I never noticed that I had lost most of the hair on my head until a colleague advised me to wear a cap when walking during the summer.
“It’s very hot,” she said, pointing to her cool, straw hat as we walked to our respective cars under the blazing sunlight.
For some reason, I never think of myself as being hair-deficient and when I get out of my flat after looking at myself in a mirror near the door, I am back being that teenager with a bushy, unruly head of hair.
Back in those days, just as I was entering the portals of higher education, there was no hair gel and you did not see young men fashioning their hair into tiny teepees with a pointy end. What I used was something called Brahmi coconut hair oil and it was well, oily and I smelt like a coconut sweet. If you wanted to be hip you would massage in a pomade called Brylcream and you would smell like the barber shop round the corner and you looked like a Bollywood star with shiny, bouncy hair, but you could never walk against the wind.
Why I have brought up this sad story about hair is because I read a report in Gulf News about some expats complaining that they were losing hair because of the water in Dubai.
They say that whenever they shower they see strands of hair in the bathtub, and to me it sounded like one of those really, creepy, Japanese horror movies. The Japanese directors are master craftsmen of this genre and in one movie had used hair to scare the unsuspecting audience.
The list goes on
One scene comes to mind. A deranged woman is lying on the bed alone in the house. She had apparently lost her mind, having earlier seen something horrible. As the evening sun sets slowly, the ceiling of the room starts to grow hair.
This scene should have warmed the cockles of the heart of any bald man or any woman who is losing hair, but it made you squirm as the ugly, wet, black strands of hair sprouting out of the ceiling and starting to grow down the walls.
Living in Dubai, I have found that expats complain about almost anything. It could be the increasing rents or the high cost of chicken thighs, the weather, especially when there is a sandstorm, or the lack of rain in this part of the world, or when it rains, the lack of proper drainage. The list goes on, but blaming Dubai tap water for your unlucky genes is something new.
So Gulf News took samples of water from various districts in the city and found that the expats’ complaint did not well, wash, so to speak. There were no adverse chemicals in the water.
I do not understand why people are making a fuss about losing hair. The other day I was watching an advert on TV about a shampoo that showed men going to take a shower after a strenuous game of tennis and lovingly holding a bottle of a well-know brand of shampoo, and I laughed.
I do not have to waste time washing my head and I save tonnes of money not buying shampoos, hair-conditioners, gels, brushes, combs. However, I have to go to the barber’s for a hair trim on the sides from time to time or else I would look like the pointy-headed boss in the comic strip Dilbert.
Recently, I noticed that I was putting on weight and an ungainly paunch and was not sure whether it was the drinking water in Dubai that was making me portly! Should I stop using water to cook my food, I wondered. It may have some hidden high calories and unsaturated fats.
Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai.
