Hair Raising Tales !
“Uncle-ji, what else do you want?” asked the shopkeeper, while I was buried deep into a pile of bhindi (Lady’s finger/Okra ) trying to sift and identify the tender ones from the woody ones by applying my grandma’s break-the-tip method. One has to be very careful with this task, one woody bhindi, that escapes you and finds its place among 40 others bhindis in your vegetable basket, would inevitably resurface and be on the top of the pile precisely when your wife decides to inspect your shopping bag, and in a flash all your efforts of breaking-the-tip are nullified. Just as I was about to snap an unsuspecting bhindi, the annoyed shopkeeper, who was well over forty, continued, “Uncle what else do you want?” His frustration was clearly evident when the customary Ji did not follow Uncle.
I paused my preoccupation and looked up in an attempt to identify the Uncle, who was cause of the commotion. I scanned the shop and found no signs of anyone in the shop who would qualify as an absent minded Uncle, possibly hard of hearing and lost in a pile of vegetables. My attention then returned to the shopkeeper, to piggy back on his gaze to locate the offending Uncle. My stare met the shopkeeper’s irate glance mid-way and together they resulted in a supplementary angle of 180 degrees. His gaze briefly moved by five degrees upwards and hovered around my head area, briefly taking the sum of the angles to 185 degrees before settling in a straight line.
I was horrified, when I realized, he was looking at ME! At the age of 30, I was already an Uncle.
Let me elaborate for those unfamiliar with the euphemisms of urban India to represent the age cohorts. When a small kid, you are a ‘Munna’ when you grow whiskers, you progress onto the ‘Chote bhai’ status. After this stage, it is not the whiskers but the hair on your head which governs your social trajectory. You could either stride into the ‘Bhaiya’ stage,when your hair starts greying and spend your entire life time reveling in the Bhaiya stage. However if you show signs of baldness, you get immediately promoted to the ‘Uncle-Ji’ stage, which is where I currently found myself. For the uninitiated, please note, that Uncle-ji has no connection with the myriad collection of relatives referred to lovingly as Uncle.
I had jumped from Chote bhai to Uncle-ji stage, completely bypassing the Bhaiya phase!
Thus began, my feverish hunt for the right solution to restore the balding patch and regress myself to the Bhaiya stage.
I did not have to look far for a solution. The Mid-Day paper helpfully pointed me towards a well-known homeopath, who seemed to have successfully transformed many an Uncle-Jis to Bhaiya-Jis. The next day, armed with the paper and my bald head, I marched into the homeopathy clinic. One look at my head and the doctor immediately knew what to do. I was promptly asked to make a payment of Rs. 2000 (those days 500s and 1000s notes were still valid!) and then rushed to the radiation therapy lab. A mini hadron collider was fired and my head was the subject of an onslaught of radiations and subatomic particles. Charm Quarks and Strange Quarks, Up Quarks and Down Quarks, Top Quarks and Bottom Quarks, all pirouetted on a slippery surface. Meanwhile, unnoticed a Higg’s Boson quietly escaped, only to surface years later in CERN. After 15 minutes, the doctor stopped the mini hadron collider and took a magnifying glass and peered at my head to spot any signs of movement in my hair follicles. The only radiation that now remained was the light reflecting from my top of my head. Apparently my follicles were in a state of deep hibernation and the doctor said the process had to be repeated every other week. Six months and Rs 25,000 later, I finally gave up.
This was the time, when a well-meaning neighbour suggested Ayurveda and shortly afterwards I found myself in a Kerala Ayurvedashala. On hearing my predicament, Dr.Krishna softy said, “Tell me when was the last time you saw a bald Sage?”.
I quickly ran through all the images of the Yogis and Rishis that I knew of, Vishwamitra, Vashishtha, Valmiki, Durvasa and countless others that I had seen and read about in Amar Chitra Katha. Yes, all of them sported a thatch of greying hair, equally matched with at least a foot long beard.
Dr. Krishna continued, “It’s all because of a secret potion, made from some of the rarest herbs, leaves and medicinal hair oil, which could be found only in the Himalayas. This secret would have been all lost, had it not been for one of my forefathers who spent his entire life in the great mountains, learning the secret from the great Rishis.” I looked at Dr.Krishna; finally the elixir was in sight! After a payment of Rs.2211, Dr. Krishna, massaged my head with scented oils, which made me smell like jasmine garden. I was also handed a few bottles of sticky ground herbs, which had to be taken every morning and night with spoonful’s of honey. The fragrance of the oil was so overpowering that on my way back, I was almost attacked by a swarm of confused bees, who I am sure would have mistaken me for giant moving flower. After about 7 months and 20 empty jars of honey, the Ayurvedashala opened a new store, but I was getting nowhere near any of the Rishis flowing tresses, rather started resembling a laughing Buddha.
Even the humdrum task of shaving my beard now presented a new challenge, not because I did not have a good razor but it was getting difficult to draw the fine line between where my beard ended and where my head started and I had to leave a bit of side burn on either side to serve as the Line of Control to resolve any dispute between the head and face.
It was one Monday morning after I had gone through the not so mundane activity of shaving that I came across an article on Trichology on the internet. To say that I came across the article would not be entirely correct, as whenever I went online, Google would alert the advertisers and I would be hounded by companies from all over, vying for a space on my head. When i finished reading the article, I had a pop-up from a leading trichologist, who most likely would have beaten others in real-time advertising and I decided to reward google with a commission and clicked on the advertisement.
The very next day, I found myself at the trichology centre and the seasoned trichologist, decided that things had to be done in systematic manner and the first step was to take a sample of whatever hair was left on my head and get it analysed in a laboratory. After about 15 minutes of negotiation, we reached an agreement that no more than 10 hairs would be plucked and the doctor helpfully added that the sample would be returned to me once the test was over. Meanwhile I was prescribed bottles of supplements to reenergise, rejuvenate and revitalize my hair follicles. The test results, arrived a couple of months later and the doctor triumphantly announced that I had male pattern baldness. I paid Rs 2000 and thanked him for letting me know that I was losing hair.
The solution to my problems came a couple of years later from a very unlikely front and from a person who was neither a doctor nor had any degrees in medicine and who for that matter had not even passed primary school but whose words bore as much wisdom as all the Sages and Rishis put together.
One day my 4 year old daughter came from school, and announced, “Daddy, my friends in school think you are ugly because you have no hair”. I hung my head down, imagining her embarrassment, waiting for her to complete her sentence. “But Daddy, they do not know you are so much fun and I love the way just you are!”
Nowadays Google has stopped trolling me and when I am lost in a pile of bhindis, breaking-the-tip and I hear the shopkeeper, say Uncle-ji, I smile and the words of the young Yogini rings in my ears, Love the way Just you are!
