Headband heroines

HUMOUR

Remember headbands? Almost every teen heart-throb back in the 80s sported one. There was Poonam Dhillon with a striped one strapped to her forehead, two long plaits dangling by the sides. She’d be wearing a tracksuit, all set for a morning jog, but all she’d do is chase Kumar Gaurav who’d be singing a song that had been especially composed to best leverage the entire set of two expressions that he owned.

There was Reena Roy wearing glittering headbands, sequinned and stamped. A Greek-goddess-meets-bar-dancer kind of avatar. This look would be the cue for the audience that a dance competition was going to take place shortly.

Depending on the hero’s dance acumen (usually ranging from ghastly to average), the sidekick would have to peg his output a few notches below that. The audience would now want a headband over their eyes.

Then, there were tribal headbands made popular by Meenakshi
Seshadri.

She’d rob a jewellery store before coming to the movie set — adorned in necklaces reaching her pelvis, earrings the size of excavation equipment, and headbands made of coins/bells/teeth of extinct animals. Maybe the trick was to blind the hero with all that bling so that he had no idea what he was saying ‘yes’ to. I heard recently that she relocated to the US. Hah, I knew it! How long could she have gotten away with those jewellery heists?

As a kid, I badly wanted a headband. Really badly. Like a kid of these times would want an iPhone 7. My prayers went unanswered for a long, long time. I felt hopeless. I even doubted that there was a god.

Then, one day, I found that my sister had forgotten to lock her cupboard. There it sat — the red-white-blue headband. Was this really happening? My heart was pounding faster than the disco beats of a Bappi Lahiri number. I picked it. I ran my fingers down the soft, fluffy strip, that crisp Velcro fastener.

It had to happen fast. Before she finished taking her shower. Happy bells pealed in the air. Birds chirped, and golden sunshine anointed me as I stepped into the garden. Jeans, sweater to match (and the sound of violins), the headband strapped to my forehead. Rishi Kapoor would have been so proud.

As that decade got over, so did the obsession with hairbands. I no longer spotted this accessory on our heroines. Maybe they diverted that material to their costumes. One headband can definitely clothe more than one these days.