Cropped Hair

Preface-  This piece was written for an ekphrastic writing (Musings on a picture) competition organized by Blue Quill. I had never imagined myself as a wife, neither in stories nor in play. It was the first time I tried to see myself as a grief-stricken wife. My own creation affected me in so many ways. However, the best part of writing this was getting a wild card entry into the creative writing club of Miranda House, whose anthologies continue to be warm, inclusive, and, poignant.  

 Frida Kahlo’s Self Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940)

The pain escalates with these gradual realizations thrusting on me, one by one, day by day, bit by bit that what you did in reality, in the world I despise, in the time when we were apart has been beyond my most paranoid confabulations.

I remember your breath and how it coalesced with mine, the fragrance of our love making and how it matched and surpassed those of flowers I tucked in my buns while leaving. And when I left, you left too, but to another woman, to another scented room. 

I am haunted by the thought that the whiff I inhaled with my eyes closed, head on your bosom, my arms wrapped around your waist is now shredded, spent, and shared. 

You lied and it hurts to think of the ‘why’. The ambiance is suffocating, it is getting heavier and darker here. I want to abandon this place, and I want to abandon all places.

I hope there is a liar, an ensconce, a cave, or even a walled shelter with smudged backgrounds not resembling any of the places I have ever been. With you.

I hope it is airy, roomy, spacious, free, and isolated, and inside it lies a seat, a throne, or even a chair, placed turgidly, not leaning on any of the walls and confidently protruding from the ground.

I sit there, mute, castrated, apart, asunder, detached and alone. You do not haunt me. I surround and imbue myself in me. I don clothes very similar to those you take off before sinking into those beds. 

I start singling out strands of my hair, each like a thread of memory. I pull out a mop of them, unfurling the world where we were together, and chop them off. I pick another tuft dyed with your promises and saw them with blades of small scissors with an oscillating brassy sound, slowly and fatally.

I cut and free the locks which store fragrance of our love. I disconnect tresses carrying fingerprints of your gentle strokes. I clear my entire mane which grew extraordinarily dense watching us entwine and engage.

Blowing wind topples the heap plummeted by the shears. The strands scatter and whirl away. I sit with fuzzy head, suited up body and my hands wanting to cut more of those memory threads, let go more of your traces, ruin more of my space. Space, which is all I accumulate there besides my castrated self on the seat.  

I stare stoically at a corner, cloudy with black tendril-like threads, and clutch the scissors (which still have my fingers locked in their round and hollow grooves) more tightly. Because I know, those are hairs and they will grow. Because I know, you would come back to me and I won’t be able to say ‘no’. Because I know I love you in the roots, a place I have never seen but perceive as a fertile ground holding infinite strands, which are beyond my capacity to be shingled off for long. A place which has been turning the castrated into carnal. A place where I first loved you, a place I know we would visit again but a place I do not want to dwell in anymore.