On Hair Cuts, Colonialism, and the Like

When I was in India, I got my hair cut at a fancy hotel.

One of the interesting things about India, in 1990, at least, and I would guess even more so today, is that unlike, say, Zimbabwe, where all the tourists were white people from far away (and we, in particular, were reenacting colonialism in what I only realized much later was a truly offensive way, pouring tonic into our bottle of gin on the train from Gaborone, and lounging by the pool and ordering more drinks at the Victoria Falls Hotel, even though really we were staying at the campground across the street), in India the great majority of the tourists were Indian.

It struck me in particular at the Taj Mahal where there were plenty of European and Australian and Canadian and American white backpackers and tour groups, but there were also plenty of rich Indian tourists and, even more strikingly, not-so-rich ones too: stooped grandmas in limp white widow's saris, and little girls in hand-me-down dresses, and men in kurtas and lunghis (I traveled through Rajasthan with an Indian friend and we confounded everyone, for though there were lots of white tourists and lots of Indian tourists, there were never white and Indian tourists together, and when we stayed in backpacker hotels, the staff assumed my friend was English or American, and our rickshaw drivers were always shocked that she understood what they were saying about us, though in fact her Hindi was nowhere near as good as her native Bengali).

It matters, then, though I'm not quite sure why, that the hotel where I got my haircut was an Indian hotel. It was in the neighborhood in Delhi where my friends lived, and there was a beauty salon off the lobby that one of my friends recommended, though she'd never been there, when I decided I was fed up with my hair which had been growing across Africa and India and was now a straggly mess of a mass, befitting the backpacker I was so ambivalent about being, especially now that I was staying with my Indian friends who found western backpackers laughable, at best.

I think the haircut itself was fairly banal, probably some version of a shoulder-length bob, but what I remember about it is that the person who cut my hair also gave me a half-hour head, neck, shoulder, and arm massage, included in the price, and it was my favorite haircut ever.

The other day the girls and I got our hair cut for the first time since September (the only thing about which I am less responsible than haircuts is the dentist). They now have adorable shoulder-length bobs, and my middle-aged long hair has been trimmed and properly layered. Good haircuts, but, alas, no massage.