July 20, 2012

From Barber to Hair Stylist

You could call even an American President, Bill Clinton for instance, a two-timing scum bag, an obnoxious lecher with a severe zipper problem, and get away with it. But, it would be unwise to call a barber a barber, particularly in Pakistan. You may invite the wrath of the Pakistan Hair-Dressers Association and the risk of a couple of cuts and nips by the man holding a razor in his hand and a frown on his face.

In the United States of America too, the barbers prefer being referred to as hair dressers, hair designers, stylists, salonists, artisans, crafters, creationists, anything but barbers.

Here are some fancy names of barber shops for men: Hair Design Studio; Hair Illusions; Hair Rustlers; Happy Hair; Joe’s Hair-smiths; Lord Jim; Hair Hut; Dynasty Hair; Hair Mystique; Noah’s Ark Hairstylist; Shear Artisan; Shear Progress; and Hair Conspiracy.

Such signboards that tickled your imagination are fast yielding to the general trend towards big business – the big fish eating up the small fish. Some chains of hair dressers have already emerged. Supercuts is one of them. When you have super grocery stores, super department stores, Super K-Mart, why not a super haircutting salon? Another chain is called Fantastic Sam. Sam may or may not be as fantastic as the name claims, but his TV ad certainly is. A seductive, curvaceous blonde is shown drawing the hungry looks of the men around the place. ‘Got to be the hair’, she utters. It is an effective ad with a cunning, tongue in cheek, message. Women barber shops are listed in Yellow Pages under the heading ‘Beauty’. That is actually the beauty of the compilers’ dexterity.

There is not a single name which does not attract your imagination. Here are some names picked at random from Yellow Pages: Genesis Distinctive (You might succeed in figuring out what it means; I couldn’t.); Royal Coiffures (The word ‘Coiffures’ is perhaps to give the credulous customer a feel of the French haute couture ); The Hair Revue; Hair Liberation; Hot Hair; Hair Event; Haircut Factory; Hair Happiness; Hair Dimensions; Hair Go Round; Hair Savvy; Hair Sensation; Hair Wigglers; Hair Crafters; and Hair We Are For Undercutting.

Then, there are a whole lot of shops that attend to ladies’ nails. They operate under equally fancy names; and of course charge as fancy fees for manicuring or putting on artificial nails. In one such shop, the amount quoted at a ‘special reduction’ was $18.00.

Any lady planning the opening of a new manicurist shop would have to chew her nails to the bone just thinking of a new fancy name!

As I have mentioned at the outset, one should meticulously avoid calling a barber a barber. In the tolerant society of America, your faux pas in addressing a hair dresser as a barber may be received by him with a condescending smile. But, he might give you a mystery hair-cut. Such a haircut may hold a most unexpected and not unoften as unpleasant a surprise for you. For instance, if you are almost bald, like me, he might give your head a Yul Brynner’s or Kojak’s look. To add wit to his impish dexterity, he might assure you: ‘Bald is beautiful, Sir. God made only a few perfect heads, the others he covered with hair.’

You might credit him with relieving you of the hair hassle for at least a few months.

If you are young and sport long hair and your voice carried a patronizing undertone while calling him a ‘barber’, you might be given another kind of mystery haircut. You might come out of his shop wearing the punk style, totally unmatched to your upscale job of soft-ware engineer. Or, you might look like an extinct Red Indian Chief with very short hair around the sides but a braided long, thin tail going down the back of you neck. The clump of hair on the top might be gelled and styled like spikes, giving you the distinctive look of a ferocious outer-space being.

If you have to stay in a hotel on a visit to another state, the barber shop there is the worst place to go to for a hair cut. For the barber knows he will not see you again for a long time. It doesn’t therefore matter to him whether the style crafted by him compliments your features or derogates them, whether the sideburns are even or not.

Pakistan’s first Foreign Minister, Sir Zafarullah Khan, had a terrible experience in 1953 in Ottawa. He went to the hotel’s basement barber shop for a hair cut and came out clean shaven. His beard, such an integral and distinctive part of his personality, had gone. The barber presumed that the VIP had crossed the Atlantic to reach North America by boat in a turbulent sea and had therefore had no chance of getting a shave. So off goes the beard. That evening at a reception in his honor, he was the center of attention of the community because of his new look.

I too had a somewhat similar experience in Montreal where I went to the basement barber shop to get a shave simply because my electric shaver did not plug into the round-hole socket of the antiquated yet aristocratic hotel room. The barber there, a Syrian Muslim, started immediately lecturing to me on Muslim brotherhood. Before I could even utter the word ‘shave’, he launched the attack of his scissors on my mane. By the time he was through with his lecture and my hair, which needed not even a trim, I was only minutes away from my appointment that morning.

The Syrian must have had it in his blood; his ancestors must have largely been orators. His bill for the uncalled for cut was six times higher than what I normally paid. I have since been wary of fancy names and ‘haute couture’ gougers.

A few years back, I noticed a small place with no pretentious name but just a small plaque reading Barber Shop. Peeking inside through the glass window I was convinced that it was indeed a barber shop.

I entered the shop and was immediately coasted to a vacant chair by an old fat man who, later on I discovered, was just a friend of the barber. He had retired a few years back and came to his friend’s shop to while away the time talking and joking. Tom, the barber, did not even ask me whether I needed a light trim, medium or a heavy trim. He seemed to know by experience. His tools were as antiquated as he himself was. The aluminum comb, the well-worn scissors, the old water-spray bottle, the round brush which must have removed hair from the necks of hundreds of customers, all took me back decades on memory lane when a hair cut used to cost 50 cents.

The fat man was gifted with a tremendous sense of humor and Tom had an appreciative ear for him all the time, indirectly egging him on to continue. The experience was indeed a treat for me. And, Tom charged me less than what I had usually been paying elsewhere.

A few years later, when I visited that place, I found that it had been taken over by a Chinese fast-food chain. Tom’s barber shop had evidently become anachronistic, outdated. It had to bow out. The owner of the new enterprise didn’t know what happened to Tom.

His shop was a remnant of the good old days when a barber shop was not just a business; it was an institution, a miniature club for exchange of news, gossip and advice. It made me sad, very sad.

arifsyedhussaini@Gmail.com