The Afternoon Visitors

Head-Bath Days

Throughout my childhood, usually, once or twice a week, came the head-baths, the crowning rituals of our grooming routines. Head-baths were not to be taken lightly, they were special events not to be interfered with. Everything adjusted and fitted around head-baths, not the other way around as it is with most of us today. Large pots of steaming hot water augmented the efforts of our struggling hot­-water geyser and we mixed the hot and cold water stored in buckets into the one we were using to bathe from.  

For reasons of convenience, our head-bath days were almost always on Saturdays which marked the respite from a full week of going to school and packed weekday routines. For hours before, hair would be oiled and combed and the scalp massaged furiously. Two or more cycles of washing, shampooing and rinsing would be followed by toweling dry. My sisters and I, taken one by one into the bathroom by our mother with her sari hitched up to her knees, would giggle, snort, and shriek as she doused and scrubbed us and finally toweled us dry, dressed us and sent us into the bedroom with thin muslin towels swaddling our heads, to wait until all three were done.

The room would be darkened as its many windows would have been shut to keep draughts out and our grandmother would sometimes be waiting to button us up into our clothes. Then, when my mother came back into the bedroom, with squeaky damp soles and her damp sari straightened out, to towel us some more and to comb out the tangles from our freshly­ shampooed sweet-­smelling hair to more shrieking and wailing, my grandmother would hurry off to the kitchen looking as if she had a mysterious errand to take care of. Some minutes later, she would open the door a crack and ask if we were ready for the “...”. Initially, I could not understand what she meant. My mother and she would have a quick exchange and she would hurry off again looking mysterious, I thought.

My mother bade us lie down with our drying still­-tangled hair hanging over the side of the double beds. My grandmother would enter with some kind of large ladle with something smoking in it. "Shut your eyes!" exhorted our mother. "Don't let the smoke get in." We would giggle and shut our eyes tightly, covering them with our hands only to peek out from the curiosity of it all

After a while, we learned to call it “lobhaana dhuvaru” (smoke from the “lobhaan”) which, we were told, was supposed to smoke out (lice?!) and to purify our washed hair. It was quite pleasant actually, the odor was sweet and nutty and interesting because it was so different from everything else I had ever experienced. It was an experience like no other. "Don't breathe it in!" my mother would remind us. But I would take deep breaths of it when she wasn't looking.

Years later, I read that lobhaan is used to repel mosquitoes, relieve stress and strain and to promote harmony. What my mother and grandmother’s intentions were, we will never know, but  the memory of that unusual experience still lingers. After my grandmother took the smoking ladle away, we would bask in the afterglow from the fumigation. My mother would open the windows after a while when she thought that we wouldn’t catch a chill. But she still kept us indoors until our hair was more or less dry. At some point she would call to us to brush our hair to make it smooth and shiny and chat about whatever came to mind.

Once she told me about some cousins she had whose mother, her aunt, believed that they had to be protected from the cold to the point where they had to go from the bathroom straight into their beds where they snuggled under their bedclothes for the rest of the day. I thanked my lucky stars that our own post­-head-bath confinement lasted less than an hour usually.

When my mother herself had a head­-bath, I loved seeing her walk around for most of the day with her long hair streaming down her back letting it dry in the air. Finally, late in the evening, before dinner, she would comb the tangles out of her fragrant hair as we played with it behind her back and made mustaches out of the ends of it, giggling and cavorting.

When we visited my maternal grandparents in our ancestral home tucked into the southwestern edges of the Western Ghats in the Kanaras, there were head-­bath days there too. Usually, since many of us would be visiting ­ anywhere from five to twenty­-five, someone ­ - usually one of my several aunts ­- would make a mental listing of who would go after who to bathe and be the one to remind, notify and orchestrate the effort. So that we would have hot water in plenty, the maid in charge of building the wood-­fire under the hot water cauldron inside our bath­-hut would be informed ahead of time and she kept a vigil and replenished the wood as it burnt and the water steamed away in the cauldron.

The sharp smell and crackling of the burning logs would greet us as we took our turns and marched up to the bath­-hut with our towels and change of clothes. Once we had placed the long wooden beam across the doors into their slots to keep the door shut, we would dip our hand­-held brass urn into the hot water and the cold water to mix and get it to the right temperature. Then we would douse ourselves with the water, soap and shampoo ourselves and rinse off.

Looking back, those were the most delightful baths I have ever taken in my life. I still remember most vividly the smells of the stoked wood­-fire and smoke, the sight of the sky framed by branches in the high window near the ceiling of the bath-hut. Most of all, I remember the feel of the rough large­-hewn stone-­floor under my bare feet and walking or running back along the long covered corridor back towards the house, hearing my aunt call to the next one in line.

And the sight, lasting most of the day, of the women of the house looking relaxed and fulfilled with their open hair fluttering and curling around their faces or cascading down their backs. They would lounge and talk and comb one another’s tresses while the children ran about playing until, reluctantly, by tea­-time, they would gather up their hair into their customary buns or chignons again, each pin or clasp imprisoning a section of the gathered hair before getting together for tea and afternoon snacks in the dining room that looked out onto my grandparents' kitchen garden.

I loved most of all running my hand over my own freshly washed and dried hair, exulting in its smooth softness. Saturday head-baths were special, I realized. At some point, my mother would  locate me and say “come, let’s do your hair...” and I would protest. As she tugged and pulled and brushed out the tangles in my own wavy waist-­length hair -­ which were always a mystery to me as to how they kept forming -­ I would groan and resist and threaten to run off.

Sometimes I think I did it just to see what she would say. And it would work almost every time because she would say triumphantly that, in effect, I would be doing her proud by not letting myself look like a dishevelled and distracted hen. She would refer to as a “pisullellen kunkada”.  The startling mental image of an untidy plucked and disheveled hen is somehow too vivid to let  go of easily and it became a recurring theme somehow connected to and interwoven indelibly with my memories of our weekly hair bath rituals.

To this day, many decades later, after shampooing my hair every time, I have a fetish about standing before the mirror to meticulously comb out the tangles and the parts that stick up unexpectedly, The last thing I want to look like is a pissullellen kunkada​ but my hair has an obstinate streak and much as I desire, I cannot tame that streak entirely. But my mother might be pleased with the extent to which her homilies have persisted in my life thus far.

My Indian Childhood

Head-bath Days

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