I interviewed a hair doctor the other day and the PR company that arranged the meeting later gave me a box of tablets for my receding hairline.
“Isn’t it a bit too late for that?” I joked, pointing to my head, and the accounts manager neither smiled nor laughed, just stood there staring at my large forehead, not sure how to respond to such a bigoted question.
For most of us, hair is a very important part of our being; the mop on top of our skull defines who we are and if we have lost it or beginning to lose a few strands off the mop, panic sets in.
The doctor said losing a few hair strands a day is normal and the only way to find out if it’s serious is that when your hair parting gets a bit bigger day by day.
I had never realised I was losing hair, maybe because my eyesight was also going at the same time. It was only until a roommate looked at the top of my head as I was washing up at the washbasin and remarked, “Hey, shiny top!”, that my toes curled in my shoes.
Losing hair was very awkward at the time as I was in my prime and as they say on social media today — it was ‘cringe-worthy’ and a ‘fail’.
What the hair doctor (who incidentally is known as a trichologist) said about the parting becoming bigger, was right. My parting then started shifting from somewhere up at the top of my skull, to somewhere near my left ear.
This way, I had more hair to comb, but it got nasty whenever there was a dust storm as my hair would literally stand on ends because of the erratic winds. Then I realised that if I looked right as I walked during a windy day, my hair would not get mussed up, just be flattened down by the wind. But walking that way gave me a stiff neck.
One day, a Saudi colleague came and whispered to me that he was going to Europe to get a hair transplant done. “It’s very expensive, do you know any cheaper place in India?” he asked.
I didn’t answer him immediately because I was thinking of my garage mechanic back home who was very good at quick-fix solutions. “You don’t really need this part,” he would say. “It is very expensive. What we can do is take this wire and bypass this ... come back after an hour.”
I then told my colleague I did not know anyone and that was a good decision or else he would have come back from my hometown after a hair transplant and killed me.
When I told my wife that I was going to see a hair doctor, she told me to ask him if the water here in the UAE was making her lose hair. I am not sure if you have seen a Japanese movie called The Grudge, but it is really creepy and it gave me shivers down my spine when I watched it alone at night. In this movie, whenever something nasty is about to happen, hair starts growing out of the walls or that’s how I saw it. Our shower stall is something like that scene in the movie. Maybe it is the water, maybe it is because of my grandfather, who carried an extra large handkerchief, to wipe not only his face, but also his sweating skull in the heat of my hometown, but I have become reconciled to the fact that bald is beautiful.
After the interview, I asked the doctor why hair is so important to people. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I remember sadly carrying the hair tablets in a bag as I left the hotel.
