Crowning glory

It was my strategy to hide the onset of premature alopecia.

We all know the teens are a precarious rite of passage for both boys and girls.  One problem they encounter is to decide what they want their heads to look like, both frontally and in profile.  Some have a natural gift of hirsute abundance which can be sculpted to copy admired models, live or from photos, films and dummies. But for some this very abundance is a problem of plenty:  avoiding wild looks reminiscent of the atavistic simian ancestry of humans. Boys discover that it is best to present a scalp tended into neat bifurcations, left and right, front and back. Some were even fastidious to ensure that any photo they posed for should show their preferred profile, left or right.
 
I went to a high school in a southern district town in the 1940’s. Our Sanskrit pundit, who wore a kudumi or tuft offsetting his half-shaven pate, astonished us when he returned after a week away, with his tuft gone and a cropped coiffure like the rest of us, with some unruly locks and spikes. But he was clearly unsure how to present his new persona; where exactly should he essay the parting of this hirsute surplus?  We speculated on the next attempt he would make, the degree of deviation from the last line his comb had essayed on that unfamiliar terrain.  

Meanwhile the new look of the crop for males had caught on. The priestly types wearing the conventional tuft shed it.  The parting line on the scalp admitted of various compromises, with some paths meandering or turning zigzag midway or losing track en route. We saw several stylistic innovations. One was to forsake the partition altogether and sweep the wayward tresses straight back from the forehead, to be gathered into a thicker and fuller tuft at the nape of the neck. Another was a strategy I myself had to adopt to hide the onset of premature alopecia. It involved taking the parting close to the angle of the left ear, so that the long strands, aided by coconut oil, could be smoothly flattened on the scalp like a silken mat.  

Long after I left that town to go to college, I wondered whatever happened to the Sanskrit master and his crowning glory of the abandoned tuft and the variant hair-partings he was trying out. It is a pity he did not live long enough to rejoice in the modish revival of the tuft for men, nor the craze for the male ornament of the kadukan or ear-stud. He would have found an appropriate sloka from a forgotten epic to recite in class and bid us conjugate the verbs. He might have encouraged our budding  guitarist to put up a poster of a kudumi-wearing rock star.  

But when I re-visited my old school years later, a friend told me that the pundit had left to become headmaster of a middle school in his native village. I was told that he was furious that students sniggered when they saw him run his fingers over his latest hairline partition. It seems he used to pause by any parked car to crouch and peer into its side-view mirror for reassurance that his most recent attempt at self-presentation was worthy of cinematic heroes. But there was no going back to the kudumi era. He was condemned to worry about where to part his hair with its waves and spikes. I was told, however, that his fellow-pundits shunned him as a traitor and that his own wife and children resented the social disapproval of the clan.  Surely, we might say, “Vanity, thy name is everybody.”