I am a very good boy. Nobody is so good as I am. I am not sure whether I should call myself a boy, coz I don't look like one. I have lost 95% of my hair. And my face looks like that of a 50 year old.
Life was pathetic when I first discovered that I was turning bald. I can write a book on it. It is true. Nobody understands better the feelings of a bald person than the bald person himslelf, or another bald person.
It all started when I was in the 11th standard. It was aweful. I used to love my hair. My dad is bald. My whole khaandaan, at least 7 generations backwards is bloody-bald. But somehow, I had had this confident feeling that I was not going to be one. A classmate of mine in school started losing his hair when we were in the 9th standard. I used to make fun of him. Call him "taklu", "ganju"...lots of things...all in Hindi...coz mine was an English Medium school where nobody spoke english.
Though there were tons of dandruff and though the hair used to keep falling all the time, I never even dreamt that I could be bald. I don't know exactly when I first noticed, but whenever I did, I had lost a lot my hair and had pretty large bald patches on my head. It was like you get up one fine morning and discover that u've turned a female. My god! It was more horrible than that. It was like you lose the most important part of your visible personality and all so suddenly. Before long, everyone knew about my handicap.
11th class was particularly important those days. I am sure even now it is. The reason being the fact that it's in 11th that guys start preparing for the various competetive examinations they have to appear for at the end of the 12th class which will decide whether they'll be engineers or doctors or something else (this something is very uncertain at that stage). I joined 2 tuitions. One was with Khan Sir, for Chemistry. Another was with Rao Sir, for Maths and Physics.
Khan Sir's house was pretty far away...near Pratap Taulkies. I used to stay in a place called Control Blocks in the Railway area. Three days a week, I used to cycle from Control Blocks to Khan Sir's place. It used to take about 45 minutes. And I used to cycle very very slowly. The reason...simple:
The moment I discovered that I was growing bald, I stopped getting a hair cut. My hair grew in a very bad way. There were lots of unwanted hair on the sides and at the back, of my head of course, growing uglily, and on top the little hair that was there grew exceptionally long. I let the hair grow so that I cud cover the bald pathches. So every morning, it took about 30 minutes to get my hair style right...i.e., I used to pull upwards all the hair from the sides to cover the scanty area on the top. This could unfortunately be done only from one side. If I pull hair from both sides upwards, I'm afraid it'd look obscenely scary. So i decided to go ahead with this. Then there was the problem of the receding hairline in the front. So I used to pull in front some hair from the top, creating some fringe. There was no "maang". Rather there was one close to my left ear and everything was turning right from there. I used to oil my hair heavily. For 2 reasons...one, in hope that the hair that i'd lost will grow back...two, so that the hair I set at home would remain like that till I come back home. But this was mostly in vain. Coz, I wonder why, but when hair is long and scanty, even slight wind manages to blow it here and there. As I used to cycle from Control Blocks to Khan Sir's place, I had to ride very very slow to avoid my hair-style getting spoilt. I used to turn my head to the right and then turn my eyes to the left so that my line of vision was along the road and my hair suffered the least due to the wind. And most often, despite all precautions, a truck would come from the other side at full-speed and blow off everything. It was an aweful feeling. I never carried a comb those days. There was a reason for this:
I am very shy person. Rather I was, a very shy person. I don't know why. I was not like this when I was a kid. Really. I used to bathe nacked even in front of ladies. They used to watch me. I never cared. But now, in class 11th, something turned me very self-conscious. This falling hair was changing my entire personality. I was in deep pain all the time. If I saw someone laughing at a distance, I would imagine that it was about my hair. I started hating people. I used to get complicated feelings. Each time I combed, a lot of hair used to come out, making me almost cry. I would imagine how I would look at the end of 12th class...completely bald at that rate...I thought...I was not actually ready for all this...and it was hard to imagine someone getting bald when he is in school. And it was scary being a bald kid.
I hated meeting anybody. I hated seeing people. I rode my cycle very slowly. I bunked school. I couldn't concentrate on studies. I was brilliant in studies, but now I couldn't concentrate at all. Wherever I went, people looked at me as if I was an alien. Guys cracked joked calling me a "taklu". There was a guy called Tony who loved to embarrass me in front of girls. I hated combing my hair in front of anyone, even my parents.
There was a peculiar way I used to comb. There was a mirror in my room hanging on the wall. I used to carry another mirror in my left hand. With the comb in my right hand and the smaller mirror held on top of my head with my left hand, I used to comb, very cautiously trying to cover every brown area on my head with whatever hair that remained. Underlying this, there was a very vague assumption that the hair would remain like this the whole day without getting disturbed, which never used to happen. But I could not help not to make this assumption. I didn't carry a comb until I reached college. There was a reason for this:
One day Khan Sir, who used to take my chemistry tuitions, cracked a joke during his class. It went like this:
"If you are in a train and you need to comb u'r hair and u don't have a comb, just look around for a guy with least hair. Ask him for a comb and you will get one. The lesser the hair, the better are the chances that the guy carries a comb."
This went through me like Shri Ramchandra's arrow. There was pain all over me, while everyone else were laughing at the stupid joke. Many looked at me while laughing, including some gals. The guy sitting right beside me asked whether I had comb. I was terribly embarrassed.
Also there is a general feeling that only "bad boys" carry combs. And I always wanted to be a "good boy". So I didn't carry a comb in my pocket until I reached college, that's when I grew matured enough to handle a bald head.
Anyway, things got better once I was in college. I got used to a lot of things. I grew up. Comments about my hair didn't pinch me any more.
To be Continued...
