Off The Cuff: Cut short by the barber

I have encountered that single object that is far more intimidating than the dentist's chair. The barber's chair. Give me a man in a white facemask and a drill in his hand, any day.

Any day better than being held hostage under a white towel by a man wielding a pair of shears in one hand and a whole array of razors set out on the counter before you, the horror reflected sharply a hundred times in the mirrors around the room.

I've always maintained that dentists are rather selfish by nature, they are trained to sniff a patient's breath from behind the mask, keep the knees from buckling, or the drill from straying to the next tooth from the shock of it all.

But you are never given the chance to sniff out their own personal hygiene, I mean how could one, with the jaw gaping wide like Ali Baba's cave, and the olfactory mechanism gone into recess? But not being in the business of breath trading, I could live with such selfishness.

I'm generous, to a point. But I'll tell you who gives generosity a third dimension. The barber. Especially the talking barber. You know, the one who turns the shears loose, bequeathing it free will as it rampages through the thinning glade while he's loaned his tongue (with a lot of interest) to the man sitting in a plastic chair holding a newspaper he never reads, waiting his turn to sneak under the white towel.

My barber's a giver. He gives me a haircut, and what attention he has he cuts up and divides in so many parts between all those in the room. A very light trim means one thing to me and quite another to him. Everything's relative, including his cousin who works with him on the head in the adjacent chair and is similarly endowed with the gift of loquaciousness.

Just recently, I parked myself in his red mock-leather swivel seat and said mock-cheerfully, give me a very light trim, choosing my few words with care. That's when the man in the plastic chair chirped up and asked the room in general, very philosophically, what's the difference between film stars and politicians.

That's also when the attention rating my hair deserved plummeted from 100 per cent to one in two clicks of the scissors. Off went my man, snipping and sniping at will. MGR, Jayalalitha, Karunanidhi, even Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan, they all got discussed and dissected over my head. Tinsel and burnished steel at their irreconcilable best.

Food for the poor schemes were fondly recalled, dark sunglasses; the malnutrition of political vision juxtaposed with the obesity of greed…I think at some point I probably got swept up and transported on this verbal flood, because the next time I looked I noticed that my tresses had been ambushed.

There they lay, on the floor, scattered tributes to denudation. I panicked, but that was a mild reaction to what followed, because the conversation heated up and moved into Poe's Garden. I don't think my barber liked going there.

I didn't want him to go there either in such a frame of mind because he was at that point tilting my head back and picking up a razor to sharp edge my beard under the chin. It was as he stood there poised that the door opened a crack and the voice of the lookout said, municipality inspectors.

Quick as a flash he set the razor aside, whisked on a white coat, whisked away the hair on the floor with a large-handled broom, and in the morgue-like silence cut a perfectly straight hairline only inches above my Adam's apple.

That, my friends, has become my new definition of a close shave. If anyone's encountered the ideal silent barber - not the "dumb as in dummy" one - I throw myself upon your generosity. Give me his whereabouts. Meanwhile, I'm contemplating a ponytail.