Sangeeta beauty parlour does amazing business. It started out as a 100-odd sq. feet non-AC room and today, after over a decade, it's a two-storey AC parlour and has opened shop even in Lokhandwala.
I go to the 'parlour' only for basic services like waxing and threading, like most of us do now, thanks to the flourishing 'salons' for haircuts and 'spas' for more fancy pampering. Yet, Sangeeta aunty always seems to have become fatter like the gold chain around her neck. Unfortunately for us and fortunately for her, unwanted hair grows back quickly.
The place is always teeming with old, loyal clients but for some reason the beauticians are always new. Yet they're a homogenous lot. Something binds them so that despite a couple of them leaving every month and a couple of them joining, the staff seems unchanged, untouched.
One afternoon while having electrically-overheated wax smeared on an arm, I was involuntarily, unwillingly eavesdropping on their conversation which was actually rather interesting. The girl who was reverse-whipping me with a waxing strip was complaining about her bhabhi who apparently can give Lalita Pawar a run for her money. An older woman who was bleaching someone's face 'Shehnaaz Gold' consoled her for a moment and then immediately started to curse her father-in-law's illness that ate into their modest income. The young girl politely interrupted the woman and asked another young girl to take up my idle arm so they could get rid of me faster and in the meanwhile they'd get to catch up. As she opened her mouth to moan about her 'Lalita' bhabhi, her friend began her own laments over her cheating boyfriend. And so they were simultaneously jabbering and simultaneously reverse-whipping me.
The problems keep piling up. Husband problems, children problems, parent problems, Sangeeta aunty problems, landlord problems, crowded train problems, client problems, health problems, financial problems... Like layer upon layer of hot wax, the problems keep piling up in the air-conditioned room, and the women keep pulling them out like hair. They massage their stressed-out lives in circular motions like the back of a semi-nude aunty. They paint their aspirations a bright scarlet like the pretty toes of a teenager. In a place that has beautification as its motive, they try desperately to lighten out their scars. They joke and they fight and they sing and they advise each other to use eggs for their hair and turmeric for their skin and they exchange recipes and they ask each other to bring them things from near their homes because they're cheaper or 'exclusive'; things like peppered banana chips, mobile phone covers, water bottles, padded bras. They bring all their troubles to the parlour and squeeze them out of their hearts like zits. And that, I guess, is what makes them a homogenous set.
Each one of them returns home every evening feeling light, temporarily relieved of their maladies, but alas, like unwanted hair...
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