One uncle looked at me and laughed. New style huh? Rather insensitive and rude some would say. He knew it wasn't intentional.
Another looked with alarm and cautioned me. Show it to the doctor. It can still be cured.
Another looked at me intensely and exclaimed, "What happened to you?". Then he added sadly, "You're still still so young. So unfortunate". Sigh.
Yet another noted how my father had gone through it too.
And yet another was worried about how my future would pan out with it. Would I have a future? Who would give me a job? Who would consent to marry me? All pertinent questions clearly.
A slightly younger man was more optimistic. I have it too, he admitted without any qualms. It'll be alright. I believed him rather easily.
My affliction clearly inspires a lot of horror and concern in most people. I'm just 20 years into this wonderful life and this!
Well I will spell it out for all of you to know because I always have been a true believer that total and complete frankness is the best policy. It allows for unbridled communication and should there ever be a misunderstanding, you can always say you put everything on the table and could have done no more.
So here it goes. I have a receding hairline. I'm 20 years old and it's receded quite far. Very far. I'll pause and wait for that to sink in.
A friend of mine insisted that I name my rapidly-expanding bald spot and I decided to name it Kandahar after the province in Afghanistan, large part of which is covered by the Registan Desert. My own Kandahar is a small patch of land, rapidly expanding, where nothing grows and nothing will perhaps ever grow.
I'm very often asked when it all began; a question to which I give indeterminate answers. Oh, it's been going on for a while. Quite some time. The honest answer is, I really don't know. For as far as I can remember, my first response to someone (so concernedly) pointing out that my hairline is receding was to reply with a hint of sarcasm and a hint of humour "Oh you noticed it NOW?"
I would put the exact onset at somewhere around the age of 16. It sunk in really quickly as I always had very thin hair and it was one ubiquitous detail in the excellent gene-set my father handed to me so I knew it would come some time. Many relatives had predicted it the day my mother decided to marry my father.
Initially my reaction was surprise. Not to the balding but the reaction to the reaction of others to my balding. I was a free-spirited kid in my own world, studying hard to get somewhere, watching football and cricket, curling up with a book or hanging out somewhere with friends every time I got the chance, rarely troubling everyone or being too naughty and here suddenly people were taking an interest in my hair, of all things. They volunteered information. Go to this doctor in so-and-so-halli or so-and-so-nagar, he's really good with these cases. There's a good hair transplant place I know. You can go there later. Maybe before your marriage. Mmmmm hmmm. I'm hungry, got anything to eat?
Mostly I was bemused. The reaction of others to my reaction to their reaction to my balding was usually an air of wisdom, a demeanour of "Oh my sweet summer child, you are so ignorant and happy in the face of this adversity that threatens to consume and override your whole life." Mmmmm hmmm sure. I didn't quite get what you had to eat again? Some chai would be lovely too.
Then there were friends. And I can tell you, they were the best. It was a laughing matter to them and very very quickly it became a laughing matter to me. And to this day that's all it is. The seriousness and alarm associated with it still bemuses me. I've met people (you know who you are) who are shocked that I can continue living normally and happily with these "condition". Calm yourself, hair isn't so essential for survival.
People can be rude though. There's two kinds of rudeness. The first kind is people who want to bring it up but are trying hard to veil it with courtesy and politeness. I am used to people bringing it up directly so I find it hard not to laugh at how hard they're trying to seem like they're not actively interested in the topic. You can ask me about it, you really can. You can cast doubts over which girl will ever like me and you can crack jokes about my "real age" and I'll laugh along with you. I appreciate creative humour.
Then there's the second kind of people who are unabashed to bring it up at the instance I meet their eyes. My first conversation with a friend's brother went - Little bro, this is Lokahith. Hi nice to meet you. Hi, premature balding huh? His tone was akin to someone saying, "looks like we're in for some rain, huh?". I was thoroughly nonplussed before I saw the funny side of someone actually using those words in the first ever words they spoke to me. I had a hearty laugh with my friend (you know who you are, KS) who apologised on behalf of his brother. It was nothing.
Another instance was a friend of mine, 3-4 years older than me, who I ran into after ages. He looked at me shell-shocked and said "Dude, what happened? You looked so good when you were young. You look like your dad now. Why have you become like this?" Sorry if I offended man, it wasn't voluntary.
At the insistence of my father, I visited the local homeopathy doctor and asked him for a solution to my patterned hair-loss (I wouldn't have minded a colloid either :P). He, for some reason, shone a torch onto my scalp and flicked my hair about before pronouncing, "nothing can be done about it. What is gone is gone. You can delay the rest but it is inevitable." No words have put me more at peace than that. If I couldn't do anything about it, well I could not worry about it (not that I'd started) and the others could continue worrying without it bothering me. Else I'd have been left with the underlying feeling for the rest of my life, every time someone mentioned it (every day, maybe thrice an hour) that maybe I could have "cured" it. None of that.
Is it hard to ignore? Of course it is - simply because it is mentioned so often and so incessantly. Annoying at times, mildly irritating at times, passes over my head most of the time. I am certain if man was still a hunter-gatherer species and I was in that society where my fellow Neanderthals are so busy hunting for food that they find no time to point at my forehead and chuckle, I would never have independently given much thought to my steadily broadening forehead. Now though, it is something I live with daily and I embrace. One of my favourite silent games is to preempt a coming bald/age joke. I'm right more often than not.
A random observation I've made is that the number of advertisements for anti-balding oils, creams, pills etc. is far higher on city billboards and internet pop-up advertisements than on television. Fairness creams, for example, are widely advertised on TV. I can't think of a reason why.
One of my father's friends happened to work in a soap company and was part of their marketing team. He once explained to my father how they "sell hope, not soap". Let me expound. You will never hear a soap advert say, "Use our soup and you'll be clean and healthy" or "use our soap and your skin will look fresh". They add, "use our soup, you will be clean and healthy and so your son can go to school daily and get top marks and be the best in his class" or "use our soap and your skin will glow so you will look beautiful and you'll stand out among your friends and all the men-folk will notice you". These messages are either overt or are an obvious subtext, like a man's heading turning when a woman using the particular soap walks by. These advertisements are designed to work on a very primitive, basic and emotional need in our lives - a need for our children to do well or to be popular in the social group.
The narrative is similar for fairness creams and anti-balding products. But there's a difference. The soap company isn't branding anyone as beautiful or not beautiful, clean or unclean. It merely addresses the aspirations of individuals who wish to be considered these things.
A quintessential advert for a fairness cream is about a girl who is dark-skinned living life normally and after using the fairness cream over a short period of time, suddenly she is deemed attractive and the men flock to her. Doesn't this, very very blatantly, imply that dark-skinned women aren't attractive. That dark-skinned women need to become fairer to lead better lives. Here, the branding is on a natural characteristic of a person that cannot be helped. A person is born dark-skinned or with a genetic tendency towards balding or obesity. Such advertising is akin to racism. In fact, it should be considered racism in my opinion. If nothing, it's putting a label on people because of something they can't help. Like calling a person suffering from depression anti-social.
The narrative of the bald man whose marriage proposal is rejected but accepted the next time post-usage of an anti-balding product or whose "confidence is low" but suddenly is a confident, star public speaker because of some hair on his head is everywhere. You see, the man's confidence is low because your first advertisement showed a bald man living an inferior life because of his baldness and his life suddenly turning ideal when the baldness is removed and most crucially, nothing else is changed about him. Just the baldness (or the skin tone). Then you feed him nonsense about how his confidence will improve if his baldness (or dark skin or obesity or numerous other things) is removed. The market, through media, creates its own demand and feeds off insecurities created by social pressures which are themselves also created by the media.
Also, isn't in the interest of an anti-balding cream manufacturer to keep bald people bald and retain them as customers? Why then, would their products work? If there was one product above all else that worked, a chemical or something, why isn't it everywhere in the public sphere when people world over "suffer" from baldness? From my maid-servants to my relatives to friends to large corporations (Dr. Batra's, for the 986th time, I don't want to visit your clinic. And how did you know I'm balding? Or did you just send the message to everyone so they'll recommend you to me?), everyone has at one point offered or suggested to me an anti-balding product. Keeping my thoughts from the above paragraphs in my mind, I have rejected every single one of them in favour of just not giving it any thought. And no, I do not wish to say I am the hero of my own story, "the man who chose to reject all products and live through the horror of a receding hair-line." It's just not at all a big deal if you wish not to make it a big deal. It's shouldn't even be a "thing". It's laughable.
They do say the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh in equal measure. While I can not vouch for the bit about measures, I can tell you when the Lord taketh some of your hair, he giveth a few notable perks. There's the general behaviour of people you deal with - autowallahs, shopkeepers, waiters, bank clerks etc. There's a lot more respect and you are taken very very seriously indeed. Auto fares aren't quoted very exorbitantly to me. Shopkeepers usually give me my items first before attending to people who look younger to me but are perhaps a little older than me, They don't want to keep the old man waiting and make him grumpy. People speaking with respect initially takes a little getting used to but then feels very good.
There's the unfortunate people who aren't respected to the extent that someone speaking to them with respect surprises them. I'm speaking about waiters and cleaner-boys at small restaurants, maids, house-keeping staff etc. These are people who are usually older than me or perhaps my age. I speak to them respectfully and given the age gap, suffix sentences with anna or bhaiyya. Since I look older than these men and women, they feel that I'm being extra respectful, far more than they are used to sadly and are immensely grateful for it.
Of course, these are my impressions but I'm pretty sure they're not too far off the mark.
A receding hairline is also an excellent conversation starter. There's never an awkward moment when there's so much to discuss. First signs, steps taken to counter, members of family who have it, how it feels and a whole world of topics to discuss. When I meet friends after some time, "It's gone back more" is always one of the first forms of greeting.
One of the biggest shocks is the first time that some petulant little kid dares to call you uncle. You stop dead and take stock of your life. Everything flashes before your eyes. You ask yourself if your childhood is behind you, life has gone on further ahead than you've realised in the midst of your fun and games. People are calling me uncle and what have I achieved so far! Nothing.
The second time, you just mutter angrily. Once, after a boy said "thank you uncle" when I caught a tennis ball and returned it to him, I walked up to him and demanded of him through grit teeth - Am I uncle or anna?! Thanks anna. He was terrified.
With time though, I got used to it. Why last summer, I had a pleasant conversation with a stranger on a bus. I was on vacation and was inquiring about local weather and culture and other things. The guy looked about 15 years of age and referred to me as uncle throughout. When he was about to alight, I asked him what he did and I learnt to my amusement he was about 3 years older than me. I was so tempted to tell him my age and watch his reaction but I decided against embarrassing him that way so I let him go on with his merry life imagining he'd enlightened a middle-aged man about his local culture. I turn around every time someone says "Uncle" now.
If I was of a more poetic bend of mind I'd go so far as to say how losing hair is a lot like life itself. You keep on losing hair. It keeps happening irreversibly. You think you can do something about it but actually you can't; it has a mind of its own and takes its own course. Others always have more ideas about what to do about it than you yourself. You never know when it can hit you, when it can surprise you. It has its ups and downs, pros and cons. And in the end you learn a lot from it. And however your hair was, at the end of it you're left with nothing. Just like life.
But I'm not so poetic so I won't draw such parallels. It's a thing that's happening to me. And for all the fuss, it's not a big deal. It does give me a topic to write I think my longest blog post ever.
Cheers