Our Own Confession Box

Time spent at a traditional barber shop can be a vicarious experience of so many hues. It literally gives you an insight into the life of so many people on a platter. Like it or not, you are destined for this experience if you have hair on your head or otherwise.

Let’s not make the mistake of confusing the barber shop I am talking about with that of a modern-day salon. The one I am talking about is known more as a social institution than for the basic grooming service it offers. Two rows of seats, a wall-to-wall mirror with pictures of calendar gods and goddesses providing oversight to your grooming process, and a TV or a cheap sound system blaring out local hits characterizes them. An hour of grooming including half an hour of waiting time can set you back maximum by a hundred rupees even now. 

Many those days shaved once in three days and had a haircut once a month. Being recognized and acknowledged by the barber was treated as the first certificate of an adolescent into his manhood. He would be considered a man and a man enough if he in the later years gets the offer of a waiting seat and is given a pan or included in the rounds of tea order unasked. That is one of the methods by which a man in our societies left his urine marks on his territories as being someone important. Those days the service comprised of recognition, acknowledgment, respect, elaborate talk on various issues both local, national, and personal then a haircut or an odd body hair shave and a spine-chilling message to end the session. The quality of haircuts at those times was given the least priority and people were supremely confident of their appearance in spite of their oddities.

Traditionally, barbers, as a clan were the ones who could carry any potentially lethal weapon nearest to the jugular of the most powerful person in that area, and his massage skills, gave him the access to the most sensitive spot that every man tries to protect after perhaps his eyes. Scores of stories and hearsays had the shrewd barber as the manipulative character at its center. His closeness to the kings and such power centers made them develop their art of glib talk to keep the powerful engaged while being groomed. It gave them the enviable access to the powerful ears too. To plant a suspicion for mischief or gains or to extract a personal favor. The trait had become genetic and would have continued had the disruptive culture of new age salons not come up.

People would stroll in with scant disregard for the person on the seat. Pick up a comb or a pair of scissors from the tray on the ledge in the front and start to give themselves a groom while picking up a small or a serious chat. The one silently sitting in the waiting chair for the last half an hour would randomly choose his unsuspecting audience and target his opinion on some issue that he discovered in the newspaper, without bothering to check if the issues interested his audience or not. Doesn’t matter if it didn’t interest him, as there will be someone else who would catch that thread and the discussion will continue ad nauseam. One was free to join and exit the discussion anytime as the barber as the moderator would keep the discussion stoked with his wisdom and quips long enough. Regulars chose their timings. Mornings are the usual rush time. Sunday was the lean day and Mondays and Thursdays were the leanest. For many, the trip was more social than anything else. They chose the crowded timing few who were not very socially adept would choose the lean times.

Don't know why barber shops are kind of confession boxes for many. A bar with a good bartender served the same purpose in the West perhaps. Today, I was privy to simmering tension between a man and his wife. The man talking to his wife over his cell phone chose to get up immediately without getting a haircut to mete out instant justice. By this time he was out of the doors, he already had made his intentions and plans public. After being exposed to the cold, dust, and fog in the morning yesterday, a land agent was lamenting how he is down with a bout of cold and chest congestion. His misery seems to be never-ending as he was just recovering from a surgery he had to endure to rupture an abscess on his Hydrocele (sic).

This place of social interaction headed by the lead barber himself was no less than a social institution itself. Our cities till some time back were dotted with such shops. They were known by the names of the barber, not by the shops’ names. And fortunately, some still exist as the shadow of their former glorious bests. Our preference for conspicuous consumption in the name of hygiene, style, and comfort is depriving us of experiencing what is called glib talk. I won’t say much about the voyeuristic pleasure we derived from peeping into others’ lives as collateral.

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