I Traded a Poem for a Haircut
The barber wanted verses for his daughter's wedding; we settled in stanzas.
The sign in the window said HAIRCUT 250, and I had ninety rupees and a notebook full of poems nobody wanted.
It was the last Tuesday of the month, which anyone who has ever been properly broke will recognize as the cruelest square on the calendar. I had a job interview on Thursday morning. My hair had reached the stage where strangers on the metro assumed I held strong opinions about jazz.
Farooq bhai's shop sat wedged between a pharmacy and a store that sold, as far as I could ever tell, only zippers. Two chairs, one of them permanently reclined like a patient who had given up. A peacock sticker peeling off the corner of the mirror. A radio playing Rafi songs from somewhere behind the towels, and two glasses of tea always cooling on the counter, one for him, one for whoever fate sent through the door.
"Sit," he said, and I sat, because when a man holding scissors says sit, you sit.
Halfway through the first pass of the clippers, I confessed. "Farooq bhai, I have ninety rupees. I'll bring the rest on the first." He did not stop cutting. He met my eyes in the mirror the way barbers do, which is somehow more honest than face to face. "What is that?" he asked, nodding at my lap. "You hold it like a passport."
"A notebook."
"Of what?"
"Poems."
The scissors stopped.
"You write them yourself?" "Yes." "Good ones?" "Depends who you ask."
He resumed cutting, slower now, and for a while there was only the radio and the small wet sounds of the comb. Then he said, "My daughter is getting married on the twenty-ninth."
"Congratulations."
"Every time I try to prepare something to say at the wedding, my mouth becomes a desert. I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and produce the speech of a man being arrested." He put the scissors down and turned my chair a quarter turn, so we were no longer mirror people but real ones. "You write me a poem I can read to her. I finish this haircut, and the ninety rupees stays in your pocket. Fair trade?"
I would like to tell you I hesitated, weighed the offer, considered the dignity and ethics of bartering with art... I did not. I said yes before he finished the sentence, partly because I was broke and partly because the whole arrangement felt gloriously medieval, like being a court poet, except the court smelled of talcum powder and the king kept a comb in his shirt pocket.
I went home feeling like the last professional poet on earth. Somebody wanted a poem badly enough to pay for it in an actual service with a market rate. I wrote the whole thing in forty minutes.
It was terrible.
I did not know it was terrible. It had moonlight in it, and blessings, and a line about two rivers meeting that I was privately very proud of. It read like I had pulled a wedding theme off a list of prompts and filled in the blanks with syrup.
I brought it to the shop the next evening. Farooq bhai wiped his hands on a towel, held the page at arm's length, and read with his lips moving. It took him a long time. When he finished, he folded the paper carefully, respectfully, the way you fold something you are about to reject.
"This is a poem for anyone's daughter," he said. "Write one for mine."
I started to defend it and he raised the comb like a traffic policeman. "Beta, I have been cutting hair for thirty-one years. People sit in this chair and ask me to make them look like film stars. I cannot do it. I can only make them look like themselves, but properly." He tapped the folded poem against my chest.
A good haircut and a good poem do the same work: they remove everything that is not you.
So he told me about her. He made tea on the little stove in the back, the kind of tea that is mostly sugar and intention, and he talked while the evening customers came and went under his scissors.
Her name was Heena. She grew up in the shop because there was nowhere else for her to be. She did her homework in the broken chair, spinning slowly while she recited her tables. At five she was given the job of sweeping the clippings, and she refused to sweep them into ordinary piles. She swept them into shapes. Sparrows, mostly. Once, a boat. Farooq bhai said customers would stand in the doorway waiting, unwilling to walk through a sparrow.
At nine she cut her own fringe with the trimming scissors and wept at the result, and he sat her in the chair and repaired the damage and told her she looked like Sridevi, and she believed him for exactly one year, which he counted among his finest professional achievements. She takes three sugars in her tea and tells everyone she takes one. She is the only person he has ever allowed to touch the good scissors, the German ones, kept in a velvet-lined box like surgical instruments.
I went home and understood what I had done wrong. I had spent my whole notebook writing around family, circling it from a safe height, and the one time somebody asked me to land, I had produced moonlight and rivers. Nobody weeps at rivers. People weep at sparrows made of hair.
The second draft took four days. It had the spinning chair in it, and the repaired fringe, and the sugar she lies about, and the sparrows a father could not bring himself to sweep away. There was no moonlight anywhere. I typed it, then copied it out by hand on good paper, because it seemed like the kind of thing that should exist in handwriting.
He read it standing in the middle of the shop. A customer waited, half-lathered, and Farooq bhai read the whole page without once looking up. Then he touched his own chest, briefly, the way a man checks whether his glasses are in his pocket.
"Yes," he said.
That was the entire review. It remains the best one I have ever received.
He invited me to the wedding. I stood at the back near the cold drinks, wearing the haircut he had given me, which had also, incidentally, survived Thursday's job interview.
When the moment came, Farooq bhai stood up with the paper trembling slightly in both hands, got through the first line... and stopped.
The desert had arrived on schedule. The hall waited.
And then Heena, in full bridal red, crossed to her father, took the page gently out of his hands, and read it herself.
Out loud. To him.
She read her father's poem to her father, my words in her voice, describing her to the man who had taught me who she was, and by the time she reached the sparrows he was weeping into his wedding shawl, and so, somehow, was the DJ.
Nobody in that hall knew I had written it... and I have never been happier to be anonymous.
That was three years ago. The ledger between us has since grown into a small private economy. I have not paid for a haircut since, and he has never once run out of occasions. Four lines for his wife's birthday cost me a beard trim. A couplet for the shop's new signboard went for a head massage that nearly ended my career mid-week. Last winter I finally wrote something for myself, about his shop, about trade and tenderness and men who cannot say soft things without a piece of paper between them, and I entered it in a monthly poetry contest. It did not win... Farooq bhai heard the result, snorted, and delivered his lowest professional insult: "Those people cut hair with a ruler."
Some evenings I still sit in the broken chair while he closes up, and we argue about whether a poem should rhyme. On the floor between us, the day's clippings lie where they fell.
If you squint... and I always squint... they look a little like a sparrow.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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