Parlour Politics
In her latest book, Tuki’s Grand Salon Chase, author Parul Sharma introduces us to hairstylist Tuki’s world of combs, scissors and scandals. Sharma talks to L’Officiel India about what inspired her to write the book and about the reigning obsession with perfect faces and bodies.
Istarted reading Tuki’s Grand Salon Chase by Parul Sharma while on a train. The book finished long before the train had pulled out of Ludhiana, but Sharma’s words stayed with me while I went about the lanes of Amritsar, took pictures in Agra, and watched tourists poring over the red stones of Fatehpur Sikri. Quite befitting for a book set in three cities and their three moods— Mumbai, Goa and London. Tuki is the archetypal twentysomething-year-old of today, angst personified. The book takes us through how she finds her way (and herself). But more importantly, it is about love, luck and the plans that never were. And it is about us.
Sharma sets her characters in and around a salon, ‘Nancy’s Factory’—such a clever vehicle, with salons being the caravan serais, the chai khaanas of today. I was a fly on the wall, when Mohammad Hanif and Sharma had discussed how salons are now the ‘everyday’, at the Jaipur Literature Festival. I revisited that conversation with Sharma—the irony of a generation that ran away from their mother’s weekly champi but now considers it the new leisure industry. “I think, in India, the ideal of beauty has always rested on the face,” says Sharma. “There was always an emphasis on gorapan, of course, but this was attempted by the natural and largely harmless besan-and-malai type kitchen remedies. Now things are challenging as more skin and, therefore, skin colour is on display.” As the world moves towards a global ideal of beauty (long, straight, glossy hair, size zero bodies, very fair skin), there is a desire for permanence, Sharma adds. “It is no longer sufficient to blow dry my hair, it should be chemically straightened, no longer enough to wax and shave, body hair should be lasered to oblivion...” She and I get talking about the mushrooming of spas in every little nook in the countryside. “One part of it can be attributed to urban stress levels, but there is also a dearth of human touch and contact,” she says. “What were earlier family rituals (applying mehendi, oiling hair) now need to be outsourced because the bua and the tai disappeared along with the joint family system.”
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148 July 2014 thegoodlife
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