Men’s Salon

One fine Sunday afternoon the yellow dot on the sky was beaming with a new vim, the honking of vehicles, the shouting of the hawkers, the exuberance on the faces of school going children, the unfortunately underprivileged children playing marbles in the debris on the road side made me surf through the recollections of the days when I used to stay at my home permanently. It’s been many years that I am living away from my family for educational purposes.

Usually Sundays are considered as the days for barber related work. So this particular post is a description of a saloon in my vicinity. You enter the shop finding new faces staring at you as if you were just released from a local penitentiary. The walls of the saloon are covered with morphed posters of celebrities depicting different hair styles, a chart showing different hair-cuts, a shelf on which the idiot box is kept since the time when the RAJ had come to an end in INDIA, the cloth used to cover the television set is not of crochet instead it was of cobweb, along-side the television a contemporary radio having a sticker of the TRIBAND was present it seemed it only played the NEWS of INDIAN independence. The description of the room is incomplete without the music being played. The playlist comprised of songs depicting the saddened heart of the protagonist of the movie because he/she wasn’t able to convince the one he/she loved. Well there is no such genre as sad songs but still for the sake of mentioning it, all were sad songs with such lyrics that will at least once persuade you to think of the only person…...

The barber was a local celebrity (the usage of past tense here means he is no longer a barber) the air around him whispered to everyone else present that he was the most handsome. When I sat on the hotseat  and the so called celebrity started to cut my hair he repeatedly looked towards the rooftop of a house across the street, out of curiosity I peeped out of the window to see the God’s most complicated creation(I meant female). She was in her twenties then, had a great smile and was strolling to and fro while looking down at the road and sometimes at the barber. The barber noticed that I found out the hidden chemistry so he looked at the girl with a grinning face and the turned towards me and uttered “that coquette stares at every passing chap” those were very insulting and offending words I personally felt. The track changed and with every passing song the frequency of the barber’s fingers flicking his hair increased. The barber had a habit of making a promise to every customer that he’ll be free within half an hour, I though after half an hour the local celebrity will be surrounded by loads of fans asking for his autograph (unintentional sarcasm).

 The business came to an end and I was looking good at the end and it is all that matters. I left my home for another few months and when I returned the barber was gone, the girl had walked thousands of kilometers till then and I felt that if these two had a chance to talk to each other he might have started to respect her or hate her even more.