Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Hair Loss - I


Prologue
:
You are not your hair.
You are not even yourself.
Your hair isn't yours.
Your hair loss is yours, though.



Chapter 1: The Parabola

He closely examined his broad forehead in the mirror. He didn’t mind it being quite broad, at least, he didn’t use to, but the small inroads the barren space, passing itself as the forehead, has made diagonally beyond the temples on both sides of his forehead, thus forming an acute parabola of sorts, was bothering. He held his hair tight towards the rear side of his head. The signs were telling, even if it didn’t mean anything. He wondered if Nietzsche also had these inroads early in his life, and if it influenced his outlook of life.

“How did it all go? And more importantly, when the heck did it all go?” He wondered. It was quite depressing to know, a man could go bald just like that even before he realizes it. Just like that. Not that he has already gone bald, but the forehead sure has grown by a centimeter or so, in less than two years.

He wished he was warned, warned enough, by somebody. Somebody - his mom, his girlfriend, and here it has to be mentioned that he had none, his roommates during his college days, or the goddamn mirror – should have told him, at some point earlier.

But too late, it was. No “fortifying” shampoo or hair oil outwitted the parabola. He was reminded of the numerous marriages he attended in which the groom combed, or rather bristled, his hair letting it fall free over his forehead. And also about the really bad jokes he cracked, when he was in his college, at the Professor who taught Computer Networks. He reinstated, quite honestly, that the jokes were about the Prof’s startlingly juvenile idea about computers, leave aside computer networks, and never in anyway related to his gracefully dark pitch-bald head, hair adorning it only on the down end from one ear to another.

He was still looking at the mirror, carefully searched for any strands of hair left in and around those two singular regions.
Ah, there! There was one, a rather long one. He was stretching it straight so as to check its length, and, inadvertently plucked it. It slipped away from his hand.
And was lost.


Epilogue:
As they say, and now he knew why (or knew he will never know why), “Mayira Pochu!”

4 comments:

  1. Chenthil Saar,
    Far from it, if your club is named something like "The Bold Brawny (but) Bald Men".
    (I am young, energetic, hopeful of a great future. But, yeah, the budding parabola is quite telling!)

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  2. Damn! Whoever said Bald is Bad ??

    At times, the other side of the moon (as they call it) is a measure of one's intellectual might and demands more dowry, especially for South Indians :p

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  3. Yes Girish, Bald is beautiful!
    At this rate, in a few years, I will find it poetic!

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