At a recent video shoot for an advertisement for a business group, the creative
director kept adjusting my hair, tried to tuck a stray strand behind my ear, kept trying
to smoothen out the frizzy mini hair standing in attention at various angles. I tried to
tell him that it won’t work, you can’t tame the curls, I haven’t been able to tame it in
the last 37 years, you will have to work with the frizz and so on. I am yet to see the
final footage but I am sure it is going to be airbrushed into complacency. That has
been the journey of my life. My wild curly hair and attempts to tame it. If I ever write a
memoir it is going to be titled "Untamed". 
One of my earliest memories is keeping my head on my grandmother’s lap to read a
book and she complaining that my hair is prickly, it hurts. I would still continue to rest
my head like that and keep reading but somewhere deep inside me I would feel
pricked. She was not wrong though, my hair was very thick , very unruly and dry.
And all everyone believed was that if you comb curly hair enough and keep it locked
into two plaits, it will straighten out. 
But alas, my hair , and of countless other women in India is like a dog’s tail. Always
curly, never straight. Wagging left and right, it has a mind of its own, everywhere all
at once, but never straight.
Growing up my hair situation was the butt of many jokes. When I used to leave it
open clasped with a small hairclip at the back, people would call it a bird’s nest,
maggi noodles, make racist jokes about how i have an afro look, some kids in my
class would throw little balls of paper in my hair and it would get stuck there. Till I
went home and combed it the next morning , those little pieces of paper would stay
frozen in my hair. The only solution to this problem was to keep it into two tight braids
secured with ribbons at the end and it would make me look so unglamorous that
someone would think I have come out of an old black and white magazine. Those
were my two options. Get ridiculed for the messy frizzy hair or appear dated and old.
All those years  growing up, I did not know that curly hair shouldn’t be combed every
day. I did not know that it shouldn’t be shampooed with harsh chemicals every week,
the over-the-counter shampoos damaged my hair much more than they did anything
good for the scalp. I had no clue that my type of hair needs to be conditioned every
time and some sort of a leave in conditioner also needs to be applied. There was
also a belief that if you comb your hair in the shower, it will lead to hair loss, how
wrong was that!! It made me suffer through countless hours of combing through dry
hair trying to detangle it. My hands would ache while sectioning my hair and
detangling the ends and then moving to the top. And by the time I was done with
once section, it would again get knotted because that’s just how their structure is.
Curly hair needs to be combed when wet, with conditioner in it, so that a wide
toothed comb can glide through. But we did not know any of these things, we tried to
treat it like straight silky think hair and it would lead to lot of crying and tantrums on
my part. All we tried to do in my Maharashtrian household, my mom and
grandmother, aunts, everyone was to comb my hair and braid it with oil in an attempt
to straighten it. There was just not enough information.
There was no representation of curly haired women on screen either. Kangana
Ranaut, Mithila Palkar, Tapasee Pannu hadn't happened by then on Indian screens,

and somehow hair was always supposed to be clean and tamed, it reflected on the
personality of the woman who was also supposed to be very demure and homely.
That’s when I also started fancying about adopting a girl when I grow up so that she
doesn’t inherit my hair. She doesn't have to go through what I did. Little did I know
that there is a way to manage the curls and accept them for what they are. 
The first time I found out that my hair type is curly and could be beautiful and not just
messy was when I was around 18. Noemie, an exchange student from France had
come here to stay with my best friend and she had soft beautiful blond curls. I would
always marvel at her hair , but I thought she is beautiful because she is white. I later
found out that she had a styling mousse which she would apply to her curls and not
comb them for 2-3 days till she washed her hair again and reapplied the mousse.
She generously left me 4-5 bottles of it before going back and my hair game was set
for the next couple of years using it only for special occasions. It would give a superb
hold and make my hair dazzle. I used the products way beyond the expiry. But it
made me look fabulous and finally made sense of my hair, expiry date be damned.
That was also the time when I got my first boyfriend, a Tamilian guy who was
perhaps not so mortified by my hair as everyone else used to be. Now looking back I
realise why I liked to hang out with South Indian guys, because they did not make
me feel ugly and unkempt, they understood my hair , they had seen it around them
and did not wish it to be changed. I was suddenly the girl their momma would be
happy to meet.
In the later years, I chemically straightened my hair 2-3 times and for the first few
weeks, they were magic. Silky hair, burshed out in a few minutes, made me feel like
Cinderella. But then the roots would grow out very curly again and it felt outrageous
to have the head full of waves and dropping into broom like straight hair towards the
ends. I stopped doing it after 3 rounds and found a brilliant curly hairdresser Avani
Yashwin in Bandra who finally taught me to fall in love with my natural textured hair.
Every girl has different kinds of body image issues growing up, it’s only later on in life
that we learn to accept it as it is and not give a damn about how different we look
from the norm. Realistically speaking curly wavy non silky straight hair is the norm.
Most Indians have textured hair. But we are also a predominantly hot tropical country
and the heat and humidity messes with the curls. The heat also makes us want to
plait it or put it in a bun , away from the face , creating more space for air to circulate
at the nape of the neck.
It could also be Hollywood and the fair skin and blonde silky hair that made the
definition of a good looking girl and, while I was quite fair I had dark thick curly hair
which made me not a beautiful girl by the movie standards . 
The Curly girl method was introduced by Loarraine Massey in her book The Curly
Girl handbook in 2001 and it took another 10 years for it trickle down to India. It
changed the way we looked at ourselves, the way we treated and took care of our
hair, the CG method as we call it was nothing but godsent for us. We adopted a
regime and started using sulfate and silcone free products and comb our hair only
when they have conditioner on , in the shower. 

Now that I have accepted my hair , accepted the curly girl method, heck I have even
started my own curly hair care product range with another curly woman under the
name The Curl Co. I am proudly displaying my mane. From business perspective it
is my fixed asset and I use my own inventory on my own hair. Hair care is now free,
and I walk around as an advertisement of my products. Whenever anyone stops and
tell me my hair looks great, (it happens atleast 10 times every week), I whip out
some sachets of our product and hand it out. The power that this gives me to be able
to own up to my tresses and perhaps change the life of another curly messy girl is
immense.
But hey curls come with their own set of rules. And plan of any party or business
event has to be carefully calculated and hair wash days have to be planned. Curly
hair looks best on the wash day and the second day, and so whenever I have to plan
for any event, the first step is to design my week according to my wash days. And
no, you can’t touch my hair , it’s is real, it is not a wig, but you can stare at it. The
number of men who have wanted to touch my hair is countless and while I have let a
few of them touch it, it’s generally a don’t-touch-my-hair type of a situation. Even my
9 year old son now knows that cuddle times with momma are the best on the nights
before wash day because mom lets her hair be touched.
Otherwise dekho, magar door se.


A version of this appeared on https://www.outlookindia.com/culture-society/untamed-for-life-growing-up-as-a-curly-haired-girl