Hair

Have you ever considered your hair as an issue of gender or race? Well it is, if you are a woman. 

I have been considering this issue for a long time, because the unfortunate humidity of this torrid tropical island frizzes and wears down my particular kind of South Asian hair. It stubbornly remembers where the rest of me comes from, even though my accent, my wardrobe and most of my tastes have been working very hard to locate myself in a vague, cosmopolitan limbo, where all cultural references are references to pop-culture and certainly nothing that dates earlier than a hundred years; ah, to have been born yesterday, in TV land!

Now that I am in this place, where the majority wears their hair 'naturally' straight or neatly twirly, thanks to a genetic jack-pot of politely shaped follicles, I find myself in a conundrum. Should I fight the tendency towards kink (ohh that word really tickles me) that humidity has on my wavy hair by artificially straightening or perming it?

Every time I go to the hair dresser, he is alarmed by its abominable state- he recommends serums (which I usually buy) and more vehemently, new treatments- ah the people I could resemble, the admiration I could gain- there is hope! Don't I want to look like everyone else? No thank you, I say, I like my hair, it was made for different climes and behaves better there, besides I couldn't bear to kill it for the sake of conformity.

My male South Asian peers dont have this problem. They get to cut it off- they are supposed to cut it off, because it gets in their way of doing things.Women these days are doing things  as much as men, but we haven't yet gotten over the vestigial function of being things that are to be looked at.  If I cut off my hair it would upset me aesthetically, but more importantly, I would also be saying something with my lack of hair that I'm not ready to be saying yet. It's my hair, but it's bigger than me. So many decades after feminism won the war, women are still expected to improve the scenery with their femininity, with high heels, with big hair. Or else...what? Really, what? 

It's a marketing ploy. A colleague once told me that she attended a workshop with the owner of the Singaporean clothing chain BYSI as a guest speaker. I wouldn't put quotation marks on this one, but apparently, something was said there, to the effect of- women's maaney-ah- easiest one to get. Why? Because the lives of women are constantly beset by the utter confusion caused by 1) having to simply live the human life, which is a struggle in itself and 2) having to be mindful of what effect that living is having on their looks. This is to different degrees, in different cultures. If you go to Madras Chennai these days, the menfolk zip around to work on their motor bikes in shirts, trousers and sun glasses. Young women on two-wheelers wear whatever clothing they wear, then they wear arm-socks and a dupatta wrapped around their heads like Bedouins, because while they have to get to work as all fortunate, educated young people do, skin-darkening would lower their value in the meat marriage market. At least this also safeguards them from skin cancer, which is the only good thing about the improving quality of fairness creams. 

Of course, there are worse things to be than a woman of Mallu origin with wavy hair. Okay, I am done and I'm not straightening or perming my hair again, that's all.