To pass the time, Rajaram told the tailors, he dreamt of being the first pickhead to go into business. He dreamt of developing a system that would overcome healthy hair’s natural reluctance to relinquish the head. Perhaps invent a chemical which, when sprayed on the victim’s scalp, would melt the roots but leave the hair untarnished. Or a magic mantra that would hypnotize the individual and make the hair jump off, the way ancient Vedic shlokas recited by sadhus could inspire flames to leap from logs or clouds to pour rain.
Dreaming away the hungry hours, he concluded that in reality a pickhead needed no new invention or supernatural power: the existing techniques of pickpockets, with a few modifications, would suffice. In crowded places it would be easy, using roughly (and smoothly) the same procedure as cutpurses. They were known to employ a sharp blade to ease a restrictive pocket; he still had his razor-keen scissors. One snip and the hair could be his.
At some point, Rajaram’s fanciful notions took on a serious aspect. Now he began to believe there was no ethical connection between picking pockets and administering unwelcome haircuts. One was a crime, which deprived the victims of their money. The other was a good deed, the alleviation of an encumbrance, the eradication of a lice-breeding pasture, which would save the victims time and effort and itchy scalps, not to mention the frivolous expenses of shampoo and hair lotions. And “victim” was hardly the correct word in this case, he felt. Surely “beneficiary” would be more accurate. Surely it was vanity that kept people from realizing their own good, and a helping hand was necessary. In any case, the loss would be temporary, the hair would grow back.
“I began training earnestly,” he said, stroking his bald head while the tailors shifted on the bench in the Vishram, rendered speechless by the hair-collector’s story thus far. “I travelled through the suburbs till I found a place in the barren countryside where I could rehearse.”
There, removed from the gaze of human eyes, he stuffed a bag with newspaper to produce a ball the size of a human head, but much lighter, light enough to sway at the least disturbance when suspended with twine from a branch. To the bag he tied lush clusters of string. Then he practised severing them close to the head, without shaking the bag. For variation he would weave the strings into plaits, or hang them in a thick ponytail, or spread them loose like cascading curls.
As his skills advanced, the setup was modified to simulate real-life situations. He held a cloth bag beneath the plait to catch it as it fell, dropped in the scissors, and drew the bag shut — all in one smooth movement. He performed this drill in very tight places, to discipline his hands to work within crowds. And when they were trained, he returned to the city’s jostling streets and bazaars.
“But why did you go through all this madness?” asked Ishvar. “If your hair business collapsed, wouldn’t it have been easier to collect something else? Newspapers, dabba, bottles?”
“I have been asking myself the same question. The answer is yes. There were dozens of possibilities. At the very worst, I could have become a beggar. Even that would have been preferable to the horrible road I was starting on. It’s easy to see now. But a blindness had come over me. The more difficult it was to collect long hair, the more desperately I wanted to succeed, as though my life depended on it. And so my scheme did not seem at all crazy.”
In fact, when it was put to work, he realized he had developed a brilliant system. With his cloth bag and scissors he would elbow himself into a crowd, selecting the victim (or beneficiary) with care, never impatient and never greedy. A head with two plaits could not tempt him to go for both — he was happy with one. And he always resisted the urge to cut too close to the nape — the extra inch or two could be his undoing.
In the bazaar, Rajaram stayed clear of the shoppers who came with servants, no matter how luxuriant the hair. Similarly, matrons with children in tow were avoided — youngsters were unpredictable. The woman he singled out to receive the grace of his scissors would be alone, preferably someone poorly dressed, engrossed in buying vegetables for her family, agitated by the high prices, bargaining tenaciously, or absorbed in watching the vendor’s weights and scales to make sure she wasn’t shortchanged.
Soon, though, she would be short-haired. Amid the milling shoppers, Rajaram’s sharp instrument emerged unnoticed. It went snip, once, quickly and cleanly. The plait dropped into the cloth bag, and he disappeared, having delivered one more fellow human of the hindrance that, unbeknown to her, was weighing her down.
At bus stops, Rajaram chose the woman most anxious about her purse, clamped tight under her arm, its leather or plastic hot against her sweltering skin. Semicircles of sweat would be travelling like an epidemic across her blouse. He would join the commuters, another weary worker returning home. And when the bus’s arrival converted the queue into a charging horde, the nervous woman hesitated at the periphery long enough for the scissors to do their work.
He never operated twice in the same marketplace or at the same bus stop. That would be too risky. Often, though, he returned empty-handed to the scene of his crime (or beneficence) to listen to the bazaar talk.
For the first little while there was nothing. Probably, as he suspected, the women were too embarrassed to make a fuss. Or maybe no one believed them, or thought the matter not serious enough.
Eventually, however, quips and wisecracks about lost, stolen, or misplaced hair started to sprout. One joke making the rounds of the paan shops was that under the Emergency, with the slums cleaned up, a new breed of urban rodents had evolved, with a taste not for rotting garbage but for feminine hair. At the docks, mathadis unloading ships cheered the exploits of the mysterious hair-hunter, convinced that it was the work of a lower-caste brother extracting revenge for centuries of upper-caste oppression, of Strippings and rapes and head-shavings of their womenfolk. In tea stalls and Irani restaurants, the intelligentsia wryly commented that the Slum Clearance Programme had been given a larger mandate due to bureaucratic bungling: a typo in a top-level memorandum had the Beautification Police down as the Beautician Police, and now they were tackling hair as crudely as they had tackled slums. The inevitable foreign hand also put in its appearance, in the form of female CIA agents spreading stories about missing coiffures in order to demoralize the nation.
“Since everyone was joking about it, I wasn’t worried,” said Rajaram. “My confidence grew, and I thought about expansion.”
The hippies, whom he had long regarded as perfect but impossible beneficiaries, became the focus of his ministrations. He discovered that in the early hours of the morning they lay in drug-filled slumber around the dealer’s addaa where they bought their hashish.
Relieving catatonic foreigners of their locks was child’s play. If someone among them happened to open his eyes and see a companion being sheared, he assumed it was a hallucination; he giggled stupidly, or whispered something like “groovy, man” or “wow, real cool” and went back to sleep after scratching his crotch. Once Rajaram even cropped a fornicating couple. First the man, who was on top, and then the woman when, halfway through, she mounted him. The rocking and pumping posed no problem for the hair-collector’s expert hand. “Oh man!” said the man, excited by his vision. “Far out! I see Kama, grooming you for nirvana!” And the woman murmured, “Like, baby, it’s instant karma!”
Rajaram felt things were finally looking up for him. He welcomed the invasion of foreigners, unlike the conservative section of the citizenry that complained about degenerate Americans and Europeans passing on filthy habits and decadent manners to the impressionable youth. As long as the aliens possessed hair down to there, shoulder-length or longer, Rajaram was happy to see them pouring into the city.
Around this time, beggars reoccupied their places on the pavements, as the Beautification Law ran its schizophrenic course and grew moribund. The hair-collector’s professional eye noticed immediately. Of course, with his business flourishing, he no longer went after the beggars’ dirty, knotted hair. Some, recognizing him, would call out to him, requesting their free haircuts, but he ignored them.
“And if only I had continued to ignore them,” said Rajaram, sighing heavily, “my life would have been so different today. But our destinies are engraved on our foreheads at birth. And it was beggars that brought about my downfall. Not the beautiful women in bazaars, whom I was so scared to approach. Not the hashish-smoking hippies, who I thought would beat me up one day. No — it had to be two helpless beggars.”
Rajaram paused, eyeing the cashier-waiter who was smiling at them from the counter, still hoping to be invited to share the story. The tailors did not acknowledge him. “We know all about the beggars,” said Ishvar quietly. “Why did you have to kill them?”
“You know!” exclaimed Rajaram, horrified. “But of course! Your Beggarmaster — but I didn’t! I mean, I did … I mean — it was all a mistake!” He hid his head in his hands upon the table, unable to look at his friends. Then he sat up, rubbing his nose. “This table stinks. But please help me! Please! Don’t let — !”
“Calm down, it’s okay,” said Ishvar. “Beggarmaster doesn’t know about you. He only mentioned that two of his beggars were murdered and their hair stolen. We at once thought of you.”
