Free Me, My Hair, and I by editor Elizabeth Benedict

their hair as their American counterparts.) My hair still doesn’t want to be long, or straight, or smooth, but I don’t think I’ll ever really cut it again. Instead, I’ll just trim the split ends off every few months. Now that it’s perfectly obvious that I am an adult, the pressure to look like one is off. Most days I plait my hair into two braids and pin them up symmetrically, one on each side of my head. My hair may have failed me when I was a hippie girl, but now that I’m a middle-aged hippie woman, it’s doing just fine.

Romance and Ritual
    BHARATI MUKHERJEE
    A s a child growing up in Calcutta in a traditional Hindu Bengali extended-family household, in which all adult women (except my widowed grandmother) and all girl cousins had long, strong, glossy black hair, I developed an unhappy relationship with my own fine, wispy hair. My iron-willed grandmother, who had been born in the nineteenth century, insisted on the family’s following the unbending rules of social comportment laid down in the ancient text
Th
e Manusmriti
, circa 1500 BCE, popularly referred to as the Laws of Manu and ascribed to Manu, the First Man. Manu the Lawgiver dictated incontrovertible dos and don’ts on all aspects of Hindu domestic life, including the type and quantity of body hair and head hair desirable in women. Decent men were to avoid women with hairy bodies, women with reddish hair, and women with bald or balding scalps. To ensure the growth of thick hair, girl children in our community have their heads shaved around age four or five in the belief that the second, permanent growth will be stronger and fuller. I too had my head shaved as a young child, but my follicles did not produce thicker, blacker hair.
    My mother expended a great deal of energy every morning, massaging hair oil into my scalp to increase blood circulation and revive fatigued follicles. This was a prebath ritual. She would sit on a chair, with me squirming on a low stool in front of her, and she would part my locks, strand by strand, in order to work pink hibiscus-scented oil into the follicles. Sometimes she switched to green amla-fruit oil, not only because eating the tart amla fruit, with its sweet aftertaste, was known to control rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis, increase intelligence, and improve eyesight, but because the oil processed from it fostered hair growth. In addition, she was always on the lookout for the harder-to-find hair oil pressed from a berry called
koonch
in Bangla, because it was guaranteed to grow new hair. Every two weeks, a half hour before she shampooed my hair, she would slather homemade yogurt on my head to guard against dandruff.
    I, an ingrate daughter, resented every aspect of her hair-enhancement rituals, especially having to sacrifice precious leisure time when I would rather have read novels. But now the very memory of my mother’s nurturing fingers kneading the oiled-slippery skin on my head, her favorite fine-tooth comb sliding and smoothing tangles, the gentle press of her knees as they supported my slack-muscled bookworm’s back, brings on surges of guilt and pleasure. As an adult, I have treated myself to head massages in upscale hotel spas in China, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. But as a child, given my scanty, secondhand knowledge of Manu the Lawgiver’s definitions of ideal hair, I was convinced that my thin hair was a symptom of moral flaws.
    The oldest girl cousin in our large household, a know-it-all teenager, had a practical explanation for why Hindu Bengali women were required to have thick, waist-length hair. She was eight or ten years older than I was; I can’t be sure. Even though my generation was the first in our family to have been born in a hospital rather than delivered by a midwife at home, we did not have birth certificates. No one in our comfortably middle-class neighborhood did. The dates of individual births and deaths were associated with