Haircut

By Karan Kapoor

"How many times will I have to tell you to get a fucking haircut?" are the first words
Kartik hears this morning. Awake for not more than a minute, he tries to shake away his chronic
morning headache which, he knows well, will calm only after a shower. His father, still in his
room, remarks: "Should I bring a mirror and show how fucking ugly you look?" Taking the car
keys from the key holder, he walks out of the room. He hates that the key holder is in his room.
It makes no sense to have the key-holder in the center room. He wonders why it's there —
probably because it wouldn't look nice in the drawing room, which they refer to as the first
room, for it's the first one to the entrance. It's as if he is destined to be disturbed by his parents
every now and again.

Without these interludes, Kartik's life is as featureless as a desert. He graduated three

months ago — his internship's over now and he refused the job, so he sits at home, curled up in
his bed, and reads away his blues. This is no great matter. Barely a day passes when his
father, or mother, does not say something hurtful. He is referred to as an old, sick man —
hunchbacked, apathetic, lackluster. There's love and care in a parent's scolding.

It wasn't always like this. Although Kartik doesn't remember most of his childhood, he
thinks, hopes, he was loved as an infant, as a lap child, when he learned to crawl, to fall, to
walk, to speak, to mimic. He does not think papa was violent with him when he was small. It
was only his mama then — the victim of papa's wrath. A casualty. Papa started hitting him
when he developed reason and started defending mama. He's eleven when it first happens. He
tries to save her and is hit in the process. Afterwards, he becomes the usual collateral damage
in his papa's military operations against mama.

Kartik thinks of most of his later childhood as traumatic, without finding its basis in
memory. His childhood is a huge void. When anyone asks him about his past, he can't seem to
recall any of it. He considers his forgetfulness a boon. At the same time, he thinks of his early
childhood as a golden time. Again, no basis in memory. Papa loved him the most. He is always
hearing from him how much he loved him. In that huge void, there are countless loud, hoarse,
drunk I love yous. He still claims to love him the most, but Kartik doubts it. There is no
pampering anymore. No chocolates. No dosa dinners. He often thinks of Marquez's proposition
that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good. He thinks otherwise.
Maybe he's too young to realize this artifice; he doubts he has learned to endure the burden of
the past. Perhaps that's reason he doesn't remember any of it. Could forgetting be thought of
as something you do as opposed to something that happens to you over time? What would you
have to go through to think it an active occurrence as opposed to a passive one?
 It is fifth grade. Kartik is gasping: Papa, I'm sorry. Won't happen again. Sorry, Papa.
Papa! He has been stealing pencils in school. Mama, during a fight about too much salt in the
food, mentions it in passing. Papa's focus shifts to him. A slap. A stream of curses. A  lump in
throat. Locked in the bathroom. Fear. Tears. Papa, Papa, Papa, he screams from inside.

Papa. This episode has reduced the word to a label. The next day, when he calls him
Papa, it's not out of love or respect, but due to subordination. He's too young to recognize the
bitter taste the word leaves on his tongue, but he knows something has changed. All the love
he's felt for him has vanished in one night, in the dark. Is this sudden disappearance the cause
of bitterness, or the effect?

Three nights later, he's lost his appetite. He doesn't want to eat anything. After a slap,
mama takes his plate with an untouched roti and a small bowl of aloo-matar to show to papa.
"You will eat it right now, or I'll make you!" A heavier slap. In his head, Kartik is telling himself
that it's going to make him hungry. It's for his good, he's told. Mama asks him to not cry, to
calm down. But she started this by cursing him for not eating. And now she doesn't want him to
cry? She asks papa to stop. Why is she asking him to stop? Doesn't she want that?
Regardless, he does not stop. She tells Kartik it's going to be okay. Those words can't even get
through the outer wave of his tears. The two people he lives with do not love him, thinks Kartik.
Or love him too much, as they say. So much that they can't see him go to bed hungry. Tears
follow slaps. Slaps follow tears.

Three weeks later, mama finds thirty-six candy wrappers in Kartik's schoolbag. Later at
night: "I found thirty-six candy wrappers in his bag." He's given a prolonged smacking, but no
tears fall down his cheeks. In the darkness of the bathroom, he feels no fear. Instead he feels a
strangeness in his skin. Apathy, Kartik knows now in his late teens, is a stronger effect
than crying. But in grade five, he's confused about everything. Does the fearlessness cause
numbness, or numbness fearlessness? Kartik is trapped in cause and effect. He wants to leave
behind the cruel world where everything is divided into binaries.

Another three weeks later, in a parents-teachers meeting, Mrs. Shalini tells the couple
that Kartik is an exceptional student, and especially good with Mathematics. That night, papa
and mama take him out for dinner. Throughout the evening, he's scared of making a blunder —
slipping a glass, saying something unacceptable, or eating the wrong way — and receiving a
scolding, but the night passes without any interlude. He starts studying with utmost devotion
and scores As in all his tests.

Two months after that, a dog bites him. He comes home crying, his pyjamas dirty. I hate
dogs, Papa, he says, weeping. A boy of ten, scared of dogs, scorns papa. They do not look at the
horrible wound on his calf. He's told to go to the bathroom to clean the wound. "You're worse
than a dog," Mama's caustic voice echoes in his ears as he's taken to the hospital. Mama does
not tell him the needle wouldn't hurt. The doctor asks him to close his eyes but he's too afraid
to do that. Though he's lying on his stomach, he's looking at his behind. He cries uncontrollably
each of the four times he's injected with vaccine. Later that night, papa brings a syringe home.
Papa's eyes make his point for him: if he doesn't do as he's told, that needle would be used. He
squirms at the sight of the needle papa holds against his eyes.

Papa. He's started avoiding that sound. A sound you make with your lips, without using
your tongue. If your papa were to cut your tongue, you'd still be able to say papa. Kartik avoids
addressing him altogether. He has discovered if there's one thing that makes him feel better
about his existence, it's stealing. He's started stealing things more regularly — pencils from
classmates, erasers, rulers, sharpeners, candies from the dairy shop in the street where his
mother sends him to buy milk. He feels unable to stop himself. He has no reason to either. He
loves nothing more to furtively take out a ten or a twenty-rupee note from his mother's purse,
and then burn it. He doesn't eat the candies he steals. He unwraps them and throws them on
the street on his way to school, or in the toilet. It gives him pure joy. How did he stumble upon
this wonderful thing? He looks back, tries to find the first time he did it, but fails. The cause is
forgotten — if not forgotten, suppressed — now, only the effect remains. He longs to talk about
this to someone, but he's afraid to be condemned. Papa's spanking has taught him
it's unacceptable. He wants to meet someone who understands his joy, this universal joy of
stealing. The more he's refrained from talking about it, the more he thinks about it. The more
he thinks about it, the more he desires to act upon it. It thrills him greatly, this illicit, forbidden
act.

Apart from learning how to steal without getting caught, how to stand up to bullies in
school, stay invisible in a class, solve all Math equations before anyone else, he's learned one
more thing. He's fifteen years old and he doesn't let his father hit his mother anymore. It's the
eve of his fifteenth birthday the first time he intervenes; he screams: Don't you dare hit her! His
eyes red, fearless. He grabs him by the collar, and pushes him back. Papa looks at him, stunned,
scared; mama fearful and uneasy. Their fears are distinct, as if lying on the opposite ends of a
thread. What mama feels is a fear of the future: what will happen next, will one hit the other;
papa's fear resides in the recent past we confuse as the present: how could my son challenge
me, has his authority vanished in this instant? Then the adolescent voice again: I dare you to hit
her.

He has no feeling for his mother, no pity, no empathy, nothing, but he finds it unjust for
his father to use his physical prowess on a person much weaker. He's not as tall as him yet but
he knows he has the strength to stop him. The girl in his class whom he likes very much says
often that women are no less than men. He likes it when he hears it from her mouth, her
characteristic dramatic flair making her more attractive. But he doubts her statement. It might
be true elsewhere, but in his house, the man's hand is thrice as heavy as the woman's.
 After this instance, each time his father raises his hand, he meets a defiant Kartik, all
ready to show he has grown up. After a couple of such encounters, his father stops attempting
violence against them and distances himself. It is then Kartik's life becomes featureless as a
desert. Though one must note that his life hasn't played out in the manner it is shown here —  A
leading to B leading to C leading to...It didn't move in a straight or a curved line or any other
diametric shape, nor does he remember it so structurally. As mentioned already, he barely
remembers it. Most people's conception of time is that it moves linearly. One could also argue
time moves in a circle, which is closer to Kartik's perception. He believes his lifetime is one
moment. But it's a belief that has stemmed out of his reading than experience. His poor
memory also has a great role to play. Not long ago, he noted in his journal that time is a dot,
and a dot is a circle with zero radius.

Nineteen now, he's figured out a way to make his life a little exciting. Every time he visits
a bookstore, he gets anxious to the point he has to steal a book — the irresistible urge, ecstasy
that follows. A compensation for an actual, anticipated loss. Usually, he gives these books to
friends or lovers. Ever since he graduated from school, he's shoplifted sixty-three books, only
seven of which he has kept for himself. These books remind him of manic memories, the look of
them transports him to that space of euphoria. He did it. He's worth something. If not
something substantial, at least not nothing. Shoplifting books and making people fall in love
with him — only two things he thinks he's good at. You only have to listen to people patiently,
and pay close attention to all that is happening around.

Nobody is in on his big secret. He does not talk about his family with anyone, nor
about his childhood. He does not remember it enough to be able to talk about it, he rationalizes
to anyone who cares to ask. Memory, like time, is another abstraction he muses about often. If
there were no memory, would there still be time? He knows his grandfather who he never met
lived his last years without recognizing anyone. But time still existed for everyone else. He still
got older, he still died. People witnessed his loss of memory, appetite, and finally life. What if
everyone were to lose their memory, would that make a difference? Would people still harm
each other? Without their past defining them, would people still hurt other people? Isn't it
our past, our history which gives us reasons to hurt one another?

No animal other than homo sapiens has an episodic memory. Why is he inflicted with
this curse? Chimpanzees forget events after twenty seconds. He's fourteen; in school he's being
taught he's evolved from a chimpanzee. That must be a lot of evolution, he muses. Goldfish
have an awfully poor memory, he hears someone say in class. That is why they move so much,
he thinks later in the day. Because they don't remember where they were going in the last
moment. He does not know the scientific facticity of this, thinks it's probably untrue, but allows
himself to believe it anyway. Like a goldfish, he moves from lover to lover, book to book.
 But if memory didn't exist, he wouldn't remember all the books he loves, all the
people he's kissed. Would memory exist without time, or time without memory? Is it memory
that creates the illusion of time? He murmurs he's too young for these questions. But if time
doesn't exist, isn't he also his eighty-year-old self in this instant? If time doesn't exist, then does
he and the chimpanzee he once was and the ash and dirt and flower he'll someday be not exist
all at once, in this very moment? How is that possible? Did the reading of all the books he's read
happen in one instant? If time doesn't exist, how has he read all that he's read, love all he's
loved? This illusion that we know as time, he concludes, is more important than anything else.
All these episodes are important. How would he ever know what to do without the knowledge
of his past? His history determines his present which determines his future. In that manner, it is
all so interconnected that it can't exist without the other. Just as a raindrop doesn't only
contain itself, it contains the whole sky and every other raindrop, just as a leaf contains the
earth and the sun and the sky, the present moment contains all that belongs to the past and all
that is possessed and hid by the future. One could not possibly exist without the other. Without
knowing, he is repeating Buddha's idea: the one contains the many and the many contains the
one.

His present contains his past, his father's past, his mother's past, and possibly all their
future too, but could he recall the future, and if he does, and if it's bright, will it make him feel
better? If time doesn't exist, isn't he already there? He wishes time didn't exist. But, in all
unhappiness, it does. Now, when a lover asks him how is life at home, he sometimes says:
unpleasant. It is a great understatement. Nauseating, mind-numbing, suicide-inducing would be
more apt adjectives. Calling it unpleasant is like a toilet cleaner referring to the smell of piss and
shit as an unpleasant odor. An absurd euphemism.

Usually, he listens to the unpleasantness of others' lives — childhood traumas of men

and women who he goes out with, without bias, without sympathy, but with understanding and
kind affirmations. His friends and lovers think of him as a great listener. Many have, at one time
or the other, referred to him as a healer. He knows his delusions — he knows he's no Christ and
he can't heal anyone. But some of what his rationality knows, his instinct disregards.

This one old lover he texts on certain nights. He tells her he wants to leave home. That
he'd like a place to live. The texts don't say he's weeping, but she knows. I'll have a house of my
own soon, she tells him, hold on for a little while. But on nights like these, he feels he cannot
hold on. Twenty-one, now, he still feels like a child. Not a child of nine, but a child of three.
Utterly dependent. Can't have a glass of milk without yelling for mama. He's always wanted to
be twenty-one. Not because it defines adulthood, as one would imagine, but only because
he's always liked the number. He's twenty-one and he cannot stay here for long. He longs to be
free.
 He's been planning to leave home for years, and actively so for three months. With the
help of an acquaintance in college, he knows a flat he can rent anytime now. He thinks as soon
as his father comes home drunk again, he'll leave. But he's been thinking that for over a month
now, during which his father has come home sloshed out a total of eleven times. He is looking
for courage. He's waiting for it to happen to him, like a miracle, or an accident.

What he more often admires, he lacks. He's been stealing money from the almirah in his
room where his father keeps his cash. The rich do not count their money, his father brags.
That's his boon. He takes out a five-hundred rupee note almost every other day, sometimes a
two-thousand rupee note. He saves all the money that the relatives gift him on his
birthdays and festivals. All the money an old lover he met online — a married woman who used
to pay him for his poems — gave him. Her husband beat her. She gave Kartik fellatio and her
husband's money as revenge. His relationship with that woman reminded him of a sentence in
a song. Every man grows up to marry his own mother. But he doesn't think he's ever going to
marry. Marriage is an exercise in futility. For now, he makes love to all his mothers but one.
Family, a failure. Fucking, a therapy session.

Most of the day passes by on the bed, reading Homer's Odyssey. The only time the sun
touches his skin is when he goes out to get a haircut. Whatever pleases my father, whatever
stops him from drinking. Little sacrifices do not cost much if they beget peace in the house. I
used to drink because of your mother, now I drink because of you. The words ring in his ears. His
memory acts up like his mother's anger, always unannounced, unwelcomed.

The loud clink of the keys on the glass table a few minutes before ten brings anxiety to
Kartik's limbs. The harbinger of madness. Fingers cold, the ice reaches his palms. Voluntary
shaking of the feet. Dionysius, absent in the epic, present in his house.
His heavy footsteps. Walking towards the bathroom. On the way, he stands outside his
room, looks inside. Kartik stares, screams: "This is not why I got a fucking haircut!" His father
glares at him for a moment, and walks away. In one glance, Kartik hears all his profanity. His
father does not own himself.

Perhaps, he doesn't either. Does anyone ever own themselves? He turns and buries his
head in his pillow, murmurs into it: this is not why I got a haircut, this is not why I got a haircut.
He feels his face getting hot. Abruptly, he gets out of the bed. He crouches on the ground to
take out his shoes from underneath the bed. Next, he pulls on a T-shirt hung on one of the
hooks on the wall and walks out of the house in anger. He stops in the verandah to put on
earphones to curb the awareness of his racing heart. As he gets out of the house, he raises the
volume of the music to drown out the noises of the street.

It is monsoon, but the streets are dry, the sky clear. Three streets away and a song and a
half later, he spots a man in his late thirties, dressed for a family function, smoking a cigarette.
Ignoring the cold way of anxiety filling his body, he approaches him. Taking off one side of the
earphones, he asks him: "Can I have a puff?" He's never had a cigarette before, but in this
moment he half-realizes why people must smoke. The man, without a word, offers it to him. He
holds it between his thumb and finger and takes a puff, and coughs the very next instant. He
looks at the man, embarrassed, expecting him to smirk, but the man is too somber. Without
saying anything, he takes out his pack and lights another one.

Kartik walks away with the cigarette in his hand. He never liked the smell of it. Never
liked is an understatement. He remembers getting irritated each time someone in class would
smoke during a break and then sit next to him. Desperate times, he thinks. Then follows it with
another thought: He doesn't have so much power over me as to make me do what I don't want
to do.

So often, thinks Kartik, we end up giving power to the wrong people. Isn't the
destructive quality of anger, jealousy, hatred arises from just that? That loss of power. That
surrender to the one who oppresses you. Each time papa hits mama, is it his blows which drive
him or mama's cries? And isn't it this surrender which makes them victorious, and us defeated?
In the name of love, we keep suffering. Kartik has always been full of whys, but one why
overruled his life: Why is it so hard to leave your family behind?

His step falters. He has a stone in his shoe. He shakes his feet and continues to walk. The
stone is still bothering him. He stops, takes off his shoe, holds it by its tongue and hits the sole a
couple of times on the road. The stone comes out and rolls away from him. At a distance, a dog
is looking at him. He puts on the shoe and walks toward it. Throwing the forgotten cigarette in
his hand, he starts humming. The dog stares, seemingly angry. Or perhaps Kartik's imagines its
anger. Fear distorts our perception of the world. This is it, he says out loud into the empty,
quiet street. This is it. The dog barks. Alright, alright, he murmurs under his breath, as if
responding to the dog. He turns back. Walks home. One last time.

He does not look at his father in the living room, watching television, a still block of a
man. He walks inside his room. Taking off his shoes, he breathes a louder breath. He picks up
Homer from the side table and keeps it back almost as soon. He switches off the lights and lies
down on the bed. He leaves home tomorrow, he decides. For now, he sleeps under the roof of
his father's house, his hair shorter than he likes them to be.