Clippers, chatter and curry

A kampung echo at my heartland barber shop

- Bhavan Jaipragas

I generalise, but I think most people have a low view of the heartland barber shop where most men in this country get their hair cut. You find them in every neighbourhood, tucked into void decks and old shopping centres. Women often say they are envious: “How nice to be a man. It’s so quick and cheap, and never goes wrong.”

Wrong! It can go terribly awry - which is exactly why one looks for, and then keeps, the same barber for a long time. The heartland barber shop is not, to use a word rarely applied to haircuts, fungible.

A perfect haircut experience looks like this: you waltz down at a time of your choosing; the shop is buzzing; your favourite barber is miraculously free and beckons you in. You sink into the elevated chair like a rajah. In front of you: an assortment of bottles and jars, most never used on you as if you are here for a study in potion-making.

The first words from the barber, talking to you by way of the mirror as he fastens the cape around you, are not “how should I cut?”. If he is your barber, he already knows. Minus marks if he stoops so low as to ask. The opener is always: “Have you eaten?”

Mr Barber - most recently in my case the Mr Murugan of Muru Barber Shop in Toa Payoh - sometimes has things to say, sometimes not, as he gets to work on the cut I have worn since my army days: the number 2 setting on the clipper on the sides, high slope, short on top so I can have at least three weeks of not having to comb my hair. Yes, those are the specific instructions.

Conversation drifts in and out. On a recent visit I ask about the popular Tamil actor Vijay’s political foray; he launches into a mini-diatribe. I regret it perhaps I should have stuck to not talking. Or the heat - this damn heat would have been a much less controversial conversation filler.