It must have been 1961 or 62. The township was growing and the first houses had come up in Berkhera. The c3’s we moved into… eight apartments to a building…. were seemingly at the end of civilization…. if you ventured any farther out… there was construction… more houses being built for the township…. and perhaps some villages…. needless to say there were no conveniences of any sort… no stores… You could perhaps get something in an emergency…. but the choice was limited…. why do I imagine a small stand alone shop with petromax lamps? dimly-lit with long shadows….

I remember how we had to go to the city some 20 kms away to get our monthly groceries… which now that I think of it was a wonderful experience in itself… more of that some other time….

It is hard to believe now how quickly my hair grew those days… the mop was thick…. and when washed with Shikakai…( the idea of shampoos would come some years later)…. it would look even bigger and fluffier…. not that it mattered to me… but I remember my mother’s desperate struggle to bring a semblance of order to it….

Winters were cold…. without a liberal coating of coconut oil… the skin would be like water starved earth… parched and flaky…. if it had only itched… that would have been fine… but it hurt too…

if there was any competition among us in the family those days… it was to grab what little sunlight one could….upstairs the strip of sunlight on the verandah floor was narrow…. and sometimes it was hard to get two people into it at the same time…

on the weekends…. we would lay small colorful striped cotton dhurries in the verandah… and douse ourselves from head to toe with warm coconut oil… a hot water bath followed…. (no showers…. not in winter…. no piped hot water… ‘geysers’ would come much later….)

I digress…..my father had rigged this contraption…. a heater coil wrapped around a round piece of wood with a spiral groove in it to hold the coil… you plugged the contraption in but had to make sure that the coil stayed under the water in the bucket… also careful you did not touch the water…. for that would have been one sizzling experience…. every now and then…. it popped over the surface of the water and the coil burned out…. you had to wait to get another coil unless you had a spare at home…. there was an art to stretching the new coil just enough as you wrapped it around that wooden form and fixed the ends to the screws at both ends… I eventually got quite good at it….

every now and then though… we would have to hold off on this oil massage ritual…. and look out eagerly for ‘Badshah’…. yeah that was his name (The emperor!)….

“Badshah”…. people would call out….”come by today OK?”… “sure Sahib… let me finish a couple of customers in this row and then I will come by…”…. and then one waited…. down the row of houses…. there were others who waited their turn too… and everything was held up till he had come and gone…. you could not bathe…. you always did that after the haircut….nor could you go to the Sunday market for the fresh vegetables, mutton or fish we bought every week… (no fridges! …. they would come much later… in fact I do not think we ever had one till I left Bhopal)…. and as we waited…. the elders would step out into the street to gossip while the children took the opportunity to gallivant around….

When he did visit the neighborhood…. usually every two to three weeks…. Sundays… .for we never cut hair in our house on Saturdays…. Shani Maharaj (Saturn … not the easiest of gods to please)….would not have liked that….he would ring the bell on his bicycle while he was still at a distance….. He was not very tall… dark-skinned… clean-shaven…..I think he wore white pajamas and kurta…. perhaps not a kurta but just an untucked shirt… not sure… at the back of his cycle on the carrier…. he had this little box… painted in some darkish color… red or maroon maybe…. it was one of those things that opened like a lawyer’s briefcase…..to reveal this cavernous dark insides…. and in there …. were combs and scissors and all the instruments he would need to tame the wide variety of hair he might encounter on a given day…. swivel-blade razors for shaving…. little wood-handled brushes… shaving soaps… sticks of alum…. bottles of dettol…. a steel cup for the shaving water.

The mirror he could not accomodate inside the box…. it was much bigger yet not so big that you could not hold it in your hands… for that is what you had to do…. we would set this wooden chair in the middle of the verandah on top of a spread of “The Hitavada” or “The MP Chronicle”… in retrospect that is all those papers were good for… but in those days life would have been poor without them… Badshah brought the aprons with him… they were scratchy around the neck… and I know the grown ups worried about hygiene…. but then… we would all be taking a nice hot water bath later.

Badshah would put his kit down somewhere on the floor or on a stool…. then take out all the implements he would need…. the combs… the scissors… the dreaded machine…. and then he would hand you the mirror to hold…. then away he would go…. all he had to do was hack…. it just had to be made short enough so that a month could pass till he could get his hands on it again….

Badshah told wonderful stories….one was about his name…. which was not really a story… that just happened to be his name…. I think we taunted him about the incongruity…. I don’t think he minded…. he must have got used to that question…. he seemed equally amused….

no… the stories that were really fascinating were of the trips he took abroad as the royal barber to the nawab…. in those days when going abroad was such a distant and impossible dream…. almost a fiction…for people in our class that is…. (our neighbors had been to England for a year…. but that was not usual)…. we were awed that he had had that opportunity….. and also that he did not seem to think of it as any big deal…..

we never found out if there was any truth to them…. always teetering on the edge of belief and disbelief… we were still eager to ….we still wanted him to tell us….. perhaps it just made the whole haircutting experience bearable…. when you came out of that trance … you had not noticed all the nicks and the little cuts … or how the ‘machine’ had yanked some hair on the nape of the neck…. the apron came off…. he dusted your face and neck with talcum powder… ( he had that too in his box)…. then brushed off all the hair…. and then came the dramatic finale… he would walk around and go behind the chair and hold up a smaller mirror… so you could see how it looked from behind…. not sure what purpose that served…. for we never seemed to not like what he had done….we would nod our approval…. and that was it….

The water was perhaps hot by then…. you had to get going…. it was the next person’s turn…. who had probably already heard all the stories….. since they were standing around in the verandah soaking up the sun while you were being tonsured….they had perhaps already heard the stories before several times…. we all had… but I think refreshing our memories every month was as rejuvenating as the haircut was…. or more….

perhaps Badshah sowed the seeds of desire on those Sundays… and made it all seem very possible…. even if it meant you had to be a barber to royalty…. or we would have to dream up our own reasons… like working for NASA…

When it came to cutting our hair…. Badshah ruled…. just like an emperor!