Soon, though, she would be short-haired. Amid the milling shoppers, Rajaram’s sharp instrument emerged unnoticed. It went snip, once, quickly and cleanly. The plait dropped into the cloth bag, and he disappeared, having delivered one more fellow human of the hindrance that, unbeknown to her, was weighing her down.
At bus stops, Rajaram chose the woman most anxious about her purse, clamped tight under her arm, its leather or plastic hot against her sweltering skin. Semicircles of sweat would be travelling like an epidemic across her blouse. He would join the commuters, another weary worker returning home. And when the bus’s arrival converted the queue into a charging horde, the nervous woman hesitated at the periphery long enough for the scissors to do their work.
He never operated twice in the same marketplace or at the same bus stop. That would be too risky. Often, though, he returned empty-handed to the scene of his crime (or beneficence) to listen to the bazaar talk.
For the first little while there was nothing. Probably, as he suspected, the women were too embarrassed to make a fuss. Or maybe no one believed them, or thought the matter not serious enough.
Eventually, however, quips and wisecracks about lost, stolen, or misplaced hair started to sprout. One joke making the rounds of the paan shops was that under the Emergency, with the slums cleaned up, a new breed of urban rodents had evolved, with a taste not for rotting garbage but for feminine hair. At the docks, mathadis unloading ships cheered the exploits of the mysterious hair-hunter, convinced that it was the work of a lower-caste brother extracting revenge for centuries of upper-caste oppression, of Strippings and rapes and head-shavings of their womenfolk. In tea stalls and Irani restaurants, the intelligentsia wryly commented that the Slum Clearance Programme had been given a larger mandate due to bureaucratic bungling: a typo in a top-level memorandum had the Beautification Police down as the Beautician Police, and now they were tackling hair as crudely as they had tackled slums. The inevitable foreign hand also put in its appearance, in the form of female CIA agents spreading stories about missing coiffures in order to demoralize the nation.
“Since everyone was joking about it, I wasn’t worried,” said Rajaram. “My confidence grew, and I thought about expansion.”
The hippies, whom he had long regarded as perfect but impossible beneficiaries, became the focus of his ministrations. He discovered that in the early hours of the morning they lay in drug-filled slumber around the dealer’s addaa where they bought their hashish.
Relieving catatonic foreigners of their locks was child’s play. If someone among them happened to open his eyes and see a companion being sheared, he assumed it was a hallucination; he giggled stupidly, or whispered something like “groovy, man” or “wow, real cool” and went back to sleep after scratching his crotch. Once Rajaram even cropped a fornicating couple. First the man, who was on top, and then the woman when, halfway through, she mounted him. The rocking and pumping posed no problem for the hair-collector’s expert hand. “Oh man!” said the man, excited by his vision. “Far out! I see Kama, grooming you for nirvana!” And the woman murmured, “Like, baby, it’s instant karma!”
Rajaram felt things were finally looking up for him. He welcomed the invasion of foreigners, unlike the conservative section of the citizenry that complained about degenerate Americans and Europeans passing on filthy habits and decadent manners to the impressionable youth. As long as the aliens possessed hair down to there, shoulder-length or longer, Rajaram was happy to see them pouring into the city.
Around this time, beggars reoccupied their places on the pavements, as the Beautification Law ran its schizophrenic course and grew moribund. The hair-collector’s professional eye noticed immediately. Of course, with his business flourishing, he no longer went after the beggars’ dirty, knotted hair. Some, recognizing him, would call out to him, requesting their free haircuts, but he ignored them.
“And if only I had continued to ignore them,” said Rajaram, sighing heavily, “my life would have been so different today. But our destinies are engraved on our foreheads at birth. And it was beggars that brought about my downfall. Not the beautiful women in bazaars, whom I was so scared to approach. Not the hashish-smoking hippies, who I thought would beat me up one day. No — it had to be two helpless beggars.”
Rajaram paused, eyeing the cashier-waiter who was smiling at them from the counter, still hoping to be invited to share the story. The tailors did not acknowledge him. “We know all about the beggars,” said Ishvar quietly. “Why did you have to kill them?”
“You know!” exclaimed Rajaram, horrified. “But of course! Your Beggarmaster — but I didn’t! I mean, I did … I mean — it was all a mistake!” He hid his head in his hands upon the table, unable to look at his friends. Then he sat up, rubbing his nose. “This table stinks. But please help me! Please! Don’t let — !”
“Calm down, it’s okay,” said Ishvar. “Beggarmaster doesn’t know about you. He only mentioned that two of his beggars were murdered and their hair stolen. We at once thought of you.”
Now Rajaram looked injured. “It could have been another hair-collector, you know. There are hundreds in the city. You didn’t have to think of me straight away.” He swallowed. “So you didn’t say anything to him?”
“It was none of our business.”
“Thank God. I meant the beggars no harm, it was such a terrible mistake the way it happened, believe me.”
One night, while he had been out on his rounds, he came upon two mendicants, a man and a woman, asleep under a portico, their knees drawn up to their hollow stomachs. He would have walked right past them, except that the streetlight revealed their hair. And it was beautiful. Both heads glimmered with a full-bodied lustre, a radiance he had rarely seen during his extensive travels. Hair such as this was the stuff that advertising executives’ dreams were made of. Clients would have fought to feature it — its brilliance could have promoted products like Shikakai Soap or Tata’s Perfumed Coconut Hair Oil to new heights of profitability.
But how strange, thought Rajaram, that such a treasure should adorn the heads of two shrivelled beggars. He knelt beside them and gently touched the shimmering tresses with his fingertips; they felt silken. Unable to resist, he heaped them in his hand and revelled in their texture. His fingers stiffened in sensual agony, as though they would steal the secret of the shine and softness.
The beggars stirred, breaking the spell. Rajaram remembered his professional duty. He took out his scissors and set to work, starting with the woman. For the first time in his career he felt regret. It was a crime, he thought, to separate hair this gorgeous from its roots — its magic glow would fade, as surely as the blush of a plucked flower.
The locks came away in his hand. He twisted the tresses together and packed them in his cloth bag. Then he worked on the maris hair. It was virtually indistinguishable from the woman’s.
Just as the hair-collector finished, she awakened and saw him crouched beside her, the scissors glinting in the dark like a murderous weapon. She let out a heart-stopping shriek. It woke the man, who released his own bloodcurdling yells.
“Those screams,” said Rajaram, shuddering as though they still rang in his ears. “They frightened me so much. I was sure the police would come and beat me to death. I begged the beggars to stop the noise. It was all right, I said, I was not going to hurt them. I clipped a lock of my own hair to show that what I was doing was harmless. I pleaded, I pulled notes and coins out of my pocket, and showered money on them. But they kept on screaming. On and on and on! It drove me crazy!”