A Close Shave

We all have our mirages to chase. Read on as I talk about mine. My love-hate relationship with shaving and that elusive goal of a perfect shave, published in this month's Spark magazine.

A Close Shave

We all have our mirages to chase. The loftiest of dreams are achievable, but it is the simplest of goals that sometimes stay out of sight. Einstein might have solved the toughest of scientific issues, but never seems to have figured out a way to a barber shop. Tendulkar might have scored more runs than any other international cricketer, but couldn’t ever get himself a tattoo with the number 100. No, even the greatest of men and women may have challenges that they can never overcome, targets that they never meet. I may not be great but that does not make me immune to the problem. I too have a simple little mirage. The perfect shave. Your hand might be on your chin in disbelief or have dropped off it in shock, but let me tell you that because something is simple doesn’t make it accessible to all.

Vanity inspires many dreams. Some want the perfectly sculpted body, some need the tresses that gently murmur in the breeze, some want the teeth that shine like diamonds, legs that tower and inspire poetry. Men and women, we are all alike. Let not the differences in gender confuse you. If you put aside Bhishma pitamahand Gurudev Tagore and Rajesh Vivek, most of the great men in the Indian pantheon have had cheeks free from the tyranny of facial hair. The moustache served as a compromise, a bridge between the clean shaven and the hairy brigade. The cleanest of shaves has always been the staple of Indian men (if you leave asides the Sikhs, for obvious religious reasons).

I remember the first time I shaved. It was in the year 1994. A family drama named “Hum Aapke Hain Koun” had released and my extended family decided to convert that into an outing. Me, my mother, my aunt, my cousins, all headed up to the Galaxy theater in Bandra to watch two weddings, fourteen songs and a funeral play out over three and a half hours. I don’t know why the occasion felt momentous but I decided to exercise the ‘Old Spice’ shaving cream that my father had with his embattled shaving brush to work up a lather and let a brand new Gillette blade loose on my unsuspecting face. It wasn’t the blade of a samurai making precise incisions into an opponent’s body. The razor worked more like a hacksaw in my untrained hands. The skin cut and burnt like a batsman hit by a sizzling Michael Holding bouncer. I had to get relief. Quick, go for the cologne, my brain asked me to do, just like my father would each day.

I used to wonder until that point the whole thought process behind the ‘Old Spice’ ad for cologne that used to come on TV. There was a dashing gentleman sailing a boat in extremely turbulent seas with ‘O Fortuna’ giving him rambunctious company in the background. For some reason, far from having the fear of drowning, he seemed to relish all that salty water splash on his face. The splashing of the cologne seemed to overcome all obstacles. They had it all wrong. I splashed the cologne onto my cheeks. If the pain was a slight murmur before, it had now turned into a raging scream. I was in a rarely felt agony. But a movie had to be seen and off we went. In the second half of the movie, the women in my family were shedding copious tears as intended by the director. I joined them as well, the stinging slap of the cologne still nascent on my skin.

Why is the story so important? Because it set the tone for my love-hate relationship with the act of shaving. It continues till date. As time went on, my apathy towards shaving also meant that the results were not good. I never enjoyed the process – I only wanted the results to be to my heart’s content and we are told time and again that the approach never works. On the odd day where I would decide that a close shave, the kind that they show on an ad in a movie theater and you still couldn’t see a single grain of hair, was in order, the results would never be good. Nothing mattered. I shaved with the grain, against the grain, with gel, with foam, with a single razor, a double razor, an electric razor, before a bath, after a bath, with piping hot water, with lukewarm water, in bright sunlight, with lamps, with Rafi playing in the background, with Kumar Sanu soothing the airwaves. Nothing, nothing, could give the satisfactorily smooth, seemingly definite, complete shave that I hoped for. A gentle layer of dark granules on my white skin would stick out. I would think I had the perfect shave going and just like that, like South Africans in a cricket world cup, I’d choke at the end. The flawless shave would evade me.

The apathy led to me deciding that shaving was obstructing my attempts to be cool. I went through my college years spouting a moustache and a five-day-long stubble. When I started working, it went down to three days, but did nothing to push me to a daily shaving routine that men like my father seemed to be employing without trouble. I even resorted to a French beard as a compromise that required me to shave everyday, but not in entirety. The stubble is an unwelcome taboo I have dealt with. My parents, my wife, my kids, each have at some time pointed out in subtle and not so subtle ways that I should shave more often. Unprofessional, itchy, pokey, shabby – the stubble was called many a thing and shamed with the regularity of a Brathwaite six off a Stokes ball. I am forever caught in the crossfire between wanting the occasional perfection of a close shave and being in peace with my bearded self for the rest of the time.

I don’t know how the ones who do it, do it. I don’t know how the effortless strokes of a blade on a bearded face can vanquish the stubble to an extent that you wouldn’t even know it existed. It is a demon I have lived with and continue to do so. There are a few days when I am satisfied, like one would with a cup of coffee that is freshly brewed even though the beans may not be the freshest, but the moment is short lived. So, I stubble along. Sorry. Stumble along the path in search of the perfect shave, when I can run my fingers smoothly along the face and feel it move without the slightest of obstructions, like caressing a slab of granite in the dark.

Time is running out. I have two sons who will suffer the same dilemma in a decade. No, not the one about watching ‘Hum Aapke Hain Kaun’ with the family. The dilemma on how to get the perfect shave. I need to find the answers soon or risk breaking the myth of the super hero Dad that my little cherubs cling to. The drama is heightening. In the end, it promises to be a close shave.