Locks of [Unrequited] Love: The Myth Of "Good" Hair

Shakeeda navigates my hair with her pointer finger, skimming the asymmetrical hairline and coaxing a snarl into submission. I study the African-themed border on the golden wall, trying not to flinch.

“I’m sorry. It’s a mess,” I say, leaning back to fix my neck into the crevice of the basin. Apologies have been a standard part of my salon regimen for almost 18 years now, ever since baby curls gave way to a chaotic mass of corkscrews that perpetually threaten to become dreadlocks.

“Girl, I’ve seen some things,” Shakeeda says, maneuvering her cumbersome body to the other side of the sink. “This is not a mess.”

Her words, like the nimble hands massaging shampoo into foam, are comforting. I grew up the frizzy black sheep in a family of Indian women with silky hair cascading down their backs. My cousins and aunts are oblivious to split ends and humidity and buying extra strong hair ties -- weddings and baby showers are like a cheesy L’Oréal commercial, every hair toss more mesmerizing than the one before.

My mother is no exception and spent most of my middle school evenings forcing me toward a patio chair with a blue bottle of Parachute coconut oil and unprecedented faith. The next morning I would scrub my head until the hot water ran out, worried that the pungent aftermath of her childhood Indian hair remedy would scare away Science class suitors.

Now, in my favorite Harlem salon, Shakeeda does a final rinse, drapes a black apron over my shoulders, and leads me to the workstation. I look at our reflection in the mirror, taking in her pleasant face; a large, flat nose fixed firmly between high cheekbones. Her hair, I deduce, is a weave, fixed tightly at the root. It falls in perfect, jet-black rivets to her round shoulders with no trace of defiance.

“You need a trim,” she says, examining my hair between her thumb and forefinger. “How long has it been?”

“About four months -- since October,” I say, proudly. I’ve been known to wait a year. Or two.

“October! October!” She throws her hands up. “You will come in every two months from now on. We’re not letting this happen again.”

I’ve already bestowed the woman with rare and complete trust, so I agree to almost everything she says. I will not wash my hair every day. I will go to the beauty supplies shop on 125^th street, across from the H&M, and buy the entire line of Cream of Nature products. And I will not relax my hair.

I will not relax my hair.

It took me eight years to not relax my hair. Our family hairdresser in Florida insisted on the chemical straightening treatment when I was in seventh grade, determined to run a hairbrush from root to tip without bristles breaking off the handle. She would do it for a special price, she told my mom, a flat rate of $350. I quickly agreed – disheartened by catching her despair via dramatic eye roll in the mirror when I would come in for a haircut.

At the time I was prone to masking my eyelids with Maybelline eyeshadow to match my favorite baby blue shirt. I had the seventh-grade version of a boyfriend, who I would chat with on instant messenger until ten o’clock. My best friend from the neighborhood had straight blonde hair. And my second best friend -- straight, dirty-blonde hair.

The first time I got my hair relaxed, it took six hours and half of the second Harry Potter book. People in the salon came to watch as Anita blow-dried my hair straight out until it stood on end like a lions mane, my tanned face a small oval in the center. My scalp tingled for days as if someone had rubbed acetone on an open wound. But it looked so damn good.

I wore it out, styled and long, to every class that month, including gym. I kept Herbal Essences hairspray in my backpack to spritz on extra floral scent. I felt like shouting down the halls: “Hey look at me, it’s the middle of a Florida summer and I still got this”. To top it off, my 13-year-old boyfriend was effusively supportive. “You look good,” he would mumble under his breath.

“You relaxed this?” Shakeeda shrieks when I recall the story that Friday evening. She holds up a wet spiral near my ear for emphasis. “This is great hair. People pay money for this.”

“People always tell me that,” I say. “Nobody would actually pay money for this.”

I’m about to launch into a rant comparing good to bad curls, but I bite my tongue. The last few years have been like a 12-step program in the battle of Ankita versus her hair, and I refuse to go back to a time when I preferred Britney Spears to Erykah Badu.

I had become a born-again hair virgin during my last year in college, days after my friend got drunk and compared my chemically damaged hair to a brillo pad. My friend Lynsey, who had recently liberated her own hair from weaves, gave me the final push I needed – forwarding me natural hair blogs and remedies involving honey and silk pillows. I was so chaste with my hair then that I all but gave up the straightening iron, blow drier and expensive serums.

Not everyone was impressed by my revolution. My family was visibly disturbed when I showed up to a wedding reception with my natural curls. “Did you even brush them?” My aunt asked in a hushed whisper as I got ready to hit the dance floor. I forced a smile, telling myself I was representing a whole generation of hair oppression, and proceeded to release my locks from a gasping butterfly clip.

Now, in solemn respect, I swallow the complaints, and ask my new fairy godmother for more hair advice.

“You know your hair feels it when you don’t show it love,” Shakeeda says as she shears the tendrils on either side of my eyes. “It’s only good to you if you’re going to reciprocate.”

I stop to consider this idea of my hair as a needy lover, and it’s clear that I haven’t had the best relationship. My last year before moving to New York was spent living in a backpack in northern India, away from the reaches of my affluent relatives. I slept and worked without air conditioning in 118 degrees, only aware of my physical appearance when my students would point it out in English class.

 “Ankita ma’am has very bunchy hairs,” 12-year-old Kajal would say, mapping out her subject and object.

“No, no,” I would say in response. “Hair is the same whether it is singular or plural.”

By the end of the year half my hair had fallen out from bucket baths, chlorinated water and a horrifying lice epidemic in our classroom. I wore my hair in a braid so often, I didn’t realize that the ends had frayed, or that there was a knot at the base of my neck so convoluted that it would eventually have to be cut out with scissors.

When I showed up in New York to attend Columbia University days after, I was quickly shamed into a haircut. I chose carefully– skipping the Upper West Side windows with Sarah Jessica Parker photos, and settling in a chair after Google searching Turning Heads Salon, rated best for “ethnic hair care” in Time Out magazine.

And that’s how I ended up in the slow, steady hands of Shakeeda, who doesn’t mind that it’s almost 7 p.m. and we’ve just started to blow-dry my hair for tomorrow’s job interview.

“You know, if you really love your hair, you would wear it natural tomorrow,” she says with a wink.

“I’m not there yet,” I tell her. Maybe soon.


Note: This essay was written back in March 2012. Just had to clarify so my employers don't think I'm interviewing for jobs. 

Brown Guys, Bicycles, Mug Shots and Newsrooms

While the country reeled from a slew of horrific events this week, there was a sub-conversation going on around the Boston attack. Muslims on Twitter started to hope the terrorist wasn’t part of their faith – a digital prayer heard by The Washington Post, among others.  And a cluster of other voices, some South Asian like me, remembered how they were treated post 9/11 at airports, on the street.

My family was part of what some call security and what some call ethnic profiling. A few years ago, my dad was asked to disembark a flight after a vacation with my mom, presumably because his tan skin and facial hair made a fellow passenger uncomfortable. His car window was also smashed with a projectile beer can in a part of Florida that isn’t known for cultural diversity.

As I  followed both the unfolding of the Boston attacks and this culture clash, another, more petty, event came to mind. When my bike was stolen a few weeks ago, I met my bike thief in a failed attempt to get it back (more on that in a different blog). When I called the police right after,  they asked me to describe the young black guy who I had seen riding away. I did, in my adrenaline-pumped state, to the best of my ability.

But I looked at the picture my friend took of him later and I realized I got it all wrong. He was black, yes, but I told the police the wrong clothing, colors and height.  Just like the suspects, after the Boston bombing, were described as brown or black with a backpack. Only part of that turned out to be correct.

Now I’m going to try to make a graceful segue into an insightful article my friend shared with me earlier this week from the magazine Jacobin. The author, Laurie Penny, posits that objectivity in journalism is both unattainable and unnecessary. She said only middle-aged white men can be seen as objective in the West, since women and those of other ethnicities can be perceived as projecting the bias of their background on their work.

I’m not going to support or refute the idea of objectivity – it is something I test in daily life. But at a conference I covered this week someone suggested I must know more about doctors and medicine because I’m Indian. My family jokes that I write about “Indians, in India, doing Indian things” more often than I need to. And being a woman and minority has come up in several conversations with sources, in both negative and positive light.

As someone engaged in understanding my background, I am definitely sensitive to the subtleties and differences between Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis and Indians. Not to mention the vast differences between states in India, which can seem like different countries. This sensitivity, both learned and intrinsic, has proven a boon in journalism. It makes me hyperaware of people’s roots, of their worldviews.  But it's also limited. It didn't make identifying my bike thief any easier. And it didn't mean I could have guessed how the Boston story would unfold.

I think we miss the point when we talk about diversity in newsrooms, and the missing link adds to the messy journalism we saw this week. This is not a narrative solely about ethnicity. There are scores of non-minorities who are meticulous and careful to learn the differences between “shades of brown” and religious sects, just as there are plenty of minorities who don’t look too far into their own backgrounds.

Real diversity in a newsroom requires a depth of thinking and knowledge that takes time and attention to cultivate. I'm not sure where that stuff is getting lost -- maybe in education or job applications or networking, but I want to find out, because the amount of misinformation and misguided thinking I saw this week was disheartening. And if we're perpetuating cultural confusion in media, you can be damn sure it's being played out on our streets.

I guess my point, and hope, is this: when we’re telling a story – whether it’s one of violence or unity, or both – we need all hands on deck. And those hands should be a true reflection of the best of the world that we live in to make any sense of the truth.

Experiment 2: The Art of DC

Tabla/sax/beatbox concert at Atlas Theater

My parents took me to a good amount of concerts when I was growing up -- Jackson Brown, Don Henley, Sting, U2, Zakhir Hussain, Pandit Jasraj etc. It was a mix of classic rock and classical Indian music, kind of like Concert for George, which embodies both the raag and rock of my upbringing. I eventually peppered their taste with my own flings: the Backstreet Boys, Maroon5, and eventually Ani Difranco and one random night with Styx.

Partly because of this, I've always subscribed to the idea that art is one of the few things worth paying for -- concert tickets, books, paintings, instruments. These, along with travel, are worth my paycheck, and make for an easy sacrifice of things like fashion, makeup, cab rides and expensive drinks.

As my second experiment this year, I spent the last few weeks discovering DC's art, in all it's forms. I attended slam poetry events, visited the Hirschorn twice for an Ai Wei Wei exhibit, perused the National Art Gallery with a teleguide, listened to jazz, spoke to street artists from Nigeria and Northeast, saw a tabla-sax-violin-beatbox concer at Atlas Theatre, and went to a handful of photo exhibitions.

Nat'l Art Gallery

It isn't hard to find art in this city. You just have to stay off the Hill and say yes to every invitation you get, every flyer you see on a lamppost. And suddenly there's a 15-year-old kid standing in front of you reciting a poem about the emotional and physical abuse that daggered through his childhood,  making your entire body shake because you can't lift your fingers to snap when someone's soul has taken over the theater.

You learn that a man's curated pile of rusty rods and portraits of his middle finger were strong enough to have him detained by the Chinese government, and that the swiftness of a painter's brushstroke can speak volumes about his mental, physical and political state. There's ancient, and new, and accidental, and ruined. There is art from the poor and  rich, and  from men who decided to equate a smaller "package" with masculinity because they had control of the industry.

DC Youth Poetry Slam

The art immersion was a reminder about creating. About writing stories even when nobody will read them -- stories that are an extension of daydreams and reeling thoughts on long train rides. About making compositions on my tabla even if I'm a novice, because those beats are just as instructive as the ones penciled in my book.

I think it's cheesy to say I discovered art this month. I never lost art, whatever that word means, and I've always valued the delicate design and rhythm of the places I've lived. But I also think that an intentional focus on that graffiti in Shaw and the guy at the farmer's market with pen sketches has shed light on the District's relationships. It's a chronicle of the city's heartbreak and strength and violence -- and it's told through acrylic, wood, word and the absence thereof.