The Plait
Noreen Quinn-Singh

I was shopping recently near Rue Lepic, headed towards Abbesses where I had lived when I first came to Paris. I walked past the hairdresser's on my way to the metro, and I wondered if he was still there. I saw him at the door, and when he looked up I knew he recognized me in spite of the nine years, or was it ten, since we last met. I stopped. We exchanged greetings.
          "How is your husband?" he asked. "Are you still in Paris?"
          "Still in France but now in the suburbs," I replied.
          He told me he still had the statue of Shiva that we had given him, and that he would never forget the day he cut my husband's hair.
          "Neither will I," I replied, this time with a laugh. He told me to ask my husband to call in at the shop one day, and I promised I would.

          I changed my mind about taking the metro, and walked down Rue Lepic instead. I started remembering that day. I had plaited my husband's waist-length jet-black hair that morning for the last time, and I wondered if he was doing the right thing having it cut. I thought back to the day two years before when we had met. His turban enhanced his already handsome face and he looked like a Maharaja. He assured me he was no Maharaja, or no Samson.
          "What about your Mum? Shouldn't we tell her?"
          He had told me stories about his relatives who had refused to talk to, or have anything to do with, sons who had had their hair cut.
No, he would tell her after. "She'll cry for a week or so, but it'll be OK."
          "You're sure then," I said.
          "Yes. It's too much of a burden."
          I knew coming from Ireland what he meant. It wasn't so much that the hair took more time to arrange, or the turban was awkward to tie, but it was the weight of the past that made it heavy.

          We got to the hairdresser's not long before it closed, and I positioned myself behind my husband's chair. I was ready to grab the plait as it fell. "Your hair has never seen a pair of scissors and it certainly shouldn't see the floor," I told him.
          As the hairdresser approached I grew nervous. Should I be there at all? I felt that I was taking part in some kind of initiation ceremony, so I looked away. The hairdresser said he'd leave us alone for another five minutes, and then he'd come back. I wondered whether he was stalling.
          I continued to look at the plait and the back of my husband's neck. The hairdresser approached with his pair of scissors, and with one clean swipe, the plait fell away. I tried hard not to think of the guillotine! I took the plait, and laid it lovingly in the aluminum tin foil that I had brought with me. I held back tears, and the hairdresser continued to shape Inder's hair. None of us spoke, and when it was all over I took out the statue of Shiva, and handed it to him. I wondered afterwards about the symbolism of this Hindu god, being the destroyer and reproducer.
          We paid and walked down Rue Lepic. I still hadn't looked at my husband and we still hadn't spoken. He reached over and took my hand. I looked at him now, his hair no longer tightly pulled back in a plait at the back or in a bun on top of his head.
          "It is shiny," I said.
          "It looks wavy," I told him.
          "How do you feel?" I asked him.
          "Light," he said. "Do you know what? How about walking all the way back home and having a cup of tea."
          "That would be grand," I said.
          "That would be grand."