Hair

My father was terrified of hair. Not all hair. Only the kind of hair that used to belong to a scalp but had ceased to continue its residence there. So he was scared of loose hair lying around in places where they had no business to be in.

Have you noticed something about loose hair? It is never pretty.  It could have belonged to Helen or Aphrodite but once one of them comes off their heads, it ceases to be beautiful. There is something disgusting about that singularity. The possession of a lock of the beloved’s hair is completely understandable. The possession of a single hair is not only bizarre but possibly unintentional. Intentional possession is even more bizarre.

Let’s talk about a single hair. And let us talk about death.

My grandmother was ninety when she died. I was not sad. Ninety was a good age to die. It is neither climactic like thirty two or anti-climatic like one hundred and thirty two. Her hair was raven black even on the day that she died; raven black and long. It used to reach her knees when I was younger. She asked my mother to cut it off when she was eighty-nine. Said her hands were not strong enough anymore. She couldn’t comb her hair. My mother argued that she wouldn’t need to comb it herself. She and I would comb it every other day, alternatively. No one in our family had inherited my grandmother’s hair and my mother was determined to preserve it.

You see, this is when we realised that she had rarely combed her hair before that. Did people in the past not comb their hair like we do now? Because the hair started coming off. Off and off and off. And we were scared. But mostly, my father was terrified. There were ugly loose strands of hair lying around everywhere for a while. It was on our pristine white floors, it was in our fragile basins, it was on the bedsheets- entangeled with the fur of our dogs.

I asked my mother to stop using my comb. My father asked my mother to confine the combing to one room of the house. My grandmother kept asking my mother to cut off her hair.

I often wondered what happened to her hair when they burnt her. I have this strange fantasy that white hair is like dry wood while black hair is like greenwood. That’s why people die when they are old. You see, black hair would simply refuse to catch on fire. So what did they do to her hair? Was it ugly or was it beautiful when it refused to burn?

I was forced to spit out the water that I was drinking one day. There was an ugly hair tangled hopelessly around the mouth of the bottle. I tried to pull it off but it seemed to be embedded into the  plastic grooves. It had no end.

One loose white hair.