PRAYER FOR HAIR
by Sanam Sulveen
All my life I’ve had problem hair. To be precise, the initial problem was the absence of hair. For the first two-and-a-half years of my life I was completely bald. When strangers paused through their normal routines to ask whether I was a boy a girl before coddling the newborn me, my parents chalked it up to the universal, androgynous look of all shriveled, prune-like babies. But after turning eight months, when people stopped asking altogether and assumed I was a boy despite my pierced ears, my frantic father begged my mother to take me to the pediatrician for an examination of possible dermatological pathologies. To his relief, I was declared “normal” but just a little behind in hair growth compared to other babies my age. The reassurance was not enough to stop the melodrama that ensued, however, and my father, apprehensive that I would be faced with limited suitors upon coming of age, dedicated himself to the growth of my hair.
He prayed to God, beseeching him to endow me with a mane that would earn me the long-awaited recognition as a member of the female species, often spending nightlong vigils on his prayer mat facing Mecca. He wrote letters and sent money to his parents in their village in India, instructing them to make elaborate lamb sacrifices and feed needy children as a bribe for the acceptance of these prayers. In accordance with the advice of a village elder, my father even shaved the peach fuzz on my little head and released it into Lake Michigan as an offering to solicit the help of Dharti Maa (Mother Earth) to grant me luscious locks that would span the breadth and depth of the waters across the world. And when there were no signs of his prayers being accepted, he resorted to bargaining with God—to take his hair and give it to me. Just as I turned three, my hair finally reached the milestone of requiring a barrette to hold it back from my face. My father would have been ecstatic had his own hairline not begun to recede. To this day he blames me for his baldness.
As I grew older, so, too, did my hair, thicker and curlier. My unruly tresses became the thorn in my mother’s morning routine as she struggled to untangle and style it in a way that was presentable. Most days she would pull it back tightly in a ponytail, and on fancier occasions, weave it into a French braid. This resulted in a lot of breakage of the strands that became frizzies standing erect on my head as if to catch a signal from satellite station somewhere in outer space. Much to the dismay of the ET fan in me, the aliens never landed.
There were also no gentle, non-damaging hair products back in the 1980’s that could be safely used on a child’s hair to sedate the frizzies into obedient rest alongside the longer strands, so my father would belligerently splatter coconut oil to weigh them down. The divine merging of the condensed, shiny grease with my dry hair gave it the shiny polished look of gel, but definitely not the smell, costing me friendships on the playground on bad days. In response to this imperfect solution, I began my own secret routine to tweak my mother’s grooming of my hair by patting water in the morning so that it would no longer be an eyesore that warranted my father to run for the oil jar. Upon drying, when the frizzies stood up again as if in a defiant rebellion to a futile attempt at oppression, I would rush to pat them down again with water during bathroom breaks. And again. And again. Until it was time to sleep and dream of having luxuriant, flowing hair like the models in Pantene Pro-V shampoo commercials.
At age nine, just when I thought I had the hair routine down, my mother birthed twins. The babies were the cool part, live dolls that cried and cooed, kicked and cuddled and even pooped. My baby siblings amused me for hours while I played a mature, real-life version of House, earning accolades from family friends for being such a trusty helping hand.
My mother’s postpartum blues, however, were not so cool. The day she broke into a sob at being unable to glide the comb from my roots down to the tips because of the knots was the day I prayed for less hair.
My prayer was answered three years later after two months of eating only cereal in a determined effort to look like the skinny starlets on the TV show Beverly Hills 90210. My father didn’t notice my nutritional intake, or lack thereof, but did see my thinning hair. He gave me a brown paper bag to save the fallen strands so that he could release them into Lake Michigan again.
Despite my relief at the increased manageability of my hair, I complied by carefully plucking fallen strands from the carpet, the vacuum cleaner and my scrunchies among other garish hair accessories and into the brown paper bag that sat on my nightstand. Just when the bag was completely full came our moving date to the big house in the ‘burbs. Where that brown paper bag full of twelve-year-old hair went, no one knows. I suspect it was burned in a landfill somewhere, inciting the displeasure of Dharti Maa as recycling and composting were virtually unheard of in those days.
Growing back the fallen tresses from my brief pubescent bout with anorexia would have been a dream come true. Hours and hours of stimulating my scalp with 150 strokes from my wide-toothed comb to promote the blood circulation that was supposed to set new hair growth into motion was all for naught. I reminisced nostalgically of the days before my hair fell out when I would flip my long tresses over my face. It felt like being drowned in a thick, black blanket, its density cutting off the oxygen to my nostrils and forcing me to breathe out of my mouth to blow the hair out of the way, like the parting waves of the Red Sea, so I wouldn’t asphyxiate. The herbal smell of rosewater glycerin rubbed into my hair shaft by my tender, uncalloused hands soothed my nerves as I daydreamed of being a real adult with the privileges and not just the responsibilities of being a co-parent to my distracted parents.
Fortunately, I still had plenty of hair to spare when the mid-1990’s saw a surge in healthy leave-in-conditioners that doubled up as styling products at affordable drugstore prices. I was able to do cool things like straighten it and, for a more natural look, round the softer edges of my curls into a springy bounce with a light coating of good hair products. Not only were my tresses more malleable, making them look more sleek on good days, but also easier to wash, dry, and style in different, experimental ways. When I highlighted it with the aid of a mild spray-on lightener, my dad admonished me for being reckless, reminding me of his endless sacrifices in his youth, including his own bald head. As much as his worry triggered a domino-effect anxiety in me, my unreversed hair loss eased basic grooming tasks, thus freeing me to focus more on styling efforts.
My little sister even complemented me once saying, "Api, your hair isn't fat anymore!"
For a brief moment, my heart sank when I thought of how the extra locks could have been security from female baldness in the post-menopausal years as I saw my mother’s scalp peeking amidst her battle with hormones and hot flashes.
“And you don’t have those silly dots on your face anymore either!” she rejoiced.
I beamed with pride, with the assurance that I had now crossed puberty.
In an attempt to look less Indian, I began to play even more aggressively with my hair color, exposing it to dangerous chemicals like peroxide that stripped it of its entire pigmentation. I would burn with envy when I read beauty magazines that stated blondes had all the fun when it came to hair dyeing. Black hair is too dark to pick up another color and therefore must be subjected to far harsher chemicals to lighten it before the coloring process. The increased exposure to chemicals as a raven-head also meant greater damage, for which the only remedy was chopping off frayed bits to make room for virgin locks.
During the times my hair was severely damaged, I would lay off the chemicals until it was restored to a healthier, shinier state before leaping back into the cycle of destruction, like the yo-yo dieter addicted to self-sabotage. One fine day during one of these in-between periods, a Goth chick in my college dorm saw my pitch black hair catch the light in a way that made it a deep mysterious blue like Madonna’s shapeshifting, ethereal coif in her Frozen music video. She envied me for having naturally dark tresses, while she struggled to keep up with coloring her blonde roots.
“Why would you want to look like everyone else?” she asked incredulously when I revealed my own challenges with hair color. “You look exotic.”
Before then, the idea of being exotic had never appealed to the insecure, awkward teenager in me. I was driven by the impulse to conform, often feeling shame at my otherness. Even South Asian standards of beauty, whether in Bollywood films or high fashion Pakistani bridal couture magazines, exalted Anglicized ideals of beauty. Fair skin, lightened hair, colored eyes. In the world view of countries colonized by Western imperialist forces, looking Nordic was exotic. But I was an American-born already living in the West, the land of immigrants and opportunities no less. I needed to feel proud of my heritage and my naturally tan skin that didn’t burn in the sun.
As for my hair, its natural hue was richer than any toxin-laden dye could have ever given me. It took the admiration of a young woman on the other end of the pigment spectrum to convince me that my mane was beautiful in spite of its diminished thickness—just the way it was, without hair dye and highlights, straightening or curling. And, to be honest, my father’s warnings were also gnawing at me. I couldn’t afford to lose more hair, or in my baby sister’s limited world view, my hair would be “anorexic.”
I enjoyed a wonderful ten-year run of appreciating my hair for what it was in its natural state, knowing that I had the tools and knowledge to make it look different if and when I desired. I loved how it contrasted against my warm skin tone, accentuating the black beauty mark on my right cheek, another one of my defining traits. Running my fingertips over the soft, silky coating that protected it after a deep-conditioning treatment became a welcome respite from long hours of clicking away hunched over a keyboard. My black hair became my trademark, lending an edginess of the alternative, counterculture variety, especially when paired with deep red lipstick.
From time to time, a friend or family member would point out strands of gray, but I was reassured of their scarcity when plucking them out felt like picking a needle in a haystack. I don’t know at what point exactly that the grays became more noticeable. These changes are gradual. All I know is I can no longer deny that I will need to start exposing my natural locks to the chemicals of hair dye once again. The only question is how much longer will I be able to postpone it?
They say that one should never be too specific in their prayers for limited ability to see the future. I asked my Dad recently if he had wished instead that he had prayed for my marriage directly rather than hair as a means for enticing fate to increase the possibilities. After all, the world has known many spinsters with gorgeous locks. Or for that matter, simply prayed for my overall happiness because marriage is no guarantee of personal lifelong fulfillment.
He paused for a brief moment before breaking into a guilty smile. “You’re a lot wiser than I was at your age.” His chest swelled as he drew a deep breath in, his eyes searching the air in front of him for some sort of vision that will help him conjure the perfect retort to my bursting his flawed logic. “But of course, you also haven’t been burdened by the worries of a bald child.”
I recently received my third disastrous haircut in a row. The first chop came as a drastic parting with six inches in the form of a bob that was supposed to make me look edgy and hip. Somehow the stylist managed to thin the volume at the tips of my hair and expand the volume at the top to an explosive POOF! that threatened to sting the fingers of anyone who dared to run them through the beehive. I didn’t cry. I knew it was just hair and would eventually grow back. Surely my predicament paled in comparison to the cancer patients who had absolutely no hair at all.
The second haircut was a shag, a haphazard slicing of sharp layers that was supposed to emulate the sleek look of the Marc Jacobs models gracing the runway during the winter 2015 season. Also a fail. Apparently so many layers do not flatter fine hair texture like mine, creating a limp, lifeless look that cannot be resuscitated with any amount of blow-drying. Maybe teasing, but who has time for that while maintaining a nine-to-five and pursuing aspirations to be a writer? And yet again, the tears did not flow as they had following hair mayhems in the past.
The most recent haircut is not as disastrous as the prior two, but is more of an attempt of damage control to allow my hair to grow into some semblance of a respectable shape. After the blow-dry I was certain I looked like Monica Lewinsky from the 1990’s during Clinton’s trial. The hairdresser laughed telling me I looked great. Of course. She wanted to be tipped, after all. On my way to the car, I was stared down by creepy, silver-haired men in the streets of the Marina, validating my earlier suspicion of being a doppleganger of the White House’s most notorious intern. They must have thought I was on my way to the Oval Office or were hoping I’d step into their mahogany executive lounges. And I still didn’t cry as I controlled the urge to burn them with a lit cigar.
It is only after four days of sporting this unsightly coif that I have come to realize that tears would have been useless in the face of creeping age. No matter how wonderful a haircut I would have gotten, nothing would have restored me to the prime of my youth. The fine lines, the joint aches, the stray grays cannot be masked by an epic hairstyle. Sure I may have some mileage left on me still, but the marketing machinery tells me everywhere I look that I am gradually slipping into irrelevance. A few more years on the shelf life as a consumable product when it comes to men, until I shall be irrelevant in this category, too.
But this is not something I feel like crying about either. A deep inner stillness tells me I am so much more than my looks. I am how I choose to be in the world and make my place in it. As a t-shirt of mine says, “It’s not how you look, but how you see.” I may no longer be the best looking version of myself, but I have been on a journey that has allowed me to see things from more angles than I had ever imagined in the sheltered cocoon of childhood fantasies. Whatever the state of my hair.
by Sanam Sulveen
All my life I’ve had problem hair. To be precise, the initial problem was the absence of hair. For the first two-and-a-half years of my life I was completely bald. When strangers paused through their normal routines to ask whether I was a boy a girl before coddling the newborn me, my parents chalked it up to the universal, androgynous look of all shriveled, prune-like babies. But after turning eight months, when people stopped asking altogether and assumed I was a boy despite my pierced ears, my frantic father begged my mother to take me to the pediatrician for an examination of possible dermatological pathologies. To his relief, I was declared “normal” but just a little behind in hair growth compared to other babies my age. The reassurance was not enough to stop the melodrama that ensued, however, and my father, apprehensive that I would be faced with limited suitors upon coming of age, dedicated himself to the growth of my hair.
He prayed to God, beseeching him to endow me with a mane that would earn me the long-awaited recognition as a member of the female species, often spending nightlong vigils on his prayer mat facing Mecca. He wrote letters and sent money to his parents in their village in India, instructing them to make elaborate lamb sacrifices and feed needy children as a bribe for the acceptance of these prayers. In accordance with the advice of a village elder, my father even shaved the peach fuzz on my little head and released it into Lake Michigan as an offering to solicit the help of Dharti Maa (Mother Earth) to grant me luscious locks that would span the breadth and depth of the waters across the world. And when there were no signs of his prayers being accepted, he resorted to bargaining with God—to take his hair and give it to me. Just as I turned three, my hair finally reached the milestone of requiring a barrette to hold it back from my face. My father would have been ecstatic had his own hairline not begun to recede. To this day he blames me for his baldness.
As I grew older, so, too, did my hair, thicker and curlier. My unruly tresses became the thorn in my mother’s morning routine as she struggled to untangle and style it in a way that was presentable. Most days she would pull it back tightly in a ponytail, and on fancier occasions, weave it into a French braid. This resulted in a lot of breakage of the strands that became frizzies standing erect on my head as if to catch a signal from satellite station somewhere in outer space. Much to the dismay of the ET fan in me, the aliens never landed.
There were also no gentle, non-damaging hair products back in the 1980’s that could be safely used on a child’s hair to sedate the frizzies into obedient rest alongside the longer strands, so my father would belligerently splatter coconut oil to weigh them down. The divine merging of the condensed, shiny grease with my dry hair gave it the shiny polished look of gel, but definitely not the smell, costing me friendships on the playground on bad days. In response to this imperfect solution, I began my own secret routine to tweak my mother’s grooming of my hair by patting water in the morning so that it would no longer be an eyesore that warranted my father to run for the oil jar. Upon drying, when the frizzies stood up again as if in a defiant rebellion to a futile attempt at oppression, I would rush to pat them down again with water during bathroom breaks. And again. And again. Until it was time to sleep and dream of having luxuriant, flowing hair like the models in Pantene Pro-V shampoo commercials.
At age nine, just when I thought I had the hair routine down, my mother birthed twins. The babies were the cool part, live dolls that cried and cooed, kicked and cuddled and even pooped. My baby siblings amused me for hours while I played a mature, real-life version of House, earning accolades from family friends for being such a trusty helping hand.
My mother’s postpartum blues, however, were not so cool. The day she broke into a sob at being unable to glide the comb from my roots down to the tips because of the knots was the day I prayed for less hair.
My prayer was answered three years later after two months of eating only cereal in a determined effort to look like the skinny starlets on the TV show Beverly Hills 90210. My father didn’t notice my nutritional intake, or lack thereof, but did see my thinning hair. He gave me a brown paper bag to save the fallen strands so that he could release them into Lake Michigan again.
Despite my relief at the increased manageability of my hair, I complied by carefully plucking fallen strands from the carpet, the vacuum cleaner and my scrunchies among other garish hair accessories and into the brown paper bag that sat on my nightstand. Just when the bag was completely full came our moving date to the big house in the ‘burbs. Where that brown paper bag full of twelve-year-old hair went, no one knows. I suspect it was burned in a landfill somewhere, inciting the displeasure of Dharti Maa as recycling and composting were virtually unheard of in those days.
Growing back the fallen tresses from my brief pubescent bout with anorexia would have been a dream come true. Hours and hours of stimulating my scalp with 150 strokes from my wide-toothed comb to promote the blood circulation that was supposed to set new hair growth into motion was all for naught. I reminisced nostalgically of the days before my hair fell out when I would flip my long tresses over my face. It felt like being drowned in a thick, black blanket, its density cutting off the oxygen to my nostrils and forcing me to breathe out of my mouth to blow the hair out of the way, like the parting waves of the Red Sea, so I wouldn’t asphyxiate. The herbal smell of rosewater glycerin rubbed into my hair shaft by my tender, uncalloused hands soothed my nerves as I daydreamed of being a real adult with the privileges and not just the responsibilities of being a co-parent to my distracted parents.
Fortunately, I still had plenty of hair to spare when the mid-1990’s saw a surge in healthy leave-in-conditioners that doubled up as styling products at affordable drugstore prices. I was able to do cool things like straighten it and, for a more natural look, round the softer edges of my curls into a springy bounce with a light coating of good hair products. Not only were my tresses more malleable, making them look more sleek on good days, but also easier to wash, dry, and style in different, experimental ways. When I highlighted it with the aid of a mild spray-on lightener, my dad admonished me for being reckless, reminding me of his endless sacrifices in his youth, including his own bald head. As much as his worry triggered a domino-effect anxiety in me, my unreversed hair loss eased basic grooming tasks, thus freeing me to focus more on styling efforts.
My little sister even complemented me once saying, "Api, your hair isn't fat anymore!"
For a brief moment, my heart sank when I thought of how the extra locks could have been security from female baldness in the post-menopausal years as I saw my mother’s scalp peeking amidst her battle with hormones and hot flashes.
“And you don’t have those silly dots on your face anymore either!” she rejoiced.
I beamed with pride, with the assurance that I had now crossed puberty.
In an attempt to look less Indian, I began to play even more aggressively with my hair color, exposing it to dangerous chemicals like peroxide that stripped it of its entire pigmentation. I would burn with envy when I read beauty magazines that stated blondes had all the fun when it came to hair dyeing. Black hair is too dark to pick up another color and therefore must be subjected to far harsher chemicals to lighten it before the coloring process. The increased exposure to chemicals as a raven-head also meant greater damage, for which the only remedy was chopping off frayed bits to make room for virgin locks.
During the times my hair was severely damaged, I would lay off the chemicals until it was restored to a healthier, shinier state before leaping back into the cycle of destruction, like the yo-yo dieter addicted to self-sabotage. One fine day during one of these in-between periods, a Goth chick in my college dorm saw my pitch black hair catch the light in a way that made it a deep mysterious blue like Madonna’s shapeshifting, ethereal coif in her Frozen music video. She envied me for having naturally dark tresses, while she struggled to keep up with coloring her blonde roots.
“Why would you want to look like everyone else?” she asked incredulously when I revealed my own challenges with hair color. “You look exotic.”
Before then, the idea of being exotic had never appealed to the insecure, awkward teenager in me. I was driven by the impulse to conform, often feeling shame at my otherness. Even South Asian standards of beauty, whether in Bollywood films or high fashion Pakistani bridal couture magazines, exalted Anglicized ideals of beauty. Fair skin, lightened hair, colored eyes. In the world view of countries colonized by Western imperialist forces, looking Nordic was exotic. But I was an American-born already living in the West, the land of immigrants and opportunities no less. I needed to feel proud of my heritage and my naturally tan skin that didn’t burn in the sun.
As for my hair, its natural hue was richer than any toxin-laden dye could have ever given me. It took the admiration of a young woman on the other end of the pigment spectrum to convince me that my mane was beautiful in spite of its diminished thickness—just the way it was, without hair dye and highlights, straightening or curling. And, to be honest, my father’s warnings were also gnawing at me. I couldn’t afford to lose more hair, or in my baby sister’s limited world view, my hair would be “anorexic.”
I enjoyed a wonderful ten-year run of appreciating my hair for what it was in its natural state, knowing that I had the tools and knowledge to make it look different if and when I desired. I loved how it contrasted against my warm skin tone, accentuating the black beauty mark on my right cheek, another one of my defining traits. Running my fingertips over the soft, silky coating that protected it after a deep-conditioning treatment became a welcome respite from long hours of clicking away hunched over a keyboard. My black hair became my trademark, lending an edginess of the alternative, counterculture variety, especially when paired with deep red lipstick.
From time to time, a friend or family member would point out strands of gray, but I was reassured of their scarcity when plucking them out felt like picking a needle in a haystack. I don’t know at what point exactly that the grays became more noticeable. These changes are gradual. All I know is I can no longer deny that I will need to start exposing my natural locks to the chemicals of hair dye once again. The only question is how much longer will I be able to postpone it?
They say that one should never be too specific in their prayers for limited ability to see the future. I asked my Dad recently if he had wished instead that he had prayed for my marriage directly rather than hair as a means for enticing fate to increase the possibilities. After all, the world has known many spinsters with gorgeous locks. Or for that matter, simply prayed for my overall happiness because marriage is no guarantee of personal lifelong fulfillment.
He paused for a brief moment before breaking into a guilty smile. “You’re a lot wiser than I was at your age.” His chest swelled as he drew a deep breath in, his eyes searching the air in front of him for some sort of vision that will help him conjure the perfect retort to my bursting his flawed logic. “But of course, you also haven’t been burdened by the worries of a bald child.”
I recently received my third disastrous haircut in a row. The first chop came as a drastic parting with six inches in the form of a bob that was supposed to make me look edgy and hip. Somehow the stylist managed to thin the volume at the tips of my hair and expand the volume at the top to an explosive POOF! that threatened to sting the fingers of anyone who dared to run them through the beehive. I didn’t cry. I knew it was just hair and would eventually grow back. Surely my predicament paled in comparison to the cancer patients who had absolutely no hair at all.
The second haircut was a shag, a haphazard slicing of sharp layers that was supposed to emulate the sleek look of the Marc Jacobs models gracing the runway during the winter 2015 season. Also a fail. Apparently so many layers do not flatter fine hair texture like mine, creating a limp, lifeless look that cannot be resuscitated with any amount of blow-drying. Maybe teasing, but who has time for that while maintaining a nine-to-five and pursuing aspirations to be a writer? And yet again, the tears did not flow as they had following hair mayhems in the past.
The most recent haircut is not as disastrous as the prior two, but is more of an attempt of damage control to allow my hair to grow into some semblance of a respectable shape. After the blow-dry I was certain I looked like Monica Lewinsky from the 1990’s during Clinton’s trial. The hairdresser laughed telling me I looked great. Of course. She wanted to be tipped, after all. On my way to the car, I was stared down by creepy, silver-haired men in the streets of the Marina, validating my earlier suspicion of being a doppleganger of the White House’s most notorious intern. They must have thought I was on my way to the Oval Office or were hoping I’d step into their mahogany executive lounges. And I still didn’t cry as I controlled the urge to burn them with a lit cigar.
It is only after four days of sporting this unsightly coif that I have come to realize that tears would have been useless in the face of creeping age. No matter how wonderful a haircut I would have gotten, nothing would have restored me to the prime of my youth. The fine lines, the joint aches, the stray grays cannot be masked by an epic hairstyle. Sure I may have some mileage left on me still, but the marketing machinery tells me everywhere I look that I am gradually slipping into irrelevance. A few more years on the shelf life as a consumable product when it comes to men, until I shall be irrelevant in this category, too.
But this is not something I feel like crying about either. A deep inner stillness tells me I am so much more than my looks. I am how I choose to be in the world and make my place in it. As a t-shirt of mine says, “It’s not how you look, but how you see.” I may no longer be the best looking version of myself, but I have been on a journey that has allowed me to see things from more angles than I had ever imagined in the sheltered cocoon of childhood fantasies. Whatever the state of my hair.