~ Rekha ~ I met my friend, Rekha some seventeen years ago in a beauty salon. Rekha was the hairdresser there and I had gone to the place as a client. No, it wasn’t any of the famous parlours of south Kolkata but I chose that place because it was bang opposite my daughter’s nursery school. I was a lecturer in a morning college then. I left home very early in the morning, children would be still sleeping. My daughter was then just three and I often felt guilty for not being able to drop her to her nursery, like most of her friends moms did. I missed her morning face a lot. My son was a little above seven. My classes used to get over pretty early, much before noon. I never felt like going back to the empty home. So, from my college I would like to go to my children’s schools. My son initially was very happy to see mummy at the tiffin break, waiting near the playground, with a new pencil kit or a packet of chips. But he soon outgrew that thrill and confided in his father, one night,’ Mumma should not come to my school so often. My friends laugh at me and it is also loss of play time for me.’ I had no other choice left with me but to go to the younger one’s nursery and wait outside the gate. While waiting there one day, I discovered this beauty salon, on the opposite pavement, above a fancy gift shop. I crossed the tramlines and walked into the place and that is when, Rekha and I met. I was not very familiar with the beauty business then and so I asked for a simple hair trimming and nothing else. I soon started to visit the parlour quite often, sometimes for a face massage, sometimes just for a shampoo. I took my daughter there after school for her haircuts too. The owner of the salon, from someone, came to know that I was the teacher of the college her son went to and so I became a privileged customer there and the moment I stepped in, she would make an announcement, ‘Teacher didi has arrived’ and order her senior hairdresser Rekha to attend me, leaving aside, whatever work she was busy with at that time. I have been going to that same salon for more than seventeen years now and had been to no other place. Rekha and I, literally grew old together. I always thought that Rekha and I must be contemporary but it’s difficult to guess the age of a Nepali woman from her face, we all know. She called me ‘didi’, as is the custom in our country and I too always referred to her as Rekhadi. My children completed school and went to college and then started to work. Rekha’s children too finished school and got married. We used to talk a lot about home, the kids and at times about other matters of life, too. Rekha always brought Pashupatinath temple prasad and dried amlaki powder for me from her home town in Nepal. I too never forgot to bring her a packet of ‘Mysore Paak’ sweets and ‘Murrukkus’, whenever I had come back from Chennai or Bangalore. She gave me her personal phone number after she bought a cell phone and we wished each other on Diwali and on New Year’s Day. She said she missed me if I didn’t visit the salon for a month. I too got so habituated with getting my hair and the facial done from her that I preferred to wait but never go to any other place. One of Rekha’s favourite jokes was that I should call her whenever my son or daughter gets married and she would surely make me look prettier than the bride! My daughter used to go to Rekhamashi, till she learnt to choose the place for herself and started going to some posh beauty parlour, known not only for their modernised infrastructure but also for their exorbitant rate. But she knew about her mom’s bonding with Rekhamasi, very well. Even my husband would ask me once in a while, ‘How’s is your friend, that parlour lady?’ I was keeping busy with something or other for quite some time now. I had no time even to think of a haircut or a facial. After a month and a half, I visited my known parlour only to know that Rekha is very sick, hospitalised and the doctors have said that she would not be able to work again. The owner lady could read the disturbance, written all over my face. She called a pretty looking Anglo Indian girl from upstairs and said, ‘This is our teacher didi’ and then looking at me, in a very assuring voice said, ‘Didi, this is Rosie, our new hair dresser, experienced and professionally trained.’ I nodded my head silently. I faked a smile. What I could not tell her was that I never visited the shop in expectation of anything else but just to see and spend some good time with my ‘friend’.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 16:01:23 +0000
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