Sunday, August 07, 2005
muniba took off more of my hair than she was supposed to; usually i am able to control her chop-happy scissors but nooo! this time it was a manic saturday and an insistent woman and her 'behan karachi se spashal ayi hai aap se baal karwanay' kept interrupting muniba. she was clutching a big brown bag from levis (i don't understand how people can cart their belongings- not material for the tailor or vegetables but their stuff, like clothes for a night-spend or things that should be in a suitcase on a plane not a white hotel thela) and kept going on and on about her root touch-up and how she wanted her streaking to be 'zyada golden iss dafa', pulling at her otherwise lovely hair with jerky dying-chicken tugs. muniba finally turned her harasses scissors to me and i wondered aloud at how people still want golden streaks....later on through the hairdryer i head her shrieking about 'red-copper streaking meri behn keliye, woh jo red-copper na? woh, haan red-copper'. don't people feel embarassed being so pushy? and in the agitation and ammonia fumes from the hair-dye job two seats down muniba lopped off one and a half inch of me hair, i am sad although the bangs are prettified again. but i don't like this proximity of hair to shoulder one little bit.while i'm still on beauty-parlor people....i was reading while waiting for my turn at the chair, with the customary pencil-in-hand when the lady sitting next to me suddenly wanted to know if i were in med school. i said no, i wasn't, i was at regular university. then she wanted to know what i was doing there so i told her. then she wanted to know where i went to school before university, so i told her. then she wanted to know if i did matric/f.sc so i told her i didn't. the whole point of this was a) she thought i was studying and only med school kids study that much and b) her daughter wanted to go to my university but ended up at kinnaird.
thus: c) reading with a pencil makes you look parhakoo (previous unarrated incident also backs this up) and d) nobody reads books any more, at least not in public where there are magazines available. parlors are strange, creating people us and also not-us, lending feathers and tinsel and glamour until the next wash, next nail-breakage, next important enough occasion. how funny that at your wedding you look the least like yourself.
met a new little boy today, a small puppy-baby that frowned and mewled soundlessly. the small one slept between the cousins like a small sea-green peanut, and woke up to grin a huge toothless beam and clap starfish hands.
went to an interesting house for dinner, lots of art i wanted to look at better. an environmental lawyer, what a brilliant thing to be! managed to break both of my ancient gold sandals by the end of the evening enough to giggle about it with A but not enough to have to either slide my feet along the ground to hide the breakage or take the shoes off entirely. khekhe. silly old chiffon sari too short for heels...why can't a body go places barefoot?
everyone's getting married, or jumping into the stream of haan-s and engagements (saw a pretty ring today, it glowed with a satisfied inner light of sorts) and nikahs- i mean, when the last-person-we-all-surmised-to-jump-the-stream jumps it (thanks a heap for telling us, really :P), you know moons of blue cheese are soon at hand. oh well. places to wear all the clothes to, if nothing else. it's strange how you can count a person as a 'good friend' and simultaneously know you probably won't be dancing at her wedding, much as you'd like to be more important than that.
they drift together. tides are changing- it isn't her fault, you know- but moons have their own will. we just flow and recede and swirl restlessly, questing for shores we rest only teporarily upon.
'temporary' is what we all are; good that our illusions of permanence are so wonderfully resilient. i think we'd all self-combust otherwise...but maybe we'd know how to appreciate our shores better too.
A found a guitar just lying around at home, imagine! hahahaha someone gave I one, apparently. kheee. if only i could find a laptop just lying around at home....
Mina at 1:03 AM
