JOIN USMoustaches (or taches) can change people’s personalities, and thus their lives. Tache, which comes in all shapes and sizes, is also a handy aid when the nose is receding from the lips, or the chin is receding into the neck.
Unbridled, it can be frightening. It needs to be trained, and man has to his credit long, long years of practice in this profession.
The walrus is a classic. It does to lips what beards do to chins — totally eclipse them. Ready example is Maxim Gorky. The problem with walrus is, when ill, spoon-feeders have problems in location hunting. And when walrus digs into a cake, he needs a painstaking post-operative attention. So, to get away from the walrus, the bush has to be trained on to the cheeks. The ends then become critical. The higher you go, the more belligerent you get. The lower, the more benign. The result lies in the realms of finesse. A toucher can make all the difference between a Joseph Stalin or a Walesa.
Thus, trimming is the need of the hour. But which way does one go? You could trim it upwards all the way like Salvador Dali and stick it up all over the cheeks, if you don’t mind being called a freak. You could also train it down all the way to the jawbone like Fu Manchu.
Unless waxed, the ends need constant twirling. That has two pitfalls. You could look as though you are sparring for fisticuffs, or like you are gunning for the 19-year-old daughter of your best friend. This often produces startling results. The wife leads you out of trouble by the handles of the twirled edges. That’s how the sobriquet ‘handlebar moustache’ came about.
If all this makes you uncertain, you can resolve the problem by tying up the ends with whiskers or beard. But that is chickening out of an essentially artistic situation. Or, you can chop the bristles and the curls off. That leads you right into a whole new world.
You could be a broad-strip (like Groucho Marx or Neville Chamberlain). The problem? It’s ‘brushed paint’ look. Groucho actually always painted that strip. You could also be a thin long line like Clark Gable or Errol Flynn. But these thin lines are dicey. You won’t be accepted as a houseguest where there are young fillies of the right age. You are worse off if you abandon the line for the curve, and go for the talwar.
No one would put you anywhere near a connecting door. That’s when you begin to think of shortening the spread. The broad-strip can be shortened at will because it is decent anyway. Hitler spoilt that style for good. So the answer lies somewhere in-between. Trimmed, but not too much. Narrow, but not too much. Curved, but not too much. Long, but just short of the lip.
That’s what I have today. When I began — it must have been in the days of Raj Kapoor’s Barsaat — I thought it was fun. Now I realise that a moustache tender is a captive soul.
It takes a man to grow a moustache and more of a man to abandon one. One feels denuded and thoroughly nondescript, with reason. Can you imagine Field Marshal Manekshaw without one, for instance? In fact, it’s the Defence Services and the police that are largely responsible for the moustache culture. There was even an allowance to the traffic police in Bengaluru for the biggest and bushiest ones.
In the Services, there is a clear demarcation of desires. The Army favours the well-tended twirlers. The Air Force is elegant. True to their character of being fond of birds, they generally opt for the Clark Gable, and occasionally even dare a talwar.
The Navy is famous for its full tache. Maybe the celebrated Player’s image is responsible, but I rather think that with all the time on hands, what else but a whole shrub to cultivate, culture and tend? You see, the Services are manned by a race whose upper lips were born with a yearning for fungus.
But scientific discovery threatens to take the fun out of all moustache-growers. Moustaches, Russian scientists report, harbour toxic substances like phenol, benzene, toluene, ammonia, sulphuretted hydrogen, acetone, isoprene, and acetic acid. Not content with these words of wisdom, they state that the permissible concentration of pollution is 4.2 times more for a moustache, 7.2 for a moustache combined with a beard, that is, if you are a non-smoker. If you fume between the moustache and the beard, your figure is a whopping 49.3 times, calling for a statutory warning: ‘The surgeon general has determined that growing a moustache is injurious to health.’