand. He looked at me and smiled, asking to hold my trolley suitcase which was in my left hand. I immediately knew that something bad is going to happen to me. Intuitively, yes. I turned to the man on the left to grab my suitcase. He just would not release my hand. He squeezed it just like a lover would do. That was when someone on the right took a bag that was inside another bigger bag and had my passport and all my money. All this happened in less than 60 seconds. They got off at Panepistimio, the station before Omonia, and walked out in a group. By then, I knew that I had lost something, and something big. I just did not know (yet) what it was. 

When I got off at Omonia, I was relieved to see that my purse was with me. But the relief lasted for a second. Because my passport bag next to it was gone. 

So here are a few things you need to know. This, I can tell from my experience and talking to the police as well as the embassy: 

1. These guys operate in huge gangs, specifically inside the airport (yes!!) and in the metro stations. Women are also a part of these gangs. I was told they are refugees, but I do not know about that. 

2. They pretend that they do not know each other, but they do. When they target someone, they just close in on them. 

3. They use a distraction technique, holding your hand amorously or smiling flirtatiously, slightly pushing a heavier luggage from your hand. But remember, they have no intention to flirt or take your suitcase. This is meant to distract you in one direction while someone is working in the other direction. And they work really really fast, within a minute or so. They just get off at the next station and walk out. 

4. Distribute your money. I was going to once I checked in to my hostel, but it was too late. 

If you are a victim of a stolen passport, do the following: 

1. Immediately go to the police station for tourists. I first went to the metro police, who asked me to go to another police station, and I had to go to three police stations until I found the right one. 

2. Cabs in Athens are super cheap. If you still have some money, just take a cab. 

3. The police does not care. They see cases like this everyday. I was told that sometimes they are involved too, but I do not know about that. However, you need to take the police report to the Indian embassy (or the embassy of your country) as soon as possible. That report was written entirely in Greek. At the embassy, someone will translate it and issue a "temporary passport" that will let you fly back to the country of your residence. It is a hand-written passport and mine was valid for one year. The police report is the first step. The embassy cannot do anything without that. 

4. The Indian Embassy in Athens is super nice and helpful. When I explained what happened, they said they will try to get me a temporary passport within the next day. It's just like applying for a normal passport. The embassy charged me € 126 for a temporary passport, and issued it to me within two hours. They are super nice people. 

5. Take your temporary passport and get back to your country of residence. From there, apply for a fresh passport. 

6. ALWAYS travel with a photocopy of your passport and a few passport sized pictures. This, I did not do. The embassy needs to get all the information from your passport, which is why you need to carry photocopies. 

7. Get in touch with the embassy of your country as soon as possible. They are the only ones who can and will help you. 

8. No matter how much shock you are in, don't forget to eat and drink water. An empty stomach and dehydrated body will do strange things to your brain. You need to be alert and make judgments very quickly. I am pretty sure I hallucinated the entire night. 

So how does it feel? To say that I am shaken and shattered would be an understatement. I was too afraid to go to an ATM and take out money at night, and had to wait till the next morning to find some of my confidence back. My legs had no strength to move. I have never felt more helpless in a foreign country where I knew no one and was not even carrying a cell phone. I would not wish this on anyone. But I am glad that I was physically not hurt (I was told that some of them carry razors and pocket knives too). The thing is, it's not that I suddenly realized that my stuff is gone. I knew all the time that something bad is happening to me. But they put you into a trance. They distract you. As a woman, I would watch out for someone who is holding my hand. At one point, I feared that I might be mauled or molested. But that is a distraction technique. All this will be over in less than a minute. And a woman traveling alone with luggage makes a great target. 

I have many things to be sad about, but many things to be thankful about too. 

My passport is gone, but is replaceable. 

Thank God my US visa was not in this passport. 

They stole all the cash, but my bank cards, and most importantly, my residence permit was in a different bag and were not stolen. Without my residence permit, I could not have reentered Germany. Although I was within the Schengen area, airlines and airports are super strict these days after the Paris/Brussels attacks. You need to carry your passport at all times. 

I wish the money went to someone needy. It is a lot, but I will earn it back eventually. Passport, I will have a new one. But what I really lost that day was my self-confidence. I felt violated. I felt like someone had crushed my confidence and reduced me to nothing. I had no strength to walk on a street without cowering and feeling like I will be attacked again. It made me feel small. It made me blame myself for the hundreds of things I could have done differently. But as long as you are alive, everything is replaceable. I saw Athens after that, and traveled some more with my temporary passport. 6-7 men robbed me in broad daylight. But 60 people jumped in to help me. I am grateful to all of them. And a big thank you to the people of the Indian Embassy. You went out of your way to do much more than getting me a passport promptly. You made me feel safe and understood. 

And lastly, a little bit of something that perked me up. Miss Universe 1994 Sushmita Sen had the same experience at the Athens airport in 2012. I am very sorry for your loss Sushmita, but this might be the closest I have come to saying "same pinch" to a Bollywood celebrity I like. 

sunshine

Stone-faced and pot-bellied

The bus from Germany reached Netherlands without the slightest hiccup. Still getting used to good things in life like unrestricted border movements, I was surprised once again when no one stopped us for passport and visa checks. However, the way back was a different story. 

About six hours (and two cities) into crossing the German border, somewhere close to the northern fringes, the bus pulled over at a desolate place. Soon, every piece of luggage was taken out of the belly of the bus and laid on the floor. A bunch of armed, uniformed men and sniffer dogs started checking every piece of luggage. Next, we were asked to get off the bus, five people at a time, and go through another round of thorough searches. Every bag went through an X-ray machine. A couple of people had their passports checked. The uniformed men, all tall and well-built, walked around with grim expressions. Ten minutes later, we were given the clearance and allowed to board the bus again. 

And I, still feeling giggly from last night's shenanigans, got on the bus with a little bit of an unsteady gait, thankful that whatever happened in Amsterdam stayed in Amsterdam, and I had the sense not to bring a souvenir back home.

sunshine

Breaking News!

In a bone-chilling and shocking incident that shook the entire G-household, the little one has been caught red-handed, causing havoc in the household once again. This is G's littler one, Baby D.

Baby D, the accused, is a 3-year old with doe eyes, the most innocent looks, and a shrill, Dolby Digital quality voice that makes her (in)famous in the crime circle as Baby D Bose. She is agile, nimble, and as light as a slightly overweight carry-on baggage. 

On Saturday early morning (7:30 am) that the whole world perceives as weekend and hence sleep in late, mommy and Aunt sunshine were chatting up in the kitchen, enjoying their early cuppa morning tea when the crime happened. Baby D was supposed to be happily sleeping in daddy's arms, but she quietly woke up, sneaked in a pillow under daddy's arms, and made her way to the master bathroom. Daddy happily continued to sleep and snore, mistaking the pillow to be Baby D. 

Heavily suspicious of the quiet and peace in the household, mommy went upstairs looking for Baby D at around 8 am. Daddy said, "Here she is sleeping", his eyes closed as he continue to believe that the pillow is Baby D. The entire bed cover and the floor were stained red. Mommy panicked. The trail of red stains continued to the master bathroom, where the accused was caught red-handed, like seriously, with hands painted red. Swabs of the red stain were quickly sent to the forensic lab and was reported to be a mixture of mommy's expensive collection of lipstick and nail polish. The crime area was quickly sealed, and Aunt sunshine assumed the role of a crime photographer and reporter. 

When interrogated about how daddy mistook the pillow for a baby, he refused to comment. The accused has been caught red-handed doing crime of similar magnitude many times, and has received multiple warnings from mommy, the chief law enforcing officer at home. The last warning was given to her exactly 30 hours ago, when the entire door was painted 50 Shades of Purple (ahem!). Mommy somehow managed to erase the stains, but is still mourning the loss of her expensive makeup. The accused refused to comment or plead guilty. When probed, she quickly went back to using the Dolby voice and gallons of tears as weapons. The jury has recommended installing a strong bathroom lock that is difficult to trample with. Last heard, everyone in the household was reported safe and recovering well from the incident. Aunt sunshine is still a little shaken though, and is seeking counseling. She seems to be repeating the same question in a loop- "Is this what it is like to have kids?" 

The accused has already attempted other crimes ever since, but of much lesser magnitude.

sunshine

Hair and There

Every few months, I look at the mirror, thinking to myself that I deserve to look better. Since the anti-wrinkle youth enhancing creams were not helping much, and I was quite bored during the spring break, I decided to get a haircut. Now the problem of getting a haircut is two-fold. First, I am so myopic that I wouldn’t notice an elephant in the room without my glasses. Second, no one chops your hair as if a hungry famine-stricken rat just fed on your hair. When they do it, they “set it” and “style it” in such a way that you don’t realize disaster has struck till you get home and wash your hair. So the other day when I decided I was bored, haircut deprived for 5 months, and two days away from three Bong parties where I needed to show off my beauty, I thought it is a good idea to get a makeover.

While the lady at the salon shampooed my hair, I almost fell asleep, so relaxing it felt. She woke me up and asked me what kind of cut I wanted. I asked her to chop it by a few inches, still holding on to my original hair style that the lady in Shyambazar gave me last year. I should have suspected trouble from the way she sweetly cooed and called me “honey”. Soon my glasses were gone, and all I heard was snip snip. Soon I was half asleep, half awake in la-la-land. The snip snip continued, moving my swivel chair this way and that way. The snip snip was soon followed by a wrrrr wrrr wrrrr. Hot air blew all over my face, waking me up from my slumber. I should have realized, it was the “welcome back to reality, Miss. Rat-ate-you-hair” call. If she turned my chair this way and that way during the haircut, she did it ten times more now. My swivel chair swiveled like Madan Chopra’s chair did in Baazigar while Vicky Malhotra fantasized about his “I-thought-it-sucked-big-time” revenge plan. The little of what was left of my hair flew all over my face. When the wrrr-ing stopped, my glasses were shoved back to me, a mirror held behind my head. Honestly, it was cut so short that it looked like a lawn mower accident. Something looked very wrong about the way I looked, but I could not really point to what it was. My hair was set so well that if you got me some fancy clothes, I’d be ready to parade around the streets of Paris like a fashionista. She must have seen me frown, for she promptly added some “you have lovely, luscious, voluminous hair” type compliments. She even said I looked a lot younger now. I was sold.

I came home happy, went to sleep, and washed my hair the next day. Disaster struck. I looked at myself and couldn’t figure out what kind of cut she had given me. Strands of hair stuck out like bovine horns by my ears. If I parted it left or right, I would have to tilt my head at an angle of 45 degrees in that direction to make sure the hair stayed at the right place. It was so short that I could no longer tie it all up to hide the actual style. From letting my hair down, my hair had let me down. Before the parties, I spent 30 minutes blow drying it and straightening it, which is a record given that I never use such fancy stuff. Yet nothing could salvage the rodent-infested field my head looked like, as if someone had used hand saws instead of scissors. Imagine, a fancy dress, good makeup, and a crop of hay stack on my head; that is exactly what I looked like. Ever since, I decided not to go to parties until my hair grew back. I decided to make use of my caps or dupattas as much as I could. I try oiling it more than I have ever done to make it sit in place, reminding me of the bumpkin with the hair oil factory in Jajau (The inscrutable Americans by Anurag Mathur). When I wake up every morning, I look as if a cyclone hit my head. I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, twist and turn wisps of hair this way and that way, but nothing works. There is nothing more helpless than looking at your newly chopped off hair, knowing that it will take months before you can get rid of the joker look and look your old normal self again. Honestly, Indian salons give a far superior haircut than salons here. So while my hair continues to grow in nanometers every day, I have no option but to pretend that this rodent-fed field of a haircut is the latest in vogue.

sunshine