The Hindu Business Line : Only cuts & curves

FOR years one has been a regular at Bina Hair Cutting Saloon at Yogi Nagar. It is cheap at Rs 25 a haircut with a massage costing an extra Rs 15, and they do a good job of editing one's scalp. The turnover of barbers, mostly from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, is high, more indeed than at BPOs or newspapers, and their productivity never gets accounted for in GDP numbers. They earn about Rs 3,000 per month, though this figure varies from barber to barber depending on the job rating made by the owner, who sometimes plies the scissors when there is a rush. Most of the time, tapes of old Hindi film songs are played softly, and some customers put in a request to play an old Kishore Kumar while placing their heads under the blade.

The barbers blush whenever one walks in once a month, and my favourite barber asked me the other day, with a smile female TV newsreaders display, "Saab, kya chhota karne ka hai (Saab, what should one shorten?)." He was not wrong as this writer mostly has strands of white hair at the edges of the skull, like an ill-kempt hedge. One is at best in need of a trimming rather than a proper haircut, when bundles of black hair fall on the floor as the scissors run through. The man goes by the name of Raju, though his original name is Mohammad, and comes from Sasaram in Bihar. It took me about eight months to break into his life which sadly has little to show.

Coming from a poor family, Mohammad is illiterate. He cannot read or write Hindi; he can only speak Hindi. "Kya karoon saab, hum sabse bade the aur garibi se school nahin gaya (I was the eldest in the family and my family was too poor to send me to a school)," he told me clipping away at odd bits of white hairs. His father worked in Calcutta of the 60s, and seemingly lost his land to his brother in Sasaram, dumping the family into non-existence. "Abhi oopar wale ke duva se jara ache hain (Now thanks to the Lord above, we are better off)," Raju told me. His father is working on a small patch of land and has been able to send Raju's sister to school where she is in Class 9. "Abhi, aap kya karoge (Now, what will you do?)," one asked, and Raju did not reply.

For a whole life-time Raju will know little of the world spinning around him and confessed, "Buri tharah se maar khaya (I am badly hit)." There are many millions in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar stuck like Raju and they are the worst, lost cases of humanity. He picked up hair cutting from a friend in the village, and that landed him a job in Mumbai. He is thankful to my friend Lachman Singh for putting him up when he came to Mumbai a year ago. Lachman Singh bumped into a half-hungry Raju at Borivili station, took him home and used his good offices with the owner of Bina to get a job.

Lachman Singh walked into Bina Hair Cutting Saloon, on the evening one was in the revolving chair getting a skull-massage with a machine, which had a ball at one end. My friend Lachman Singh is old, touching 70. After a short morning walk, he has a bath and goes to the Lord Ganesh temple daily where he recites the Hanuman Chalisa from memory. The day is not made for Lachman Singh if he does not chant Hanuman Chalisa. In the evenings, one can see him quietly resting under a peepal tree on the main road, watching modern, wired Indians whizzing by in cars. We got to talk and were joined by 75-year-old Desai, who was badly in need of a shave. We know Desai as a walker in Borivili, having never gone to his home.

Desai and his wife were regular evening strollers. Then, last year, his wife died leaving Desai alone on the road. Raju ordered tea for us as there were no customers at the saloon and we got down to some merry chat, which swung between Saurav Ganguly and Bachchan's Kaun Banega Crorepati Dwitiya. Desai started with a quote from Nissim Ezekiel's poem, "Occasions call for silence too. ... In silence is simplicity. Expressed through speech, reality" and wondered whether Ganguly, Chappell, Harbhajan and all the BCCI officials had ever come across these lines.

More than us, Desai has been following the career of Ganguly and has the gentleman's batting stats on his tongue. "But the point is not the quarrel. In my youth, politicians and sportsmen bit into each other but they never made a public display. When they did it was in style. They held on to their personal friendships. Today, everyone reaches out for a TV channel to make public a spat with one's wife. Going live has become compulsive," mused Desai and added, "It is something to do with being an Indian. We are loud in everything. Either way we will not win the next World Cup. Do you want to take some bets or is it worth taking any." For Raju, it meant nothing. He would not have spotted Ganguly if he had walked in for a hair cut.

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