Letting Loose

on my tussle with trust

There are very few pleasures for a human that parallel the joy of getting a complimentary neck massage from the neighbourhood Salim barber after a 50-rupee haircut with Altaf Raja’s iconic hits playing on repeat on a Sunday morning nostalgia special show running in an obsolete CRT television. At the end of that massage, my barber cracks his fingers for his signature move, the chef’s kiss of his craft, the last performance before the curtains draw. There has to be showmanship.

“Let loose,” he says with one hand on my neck and the other on my jaw. Obediently, I surrender myself into his grasp. This is more than thrice of how much I let loose for people close to me. The barber makes a final adjustment to his grip on my head and to his stance behind the chair. Like a footballer before his run-up for the decider penalty shoot in the World Cup finals. It’s showtime. The whole salon has taken a momentary pause to enjoy the healing powers of that cracking sound.

He makes his final move, commits to the twist, and half a millisecond prior to the final crack, I stiffen my neck. There is no sound. The spectators are disappointed; the goal post was missed by a margin. The master is ashamed; the monkey didn’t dance to his tune. I want to tell him it is my fault.

I pulled my guards up in reflex by staying cautious in my head, even after giving up my body. This is because, dear master, the monkey has always found it difficult to accept any rationale justifying a surrender of trust, through the control of my neck in this instance.

I have been taught, or trained, to respect humans because they shared my blood four generations ago. But I have not been taught to question them for pointing fingers at my mother for being the harbinger of bad omens on “our” family, thus ruining the ancient legacy of their supposedly honourable, internally broken family name.

So, trust and reason often find an imbalance in my subconscious. My conscious efforts to let myself loose barely stand ground before the reflexes ingrained in my system. But I have to try again. The barber is looking at me with disdain. I offer him my neck again. There is a brief moment of silence. I offer him an apologetic glance and beg him to make up for my failure.

The performer repeats his show, with a drastic decline in enthusiasm this time. The love affair between his hands and my neck has turned into a task that we both need to get done with, as if a road is being constructed for the upcoming elections. His grip is less firm and more rigid now. The only thing more rigid than his grip is my resolve to cooperate with my master, partly because I am sceptical of breaking a bone or two. He twists my neck, first to the right and then left, extracting a crisp sound each time. To my capitalist slave brain, those three seconds are three hours of trance, of meditation in mountains. Why did I need a second chance at that? The spectators blissfully ignore this show; repeated tricks signify a failed magician. He looks at me in the mirror and says something in Telugu. His tone doesn’t seek answers, but he deserves one.

I want to tell him that I was raised by loving parents. Loving, caring, and protective parents, with special emphasis on the protective part of it. They taught me that there is evil all around the world that I need to stay away from. In my attempts to become a good son, I obeyed with religious sincerity. I ignored the evil till it was all around me, and when confrontation was inevitable, I realised I was scared of the evil, without even knowing what it exactly was.

As a good kid, I did not complain. In hindsight, I lacked the maturity to acknowledge my fears. I had the urge to fight them, but dare I gather the courage to stand and speak against the evil with a firm spine!

When I left home for a boarding school, it became more important not to submit complaints, because it would concern my parents, even more now since their protective shield had been diluted by the distance. And when the evil was too near to ignore and too formidable to fight, I allowed myself to be consumed by it. Maybe I forgot how to stand with a spine, or maybe I never learnt that. Excuses.

The barber brushes hair strands off my gown, apparently in a hurry. The excuse I choose for my beloved failed magician is that complaining and questioning, contrary to obedience, were not part of the ‘good child training regime.’ And in the guise of obedience, I missed out on an important question. What exactly was the evil? Evil people? Evil habits? Evil systems? Evil desires and dreams? I could not see it clearly, but a fear of that idea had established her rock-solid spot in the background of my life’s canvas. The place where it has hovered around all my childhood, where I have nurtured it through the ideals I grew up with.

I believe this fear is my share of inheritance, besides the burden of unending responsibilities. It has passed down through genetics or conditioning or both. The fear of his son’s failure in my father’s eyes and his consequent efforts to make me a successful man is where I owe this inheritance in the first place. The precursors of this fear are mostly more tangible, molecular, and picturable than the corresponding cause factors, which are vague, asymmetric, and often limited to a perception. This fear blossoms in a lack of familiarity. The horror of this confusion doesn’t make one scream. It makes you go silent. This finds abstract, or no reasons for showing up. And weird ways of doing so. In a cab driver navigating through uncharted streets, during frisking at the airport security check post, in the waxed moustache of an invigilator in an exam hall, while driving through busy roads, or scrolling dark streets.

I have tried to get rid of this fear considerably by moulding my conscience to trust cab drivers in alien cities, even sharing a piece of gossip with them, being confident that I had taken out all lighters and cables from my bag, and making eye contact with the invigilator. But when I drive, I still think of a hundred ways I could end up in an accident without any fault on my part. While strolling the streets in the dark, my eyes ignore the tragic play of moths and lights, and my ears don’t pay salutes to the chirping crickets, always wary of potential threats. This is why I give you control of my neck and still mentally prepare for getting abducted for ransom. I am not unfaithful, master! I am just struggling my way through faith.

I give him an embarrassed and apologetic look, hoping for a pleasant goodbye. Unlike the previous customer, the barber doesn’t appreciate his laudable job on my head and soul.

I want to tell him I am improving on my weak aspects. And I desperately hope that someday, when there is magic unfolding in front of my eyes, I will let loose. My head. My heart. My soul. I will surrender to the craft in all its entirety.