The other day when a barber charged me ` 75 for merely trimming my very sparse mane (a 5-minute job with no fancywork on my sideburns or nape), my mind nostalgically winged back to the late 1950s when a haircut at my boarding school in Tiruchy cost as little as 2 annas or 12 paise!
It was a “no-frills” procedure undertaken in the shade of a neem tree as one squatted on a stool swathed in a sheet that was pockmarked with dried bird droppings — the crows sheltering above certainly did amuse themselves at our expense with their unregulated excretory systems working overtime! It was one of the “fringe benefits” of an al fresco haircut, another being the occasional tendency to doze off, lulled by the barber’s soporific ministrations.
In those distant days the Elvis Presley hairstyle was the rage among teenage boys — an elaborate, oiled and swept-back hairdo dominated by a prominent puff on the forehead that often unfurled as the popular entertainer sang and danced with gay abandon. The boarding master, however, strongly disapproved of the time we spent on preening ourselves to achieve at least a semblance of Elvis’s coveted coiffure. So he ordered the barber to strictly enforce a short and spiky haircut; consequently, our pates often resembled the back of a porcupine shorn of its quills. It was indeed the classic American “crew cut”. It suited Tiruchy’s humid weather admirably, the hard-boiled boarding master opined, and required hardly any grooming. So much so that he, too, proudly flaunted one.
For his part, the burly and rather surly barber brooked no nonsense from us. Indeed he often grimly warned us that wriggling and squirming could result in a bit of one’s ear being snipped off — quite a scary prospect that kept us as still as a statue and earned him the nickname “Snipper”. Ignoring our persistent pleas for moderation, he would shear away our painstakingly grown locks, much to our dismay, leaving us “looking like razorbacks” as a wit aptly put it.
The school bully, who fancied himself an Elvis clone, once foolishly tried to browbeat the barber into sparing his luxuriant thatch, a virtual replica of his idol’s. A heated argument followed and the annoyed barber retaliated uniquely: he deliberately shaved half the lad’s head, wiping out any resemblance whatsoever to the legendary singer’s hairdo. Indeed the hapless victim looked like a skinhead who had fled halfway through a haircut. Rather than face ridicule, he contritely requested a full tonsure.
Today, of course, tonsorial preferences and facilities have changed dramatically. One lounges in air-conditioned comfort in a well-appointed salon watching TV as the hairdresser pampers one’s crowning glory (or the pathetic little that’s left of it) with hairspray, hair nutrients et al and updates one on the latest local gossip and scandals. That one ends up paying through one’s nose is, of course, another matter.