The pedicure boys

“ Poori zindagi yeh thode hi karna hai (I’ll hardly do this all my life)?” says Anil*, hunched over a pair of lathered feet, a small, warm whirlpool swishing underneath them; the lack of pride in his voice belying the deftness of his hands, kneading and scrubbing, filing and clipping with the single-mindedness of a professional. “ Gharwale toh samajhte hain main hairstylist hoon (my family thinks I’m a hairstylist)” — a charade he’s kept up since he walked in as a pedicurist at a beauty parlour in south Delhi. Five years on, his faith unwavering, he says someday he will be the guy with the swagger and the streaked hair, blowing smoke rings on the pavement outside, when he’s not ordering shampoo boys around or trimming an Aliya cut into shape.

Until then, any residue of a cultural aversion to touching feet, especially of women, must be set aside to save and scrounge, and pay for a hairstyling course that, at ₹80,000, costs 10 times his salary. In a country where pair chuna (touching feet) can be both a sign of deference and a marker of ‘low class’, or at least a class or position lower than the person whose feet you’re bending over to touch, respect is hard-won for pedicurists. Scrubbing dead skin with a metal foot filer, and countering any suggestion of ‘backwardness’, Anil, whose farmer-father left Garhwal to set up a tailoring unit in the plains, claim he’s “man enough to touch a woman’s feet”. Ask him how he’ll introduce himself to his future girlfriend or wife though, and he says, unblinking, “ Hairstylist, aur kya (what else)?”

Lowest in the pecking order of salons — unless you count the ‘helpers’, who clean and swab, and rush in with hot towels at everyone’s beck and call — even the ‘waxing ladies’ rarely cast a friendly eye upon the pedicurist. Yet, in time, a good one, like Elvis, can swing out of the door, groupies (and tips) in tow. Some may even brag about the magic touch — a euphemism for the orgasm they trigger in a few ladies, dupatta unruffled, ankles exposed.

In urban, business-like Delhi, where a pedicurist is practically genderless — although women prefer the powerful strokes of male hands over the light caress of women — a pedicure is a service, really, says Priyanka Singh, marketing director at Geetanjali, a chain of salons that started over two decades ago in the then sleepy neighbourhood of Green Park in south Delhi, now a beehive of beauty parlours for men and women. “They know what they are signing up for,” says Singh, “Yet it helps that we don’t hire rookies anymore.” Unlike the ‘waxing ladies’, many of whom must overcome their distaste for Brazilian wax at first, male pedicurists rarely flinch. Coveted by all but the ‘Saudi ladies’ (an umbrella term for women in abayas), Singh says, “after a while, the men thrive on compliments and repeat customers.”

Brought into the fold by a friend or neighbour in the trade, to the unlettered jobseeker a beauty parlour is what a call centre is to a fresh graduate without a ‘proper’ white-collar job — a stopgap arrangement that, after a point, can cease to be one. Some like Dinesh*, a chatty middle-aged pedicure ‘boy’ who started as a fatherless school dropout, learn to work the system, giving out numbers to customers, identifying and classifying people by their clothes, tonality, decibel levels and proclivity to tip — all this before they have settled into the knock-off la-Z-Boys and picked up a well-thumbed Harper’s Bazaar to flip through.

Others like Ganga Sagar Sah from Madhubani go further. Grandson of a minor goldsmith, his family’s fallen fortune put him on a train to Delhi, where he started out as a helper at Geetanjali and worked his way up to become a hairdresser at their outlet in Ambience Mall, Gurgaon. Now a celebrity in his own right, Sah has struck ‘gold’ again — earning anywhere between ₹35,000 and ₹75,000 like other hair technicians (he doesn’t reveal the exact figure), he’s raising his own family in the Capital and driving a new bike. At 33, he is already a veteran — “About 20 years ago, when I arrived here, a haircut cost ₹10 or ₹12; a generous tip was ₹2. All I wanted then was to make that extra ₹2 and send it home to my parents.”

Back at another old favourite in Green Park, some remember a time when the pedicure boys sat in wait for customers in the no-wedding, no-festival seasons. The air hung heavy with the smell of acetone and musty towels, and the only time the plastic tubs got a rinse was when a customer’s feet were lowered into them. At a spruced up Meghna, however, ‘clients’ not customers (like salon, not beauty parlour) await their turn on plush leatherite seats on a busy weekend. Young Rahul*, with rolled-up sleeves and a tattooed arm, stands out in his spiked, bleached hair — a passive-aggressive avowal of his ‘secret’ ambition. A rebellion against the strict hierarchies or ‘posts’ at work. A dismissal of his identity as an Aligarhi presswala’s son, who once tilled the fields with his father.

Primed as he is to best his fate, Rahul is not waiting for his employers or a hairdresser ustad to spot his flair like Sah. Or counting pennies to fund an education like Anil. He is using his shears on friends and family, and biding his time by buffing nails, trimming cuticles — and thanks to his enterprise — massaging and shampooing hair as well. Work is manly — the act of working crucial to his yet unformed identity. So what if he’s grown up with the idea of beauty as feminine. So what if the girls at work pay him no attention. So what if he has to touch another’s feet. Defiant, he says, “ Kyun, ab main sabke sir bhi toh chuta hoon (why, now I touch everyone’s head as well, don’t I?).”

(*Names have been changed on request.)

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