Hair Line…s

I woke up with a start, to the sound of water…thought it might be one of those rainy, shadowed days. I then saw the trail of ants on their regular bootcamp sessions…I stared at them for a long time,they creeped out to the open window from my greenish bedcover. Black and Brown Ants. Suddenly caught with an urge to destroy, I killed two of them. Poor souls departed into the shadowed day…
My mobile cried loud, it is 6:00. I tossed back with negligence, it was a sunday. Not to bother the wails.
On the wall was a line, a not-so-thick black line. On the cream paint, it shone. Of course, Sunsilk Black makes hair shine…but I thought they die when they fall off. So that was it. Hair. I pulled it from the wall and dropped it on the floor. Another broom session and baby, you end up in a rotten namma bengalooru garbage bin.
I picked up a book. Collection of Poems by Anita Nair.
There again, I saw dead cells scattered. A entwined mass of hair. Black, Red and Brown.
I sighed as the image of Kareena Kapoor and the hair colouring ad whisked its way in my mind. I made a mental pledge not to colour my hair again.
I picked the dead lovers from the pages of the book, flew them off to the floor again. Somewhere between the lines, my eyes gave up and I fell into a mass of entwined coloured hair.
I tried blowing them away. Years of Sunsilk and Years before of Coconut Oil had made them strong. They refused. They stuck to me, like green fungi on old bread. I pulled them away from my body…they were sticky now…
I cried. My project manager came and told me to concentrate on pulling it apart. I tried. This effort, will this be recorded in my timesheet??? I wondered. No, I need to concentrate…I jumped on the heap and they jumped with me.
Suddenly water drenched me, I felt cold. Now for some shampoo, on the dead cells, I poured, Sunsilk Black with sunflower extracts…to make your hair bounce, shine…the TV was turned on and I kept trying…
It was hair…and hair…

Book Review For A Change…

On a rainy Sunday evening, Norah Webber came into my life. She was an inmate in a destitute home. She, unlike other inmates was not there because someone sent her there, but of her own will. Her mother had passed away and her brothers did not want her anymore. She along with the Kind Edward VII dinner set and all her clothes became a part of the destitute home.

When Anita Nair talks about Norah, we feel surprised. There is so much of vitality in the girl, we think. She is so different…she hates the destitute home, yet she carves her own niche in the home with others. She detests the food they serve, she would have preferred toast and eggs and…to the idli and dosa that Sister Katherine serves.

Then one fine day, Norah becomes famous. Her photograph is published everywhere. It won a photographer a prize! Norah is elated. She is his lucky charm, and from then on Norah waits for him to pay a visit to her. He comes every Saturday…and they talk and laugh for hours. The other days, Norah waits for him to arrive, she thinks of topics to talk to him.

Then on a salty summer afternoon, she finds her picture hung in the notice board. The picture that won the man the prize. Then Norah realizes, she was not the same anymore. As Anita Nair puts it, “…strangly hair, wrinkles. Lines and blotches, eyes wakened, hands that are tying and opening knots in a handkerchief, he hasn’t missed a thing, even the liver spots.”

The Heart of a Gerund is perhaps the most achingly beautiful story Nair has ever published. It develops slowly with well-rounded characters adorning corners of a destitute home. They don’t live within the words, they exist. But with callousness unmatched, Nair, careful not to make them live, writes this story with a background, surprisingly clichéd.

This story along with many others appears in her collection of short stories, Satyr of the Subway . A fresh appeal lingers in all the tales. Nair blends witch tales, traditional values and moral issues with post-modernist ideas like bisexualism and the like. There are intense feelings conveyed through words. Openness in language, carefully chosen words, which do not make one feel so, blending of cultures, experiences covered up in the mask of characters, Nair sure has taken effort to pick her subjects.

Satyr of the Subway is a must read, if you still linger somewhere in your memories of green fields and mother’s warmth. The characters stay with you, the words stay on…and yet, there is no uneasiness, only the charisma of lives, well-lived.