I am Rupenzel

Once I had many worries but my hair was shiny and beautiful. I never had an inkling of feeling about it and always took pride of my lustrous locks. Of late, it had become my clowning glory. I don't remember when the shine of my hair got transferred to my nose, and when my hair receded and turned into my forehead. When people say, you've changed a lot; I read between the lines and assume that they are referring to my hair. I turned to the most advertised, exotic, expensive products flashing on the TV, the internet and even those little almost inconspicuous ads in the classified section of the newspapers. I shared my woes with agony aunts anonymously, and lamented about my falling hair in solitude. The wounds that people caused me by referring to my balding head made me desperate. I looked at all those who ran their fingers through their hair with a pinch of envy, no not pinch, a tablespoonful of envy. It shred my pride into pieces. I thought of hair transplants, hair weaving and hair bonding and even lotions and creams which promised, sprouting of new hair like shoots in a rice field. I had scary hair dreams, that I had become totally bald without even a single shoot on my head. Suddenly I started imagining that my head turned into Deccan plateau. I started buying hats and caps which fooled everyone into thinking that I was covering a thick mop of hair.

My obsession with hair, made my days miserable. If I could have that kind of hair with shine and flow of those women in the Dove advertisement, even for a day, I would flaunt it to everybody in my life with vengeance. They would crawl on their knees and beg me to reveal the secret which I would ignore with my chin up, saying, "what did you say? I can’t hear you”, and would swish away in my chauffeur driven car leaving them speechless. Such were my daydreams about those diminishing follicles of hair. How was I supposed to live without them?



 Then one day, I met a friend who had just lost his wife to cancer. He was heartbroken and said that he would have given anything in his life to save her. Saying so, he pulled out a picture of hers taken after her chemotherapy. There she was frail and delicately smiling, a picture of a loving woman. “She was the most beautiful woman in the world, nobody can replace the love we shared" he said, amidst sobs. I hugged my grief stricken friend and for the first time in my life, I did not notice that she was bald. That's it, I got my answer... and that was the end of my hair problems!