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“What happened to your hair?!” my friend Minerva at the City Engineers’ exclaimed as soon as she saw me after long years of absence.
“Why? What happened to my hair?”
I hardly ever see my hair even if I looked at it eveyday in the mirror. So I was curious what she was seeing.
But as soon as I said that, she was very careful and just gave me a measured reply. “You used to have such thick, black hair when we were together,” she breathed to my ears and did not say much more. Just a few days after I met Minerva, I saw our picture together in the mountains of Marilog, wearing our windbreakers with the mountain fog as a backdrop. My hair was scandalously thick and black. Just as it was in the photo of me as a six-month old infant in my grandmother’s arms. Whose hair is that? The babysitters used to say and giggle.
I simply thought that my hair was so thick that my head looked even bigger than my body.
Hair suddenly became our topic when Prateeh and I met in Manila this month, our first meeting in 12 years. We were about to part when I broached the subject of hair. Finally, it was from Prateeh that I learned what Minmin refused to say--that I already lost what used to be such a thick black hair.
I used to have a problem with my hair when I was growing up.
For it was only much, much later when I began to understand that it was not really my hair that was the problem, it was the people around me. In the place where I grew up, women--Mother, aunts, women neighbors--used to have only one concept of an ideal hair. It has to be straight and black and easy to control.
My hair was thick, wavy--even curly at times, if you allowed it to grow at a certain length. I used to have a picture as an infant with long curly tresses but the aunts did not like it. Kulot. And in our place, people never allowed hair to grow long. “You will look older,” Ma used to say. Older, when I was five or six years old, simply meant ugly. At least, that was how I took what the grownups meant.
So, Ma would push me to go to the hairdresser to have my hair cut. Most often, the hairdresser would have a problem. My hair had a wave just somewhere near the ears; and wavy hair, at least in our village, meant difficult to control. Unlike the straight hair of my sisters, my hair would not follow whichever way you combed it. My hair was unruly, had a mind of its own, would not follow directions. In other words, a rebel.
So, the hairdresser would cut the hair just before the length when it begins to wave; and that meant, cut it even shorter than it normally should. The hairdresser had nothing but high praises for my sisters and mere silences to me. Needless to say, the ensuing haircut would be very unflattering, even ugly. Most of my childhood, I roamed around planet earth feeling ugly and out-of-place. A cast out; a perennial outsider.
There was a time when I began telling Sean at breakfast, “I used to grow up thinking I was an ugly duckling until I discovered I was a swan.” He and Ja looked at me. I showed Sean the picture of me as an ugly duckling and he did not recognize me. “See?!” I said. “I’ve already turned into a swan!”
It was much, much later, liberated from the constraints of home, that I finally began to grow my hair long. Later, I could no longer stop to have it cut because I hardly had the time. To control its thickness, I had it straightened, rebonded.
But nothing lasts forever.
Age sets me thinking about my hair now and the people’s attitude towards hair. At the recent gathering, I watched how Iris let her hair be in all its glory. Prateeh, too, said her hair, once wavy, had developed real curls. She merely untied it without a fuss as soon as she reached the session hall where we all gathered. She seemed puzzled why I could not let my hair down. Why I could not untie it in front of everyone. I still hear voices in my ears telling me that hair is bad, hair is dirty.
Suddenly, I longed for that thick, black hair vilified by the world that only wanted straight hair. I failed to defend that hair.
