Karishma Beauty Saloon

It happens only in India. It's official.

I was walking past Vyapaar Kendra in Sushant Lok looking for a place to shed my locks, which for me normally involves a nice leafy tree of some kind, (The leafier the tree, the less the chances are of bird crap being assiduously massaged into your scalp) when I happened to pass a garish sign board with the aforementioned inscription.

The sign was of the ubiquitous photoshop orgy variety. I smiled to myself. Saloon-salon all the same in India, I thought indulgently, marveling yet again (check out my little note on pepper masala dosa in April) at the orthographic liberties this prude nashun affords itself. I obviously haven't learnt my lesson yet, because it suddenly became apparent to me, as my eye meandered through the numerous gradients and drop shadows, that the badly airbrushed face under the mop of hair soaked in Revlon Red, was that of a man. I almost jumped. Closer inspection revealed a Shah Rukh here and a Fardeen there, cruelly beheaded and firmly embossed on twinkling golden stars.

Curiosity got the better of me and I edged closer to the glass door, ready for any handbags that might be thrown my way. But I needn't have worried because the door was invitingly swung open by a fair skinned Punjabi boy, who I could have sworn was rubbing his chin lovingly in front of the mirror in the last Gillette ad. The latest Hindi film song blared from a Sony Hi-Fi in the corner undaunted by the noisy air-conditioning. Fat men sat in various stages of recline on high-backed rexene chairs and back-brushed barbers in frilly shirts and pre-faded jeans attended to them with blades in their hands, minor Michaelangelos chiseling away at seriously heavy pieces of stone. A blood speckled Ajay Devgan chased a bad guy on a precariously placed TV overhead.

“Haircut and shave saar?” said one dapper Michaelangelo, showing me to the chair right under the TV. Obviously I looked like I was badly in need of both. I politely refused the shave, but asked him to use the 'machine' on my hair since I was in a bit of a hurry. The 'machine' is a clipper that most Indian saloons, especially air conditioned ones , use to deal with frumpy customers whose unexciting demands reduce their dexterous coiffure art to assembly-line work.

He expertly sat me down and reclined my seat and before I could protest, a big colourful sheet with a Kareena Kapoor 'Kambakht Ishq' poster emblazoned on it, was draped on me and fastened around my neck. I was just getting used to this when I realized I didn't like Michael's manners very much.

“Losing hair saar?” he said as the 'machine' conked it for the tenth time. I was about to swear at him but I contained myself. To make matters worse, the clipper was something of a dinosaur and was yanking out more of my hair by the roots than actually cutting it. I decided to opt for the traditional scissor and comb approach before I was rendered hairless permanently by a tactless and insensitive moron.

A little later, once Mike had proceeded to the shaving-the-sideburns-etc stage of the haircut, and I was suddenly noticing bald patches all over my head in dismay, I heard the music in the Ajay Devgan movie above reach a crescendo. Ajay had finally caught the bad guy and was looking a little wan from losing so much blood, but was beating the hell out of a goon twice his size anyway. Film criticism aside, what was beginning to bother me was the fact that the pace of Michael's shaving was moving to the rhythm of Ajay's kick boxing. Resisting Michael's firm grip on my neck to look in the mirror, I glanced at his face and noticed terrifyingly that my barber's eyes were firmly directed at the TV. At one point when Ajay was firmly launched in mid-kick, and two helper goons were queuing up to take their respective hits from his merciless cowboy boots, I felt Michael's razor, which had become super deft by now, shave a little to close to my ear for comfort, and I was forced to break his trance and tell him sternly to concentrate on the job at hand.

I left Karishma's with a halfway decent haircut. In a fit of undeserved benevolence I even tipped Mike for not cutting off my ear. My impending baldness gives me nightmares often though, and those times I really feel like kicking Michaelangelo's ass.