Kitcha didn’t speak. He just looked at me and I knew he knew how moved I was. ‘There is something else you should do,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Come into the water with me.’
‘Kitcha, I can’t swim.’
‘You don’t have to. We are going only a little way in.’
He took my hand and led me in. The waves licked at our feet first, then they broke against our knees and swirled around my thighs.
‘Now sit,’ he urged. ‘Sit in the sea.’
I was wet anyway. A certain recklessness swept me into doing as he asked. Ah, what shall I say, Smriti? You probably know how it feels, the buoyancy of water. How it leeches away all the weight that shackles your dreams. For the first time, I felt weightless. On an impulse I opened my hair and let the sea seep through it. My hair rose and my neck ceased to ache. I began to laugh. Softly at first, then loudly, as I paddled and splashed around.
Kitcha smiled and joined in, splashing water into my face. And, all along, like a creature set free, my hair swirled and floated in the sea.
When the sun began to streak the skies, I knew it was time to go. I looked at my wet clothes and hair and reality set in. What was I going to do?
I looked down on myself, at my wet blouse and sari, and felt dread wash over me. Why was I afraid, I asked myself. All I had done was splash in the sea. Was that a crime? And they, Ambi’s family, had never given me any reason to fear them. Besides, I had done nothing wrong. But I looked down at myself, my dripping clothes and hair, and felt fear swill through my mouth.
Have you ever known anything like that, child? The binding boundaries of those unwritten lines etched into your fibre. It is a greenish blue indelible tattoo that says what is proper and what isn’t. I had been improper. I was guilty. The tattoo throbbed.
The breeze dried my clothes. As for my hair, I plaited it quickly and bundled it into a bun at the nape of my neck. When we reached home, I bathed quickly and changed my clothes. By the time everyone woke up, the morning chores were done, the coffee perking. No one suspected my impropriety. Only my hair knew.
The weight of its wetness stretched the skin of my face. My mother-in-law looked up from her breakfast and said, ‘You look strained, Vaidehi. What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’ I smiled, shaking my head. The very action made my neck hurt even more.
‘She must be missing Ambi,’ one of Ambi’s aunts laughed.
I ran from the room as befitting a young wife and went to my room. I could neither stand nor sit nor lie down. My hair dragged me down to a private hell. Of your own making, my conscience rebuked me.
I pleaded a headache and stayed in my room all afternoon. In its darkened solitude, I undid my hair and let it breathe. As I combed its by now mouldy wetness, I found debris from the shore. A piece of twig, a length of seaweed, a couple of shells, and a minnow that
had entangled itself in my hair and been buried alive in its coils. I shrieked as its silvery side emerged. And then I began to laugh. I was a fisherwoman and my hair was my net. What would Ambi say when I told him, I chortled. I stopped abruptly. How could I tell Ambi or anyone else what I had done?
They wouldn’t approve. The tattoo throbbed again.
By the time my hair was dry, good sense prevailed. I would never again do anything so stupid, I told myself.
That night, when Kitcha asked me if I would go with him in the morning, I said no.
And yet, in the early hours of the day, when he stepped out, I was with him.
Kitcha smiled. I love that smile of your father’s. It has always tugged at my heart. It is the all-knowing co-conspirator’s smile. I will never tell on you even though I know all about you, it says. He smiled again and shook his head mock ruefully.
I punched his shoulder with an insouciant hand while the other was already plucking at my bound hair. I didn’t understand this creature I was turning into. I didn’t want to. ‘Don’t speak a word. Let us go.’
Kitcha and I went to the beach the next two days. Each day, while my hair fished the waters, I escaped its weight. On the bathroom ventilator sill, a collection of my hair’s catch grew. It was a secret. My very own secret that lit my soul. The celestial light was your father’s secret. The sea was mine. On our last day, Kitcha looked at me bundling up my hair and asked quietly, ‘Don’t you think there is too much of it?’
I nodded.
‘Why don’t you cut it a bit? Just a few inches…’
‘Oh no.’ I felt my eyes widen in shock. ‘I couldn’t. They would be most upset!’
‘How would they know? No one’s going to tell the difference.
No one will even realize the difference, but it would be that much less for you to carry around.’
Only Kitcha had sensed the unbearable burden my hair was to me. He has that in him. An innate sensitivity that allows him to slice through all the layers of pretence, all the clouds of deceit we cover ourselves with. He sees right through to the heart. He understands most things even if he doesn’t know what to do with that understanding.
Ambi was meant to come home the day after Kitcha left. If he had, I wonder now if my life would have stayed the same… who can tell? All it takes is one fleeting second for an entire lifetime to shift its axis.
Do you know the story of Abhimanyu in the Mahabharata? He was still in his mother Subhadra’s womb when Arjuna his father was being taught the Chakravyuha by Krishna. Poor Subhadra. She was a warrior princess but she had no interest in war strategies. Abhimanyu listened, as did his father, as Krishna explained how to break through the seven circles of the wheel formation. And then, before he could explain to Arjuna how to exit it successfully, Subhadra fell asleep. And so Abhimanyu, on the thirteenth day of the Kurukshetra war, knew how to invade the Kaurava army but was unable to withdraw once he was in the heart of the circle.
What was he thinking of as he rode into that circle? Such foolhardiness. Such self-deception. You see, Smriti, we are all like that. Sometimes I think the Chakravyuha is a metaphor for all deceit. We let our own desires trap us into deceiving ourselves. But we do not know how to extricate ourselves without losing the life we have chosen to live.
That Friday, I woke up feeling out of sorts. I missed the dawn by the sea. And being able to shed the weight at the nape of my neck. Perhaps, when Ambi was back, I could persuade him to take me to the sea as Kitcha did.
Friday was the day of the oil bath. My mother-in-law and sisters-in-law helped massage the warm oil into my hair. ‘Why is your hair so coarse?’ one of them, Rema, asked.
The seawater had coarsened it but I had no words to speak. So I smiled and said nothing. They loved that about me. That I seldom had answers.
‘It must be missing Ambi Anna,’ Ruku teased. ‘Sometimes Akka, I think Ambi Anna loves your hair more than he loves you.’
I still didn’t speak. Sometimes the very thought had occurred to me.
That afternoon the heat was unbearable. The skies were overcast. A grey settled on me too. A flat grey swath of despair.
That afternoon my hair felt even more dense and heavy. And it wouldn’t dry. I looked at the ends. Rema was right. It felt like coconut fibre. Not my usual skeins of silk. I felt a great disgust for it.
What was I thinking? I do not know, but as if in a trance I took the scissors from the sewing machine table and cut a foot and a half of it.
The skies heaved. A clap of thunder.
I saw the ends of my hair settle on the floor. What have I done, I asked myself in fear. What have I done? What if my hair never grows again? What will Ambi say? What will my father say?
I felt the ends of my hair brush my hips. It swung with a new lightness. What had once lain heavy and to my knees now became a gentle creature. I felt freer. I moved my head this way and that. The hair swung with me. Such headiness. I was once again floating in the waters of the ocean.
The rains began. Heavy piercing shafts of rain that enveloped the room and caused the silence in it to swell. I looked at my hair lying on the floor. I gathered it quickly and thrust it into a cloth bag and hid it amidst my saris. When my hair was dry, I braided
it and pinned it into its usual bun at the nape of my neck. No one would notice. No one would know what I had done. I smiled to myself. My secret was safe.
I realized that I was no longer Vaidehi with the downcast eyes. My neck didn’t hurt any more.
Ambi arrived two days later. He sensed a difference. ‘What is it, Vaidehi?’ he said, peering at me. ‘There is something… Is there something?’ The question in his eyes unsettled me. Ambi and I still hoped that I would become pregnant soon. We had been married for two years now. No one had spoken the word yet, but I heard it in my inner ear: barren… barren. Perhaps now things would change. My eyes rose to meet his.
‘You don’t seem so shy of me any more. I can actually see something of your face, apart from your forehead.’ I heard the teasing note in Ambi’s voice and felt something like relief course through me. Ambi was my husband, not my keeper.
In our bed as I lay nestled against him, I felt his fingers caress me in an absent sort of way. My hair swathed him as he liked it to. Then his fingers paused suddenly. ‘What is this?’
‘What?’ I asked, half asleep.
‘Your hair…’
‘What about my hair? I want to sleep.’
‘There doesn’t seem enough of it,’ he said.
‘I trimmed the ends,’ I heard myself say. ‘Just the ends. Ruku said it had split ends; it had turned coarse. She called it coconut fibre.’ I was blabbering, but something about Ambi frightened me.
‘Switch on the light,’ he said. ‘Turn around,’ he ordered when the room was lit up.
He hefted a handful of hair. ‘What have you done? You haven’t just trimmed the ends. You have cut it. How could you?’
‘It’ll grow back,’ I offered tentatively.
‘You didn’t even think of asking my permission?’
I didn’t know what to say. The words formed in my head: it’s my
hair. Do you ask me when you cut your hair every third Sunday? Do you love me or my hair?
But I couldn’t speak. I had never seen this Ambi before. This cold, aloof stranger.
‘It’ll grow back,’ I said again. ‘I am sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking of.’ I felt tears start in my eyes.
‘You deceived me. Would you have told me if I hadn’t found out? You made a fool of me. How can I trust you ever again?’
I stared at him, aghast. All this for a foot and a half of hair! ‘What are you saying? It’s only hair and it’ll grow back.’
‘Yes, it may. What if it doesn’t? But that isn’t the point. You flouted my authority. You betrayed my trust. You broke my heart.’
I felt the weight on my neck grow.
‘Do you know how long it takes for an inch of hair to grow?’ Kala Chithi asks. ‘A month? Six weeks?’
Jak hears tears in her voice. Then she clears her throat.
‘Kitcha taught me how to use the internet. He showed me how to find information. I know now it takes a month for a mere half inch to grow. But then I didn’t know how long it would take. I was frightened.
‘Each day I measured my hair. To see if it showed a difference in length. Each day I waited frantic with fear. All the stories I had heard came home to roost. That after a certain age hair ceases to grow. That it would be weak hair and it would fall as quickly as it grew. I tried everything. Hot oil massages. Hair tonics. I made vows and offerings to all the gods I could think of and I waited. Time had no meaning. For I measured the passage of time by my hair.’
Jak chews his lip. He thinks of those first days after Smriti’s accident. Of the waiting that he subsumed into a relentless stream of activity. Of the passage of time gauged by news from the hospital. Do women quantify time differently from men? Do women allow
time to rule them while all around men stride through their days grinding it into the ground? While he waited, what did Nina do, he wonders now.
It took eighteen months for seven inches to grow. For the first six months Ambi chose to punish me. I had to be taught a lesson, he deemed. For six months he didn’t speak to me. Six months of not even a smile. We ate together, slept together, even fornicated when Ambi had the urge, but he wasn’t the Ambi I knew or loved. I was never more lonely or desolate than I was then. My father wrote me a letter. He said he couldn’t believe what I had done. He said he wouldn’t come to see me till I was the girl he had sent to that home. He had never been as ashamed as he was now. And I was the reason why.
I felt my heart freeze. He was disowning me. Even my father.
At first I asked my mother-in-law to intervene. ‘Your son is angry with me,’ I said when she commented on the silence between us. ‘Won’t you tell him, Amma, to forgive me? Forgive my silliness.’