Those luxurious shaving days

Rousseau’s observation that “man is born free but he is everywhere in chains” rings true when I find myself unable to satisfy a seemingly innocuous desire. This unfulfilled desire is to enjoy a nice, lazy shave as my late father did in a leisurely manner that set the pace for the rest of his day in those halcyon days when humans ruled over the clock rather than be its slave.

The imagery of my father’s typical morning always appears in an audio-visual format as it opened at 5:55 am with the haunting signature tune of All India Radio created by Walter Kauffman 88 years ago. Coming alive from a large battery operated valve radio occupying the pride of place in our drawing-room, it set Dad in motion. After his first cuppa tea, he picked up the day’s newspaper and remained glued to it till he received a telepathic message at quarter to eight from Roshan Menon or Melville de Mellow that they would arrive shortly on the air. That was the time to assume Padmasan on a settee and reverently open his tin shaving box— originally a gift box containing cream cracker biscuits but now Pandora’s box. Besides the expected shaving cup soap, razor and a shaving brush, it contained several exotic items. Topping the list was a greenish translucent glass cube on whose concave belly razor blades were ground repeatedly to obtain seemingly inexhaustible service extensions like a minister’s favourite bureaucrat. Then there was a nail clipper, a thin twisted steel item that resembled a knitting needle but was in fact used to extricate wax from ears, and a pair of small scissors that shaped Dad’s moustache. The incongruous looking Dettol bottle came in years later to replace its modest ancestor— a block of translucent alum.

Dad would arrange his gadgets and accessories in a semicircle in front of him as if he was going to give a performance on Jaltarang (a musical instrument comprising waterfilled bowls that are struck with wooden sticks to produce melody). Next came the vigorous sharpening of used razor blades to breathe fresh life into them. After this would begin the apparently most gratifying exercise of lathering his face by countless strokes of the shaving brush, its rhythm is broken only by an occasional dip in the cup soap. The actual ploughing of the razor through the thick creamy foam came in the end as an ingloriously short act after the prolonged preparations. The thirty minutes shaving drill ended in perfect synchronization with the end of the AIR English and Hindi news bulletins. The shaving regimen that began with the baritone of Roshan Menon or Melville de Mellow announcing “This is All India Radio,” would end in unison with “Here are the headlines again”. Dad would then pick up the block of alum and rub it on his cheeks with a sense of satisfaction and achievement that I never get when I hurriedly run my shaver on my face standing in front of the bathroom mirror.