thing is certain, I will not allow any kerosene stoves on my verandah.”
Ishvar understood her allusion, veiled though it was. He protested that bride burnings and dowry deaths happened among the greedy upper castes, his community did not do such things.
“Really? And what does your community say about male and female children? Any preferences?”
“We cannot determine these things,” he declared. “It’s all in God’s hands.”
Maneck nudged Om and whispered, “It’s not in God’s hands, it’s in your pants.”
Om took a day to recover from the vermifuge. Next evening Maneck made plans to celebrate the return of the appetite with bhel-puri and coconut water at the beach.
“You are spoiling my nephew,” said Ishvar.
“Not really. It’s the first time I’m treating him. Previously his pet worm did the eating.”
Ishvar stared at the man in the doorway, trying to place him, for the voice was familiar but not the face. Then he recoiled, recognizing the greatly transformed hair-collector. His scalp was smooth and shining, and he had shaved off his moustache.
“You! Where did you come from?” He wondered whether to tell him to get lost or threaten to call the police.
Shoulders drooping, head bowed, Rajaram would not meet his gaze. “I took a chance,” he said. “It’s been so many months, I didn’t know if you still worked here.”
“What happened to your long hair?” asked Om, and Ishvar clicked his tongue disapprovingly. He didn’t want his nephew to get familiar again with this murderer.
“It’s okay to ask about my hair,” said Rajaram, raising his head. The expression in his eyes was empty, the fire of relentless enterprise extinguished. “You are my only friends. And I need your help. But I feel so bad… still haven’t returned your last loan.”
Ishvar withheld his disgust. To get involved in police business, with just days left before the wedding trip, would be most inauspicious. If a few rupees could get rid of the killer, he would do it. He stepped backwards to allow Rajaram to enter the verandah. “So what’s wrong this time?”
“Terrible trouble. Nothing but trouble. Ever since our shacks were destroyed, my life has been filled with immense obstacles. I am ready to renounce the world.”
Good riddance, thought Ishvar.
“Excuse me,” said Dina. “I don’t know you very well, but as a Parsi, my belief makes me say this: suicide is wrong, human beings are not meant to select their time of death. For then they would also be allowed to pick the moment of birth.”
Rajaram stared at her hair, letting moments elapse before responding. “Choosing the ending has nothing to do with choosing the beginning. The two are independent. Anyway, you misunderstand me. All I meant was, I want to reject the material world, become a sanyasi, spend my life meditating in a cave.”
She regarded this as much an evasion as suicide. “It’s all the same thing.”
“I don’t agree,” said Maneck.
“Please don’t interrupt me, Maneck,” she said, turning to Rajaram again. “And how is my old haircutting kit? Does it still work? It is a Made In England set, mind you.”
He blanched. “Yes, it’s working first class.”
Then he would speak no more of himself in the presence of Maneck and Dina. “Can I buy my two old friends a cup of tea? What’s that restaurant you go to — Aram?”
“Vishram,” said Ishvar, and checked if he had enough money in his pocket for tea. Although the invitation was the hair-collector’s, chances were, he would end up paying.
They walked silently to the corner, and settled around the solitary table. The cook waved an oily hand from his corner. “Story time!” he shouted happily. “And what is today’s topic?”
The tailors laughed, shaking their heads. “The story is, our friend is thirsty for your special tea,” said Ishvar. “He has come very far to meet us.”
Rajaram looked about him awkwardly; he had forgotten how tiny and exposed the Vishram was. But he was grateful for the privacy afforded by the din of the roaring stoves.
“So what’s all this fakeology about sanyasi?” asked Om.
“No, I’m serious, I want to renounce the world.”
“What happened to barbering?”
“That’s where the whole problem started. I was a failure right from the first day. My hair-collecting years had left me useless for barbering.”
Ishvar was unwilling to believe a single word from the mouth of this killer. “You mean you forgot how to do haircuts?”
“Much worse than that. Whenever a customer sat on the pavement and asked for a trim, he ended up almost a baldie.”
“And how did that happen?”
“Something would come over me. Instead of clipping and pruning, shaping the hair, I hacked off everything. In a way it was funny — some of them so nice and polite, when I held up the mirror they would say, ‘Good, very good, thank you.’ They probably didn’t want to hurt my feelings and tell me I was a lousy barber. But most customers were not kind. They shouted angrily, refused to pay, threatened to beat me up. And I just couldn’t stop my clippers or scissors. My hair-collecting instinct had become too powerful, I was like a monster.”
Word got around of the maniac with scissors, and no one stopped anymore at his pavement stall. Soon he was left without a choice. It had to be full-time hair-collecting again. But there was a problem: he had no place to store the bags of low-value clippings, which were his stock in trade. “And you could not have kept it in your trunk either. You need a small warehouse for that. You saw my hut in the colony, how it was stacked from floor to ceiling.”
Rajaram wrung his hands and shook his head. “If I could have obtained even one set of twelve-or fourteen- inch hair every week, I would have survived. It would have paid for one daily meal. But there was no long hair in my horoscope.”
“What about the packets you left with Shankar?” interrupted Om. “They contained long hair.”
“That came later,” he said. “Be patient, I am making a full confession.” He gazed wistfully in the distance, as though at a parade of longhaired lovelies. “I will never understand why women hang on forever to their long hair. It’s beautiful to look at, yes, but so much trouble to take care of.”
He took a sip of tea and licked his lips. “I wasn’t ready to give up. Not yet. Now I started offering free haircuts to beggars, vagrants, and drunks.” Late at night, after the hustling and drinking was done, he would approach the ones with long hair. A few needed tempting with a small coin. If they were comatose, or too impaired to know what was happening, he just helped himself.
But the venture failed. The quality of his harvest was very poor. The agent said this type of long hair, knotted and dirty, was worth no more than the snippets of pavement barbers. Besides, the supply became erratic when the police started their Emergency roundups under the Beautification Law.
Hungry and homeless, Rajaram would stare ravenously at women who passed with their tantalizing dangling plaits, taunting him with the wealth they carried on their heads. Sometimes he picked one to follow, a well-dressed society lady, a likely candidate for a visit to the hairdresser, who just might be planning to have her tresses lopped off. The women he pursued led him to their friends’ homes, doctors’ offices, astrologers, faith healers, restaurants, sari shops, but never to a hair salon.
He scrutinized longhaired men, too: hippies, foreign and local, in their beads and beards — foreign ones gone native in chappals, kurtas, and pyjamas, local ones slouching in sneakers, bell-bottoms, and T-shirts, and all of them equally smelly. He wondered how much a head of blond or red hair might fetch, but did not bother following them, for he knew they would never get a haircut.
It was a pity, he began to muse, that hair was so firmly fastened to the owner’s head, making it so difficult to steal. Firmer than the most tightly clutched purse, snugger than a fat wallet in skin-tight trousers. Beyond the fingers of the most skilful pickpocket. Or pickhead. To think that something as fine and light as hair could cling so tenaciously was truly an amazing thing. The way its roots clutched the scalp, it might have been a powerful banyan tree anchored to the earth. Unless, of course, alopecia set in and the hair fell out.
