![]() ![]() ![]() This cousin informed us younger ones that an essential rite in Hindu Bengali weddings - the wedding ceremony lasts several days - involves the brides washing the feet of her bridegroom and drying his feet with her hair. ![]() The dates of individual births and deaths were associated with natural events, such as earthquakes and fatal floods, or with historical and political events, for example, a massive-scale, British Raj–engineered famine in the early 1940s and hangings of nationalist freedom fighters. ![]() No one in our comfortably middle-class neighborhood did. Even though my generation was the first in our family to have been born in a hospital rather than delivered by a midwife at home, we did not have birth certificates. She was eight or ten years older than I was I can’t be sure. The oldest girl cousin in our large household, a know-it-all teenager, had a practical explanation for why Hindu Bengali women were required to have thick, waist-length hair. But as a child, given my scanty, secondhand knowledge of Manu the Lawgiver’s definitions of ideal hair, I was convinced that my thin hair was a symptom of moral flaws. As an adult, I have treated myself to head massages in upscale hotel spas in China, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. #BRAHMIN WIDOW HEAD SHAVE VIDEO SKIN#But now the very memory of my mother’s nurturing fingers kneading the oiled-slippery skin on my head, her favorite fine-tooth comb sliding and smoothing tangles, the gentle press of her knees as they supported my slack-muscled bookworm’s back, brings on surges of guilt and pleasure. I, an ingrate daughter, resented every aspect of her hair-enhancement rituals, especially having to sacrifice precious leisure time when I would rather have read novels. Every two weeks, a half hour before she shampooed my hair, she would slather homemade yogurt on my head to guard against dandruff. In addition, she was always on the lookout for the harder-to-find hair oil pressed from a berry called koonch in Bangla, because it was guaranteed to grow new hair. Sometimes she switched to green amla fruit oil, not only because eating the tart amla fruit, with its sweet aftertaste, was known to control rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis, increase intelligence, and improve eyesight, but because the oil processed from it fostered hair growth. She would sit on a chair, with me squirming on a low stool in front of her, and she would part my locks, strand by strand, in order to work pink hibiscus-scented oil into the follicles. My mother expended a great deal of energy every morning, massaging hair oil into my scalp to increase blood circulation and revive fatigued follicles. I too had my head shaved as a young child, but my follicles did not produce thicker, blacker hair. To ensure the growth of thick hair, girl children in our community have their heads shaved around age four or five in the belief that the second, permanent growth will be stronger and fuller. Decent men were to avoid women with hairy bodies, women with reddish hair, and women with bald or balding scalps. Manu the Lawgiver dictated incontrovertible dos and don’ts on all aspects of Hindu domestic life, including the type and quantity of body hair and head hair desirable in women. My iron-willed grandmother, who had been born in the nineteenth century, insisted on the family’s following the unbending rules of social comportment laid down in the ancient text The Manusmriti, circa 1500 BCE, popularly referred to as the Laws of Manu and ascribed to Manu, the First Man. Romance and RitualĪs a child growing up in Calcutta in a traditional Hindu Bengali extended-family household, in which all adult women (except my widowed grandmother) and all girl cousins had long, strong, glossy black hair, I developed an unhappy relationship with my own fine, wispy hair. To find more books that pique our interest, visit the Utne Reader Bookshelf. Romance and Ritual by Bharati Mukherjee is one of those essays, and an interesting look at the relationship of women to their hair in the Bengali culture. Me, My Hair, and I (Algonquin Books, 2015) edited by Elizabeth Benedict is a beautiful collection of essays from a truly dynamic cast of contributors. The one thing that’s for sure is that hair matters a lot. And on a smaller scale, there is hardly anything more omnipresent in our individual lives - we grapple with our hair everyday. So much of a woman’s identity is tied up in her hair: large scale issues of family, race, religion, culture, motherhood, politics, professionalism, etc. Ask a woman about her hair, and she just might tell you the story of her life. ![]()
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