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2004-04-09 - 3:20 p.m. Last night, Fared cut my hair. We made a makeshift barbershop in front of the TAPAC office, along the corridor. The implements used were basic: a pair of paper scissors, absent of teeth in the blades or handles curved, with elliptical rings--where the scissors' symmetry is deformed to conform to the design of the human hand. It's always struck me how so many designs termed 'ergonomic' seem to be merely ugly: crescent-shaped keyboards where the alphabet has been segregated into two halves, padded office chairs segmented like insects, shoes with exaggerated insoles. I see them as the broken, discarded pieces of moulds used to cast the human body, bearing impressions much less beautiful than what had been expelled from their interiors. So I was seated barebodied on a folding chair, directly under a fluorescent lamp. No mirrors placed in front and behind me to replicate my image towards diminishing eternity. No rectangle of cloth pegged at the back of my neck. No TV screen playing football matches. No stereo system blaring dangdut songs, with those distinctive bass beats that sound like the frenzied burst of magma bubbles. No electric shearers caressing my head, its serrated nib so close to my scalp I can feel my skull vibrating drowsily. And none of those after-cut treats: the chill of rosewater lathered along my mandible by a shaving-brush, the razor blade scratching against my sideburn follicles in that most satisfying manner: along the grain. I noticed something as Fared snipped my hair and itchy tufts fell on my bare shoulders. I had an urge to talk. My memories of haircuts, when I was a child, and teenager, was one of humiliation. I visited a Malay barbershop near my old home in Tampines, one called Bugs Bunny but which had, in addition to the eponymous rabbit, pictures of Woody Woodpecker on the glass doors. One might think that the environment would have been one that was children-friendly. After sitting down on a cushioned plank placed across armrests, I would then be asked in which style I wanted my hair to be cut. This was when terror would strike me, unfailingly. Because the question would be delivered in Malay, and I couldn't answer in Malay. I was scoring quite distinguished Mother Tongue grades in school, but when it came to banter, I found myself rummaging through a mental dictionary. Furthermore, it was a dictionary submerged in water, soaked to the spine, its pages wrinkled and warped. The very act of diving to retrieve such a wreck involved breathlessness and the deceleration involved when one enters another medium. What words to choose without sounding stilted or straying to silence in mid-sentence? In retrospect though, I think it was my fear of not getting the inflections right that paralysed me, more so than a lexical poverty. Maybe I knew the words to use, how to string them together, but had no idea how to achieve that unreachable diction that would disguise the fact that these very words had been frantically translated from English. So I would answer in English: cut the sides short, don't cut so much at the top, leave a slope at the back. There was one time, though, when the barber frowned and asked sarcastically, 'You don't know how to speak Malay, is it?' I remember blushing when those words pierced me, my ears turning red, wishing the barber wasn't so close as to notice such obvious signs of shame. That was the longest haircut of my life; staring into the mirror I saw a boy who quite simply, didn't belong. There were other customers sitting at the bench outside: there were old men in white songkok Haji, boys in soccer T-shirts, Mat Motors in their sunglasses and windbreakers, one with his helmet decorated with a sticker of a pair of Mercurial wings. When these people come in, they will smile at the barbers, call them 'abang' (brother) or 'nak' (child) with familiarity and ease. There would be nothing alien about the barbers' mullets, nicotine-stained teeth, Islamist goatees or the stone-encrusted rings on their fingers. I wasn't part of this network of easy rapport--my feet didn't touch the hair-carpeted floor, my disembodied head was hovering in the air, cut off at the neck by a white sheet. A ghost, rootless, not of these customs and hence not of this world. Haircuts became rituals of retreat. The snips of scissors and hum of electric shearers carried out dialogues around my head, and all the while I was submerging myself in a private silence, a stone dropped in a dark well, shrinking like my own reflection endlessly multiplied by the front and back mirrors. The closer the blades got to my scalp, the further I withdrew into my mind's sanctum. But hair grows. And what was severed is replaced, finds its own length. It was only after my stint as a playwright at Teater Ekamatra that I learnt to tame my tongue to the rhythms of conversational Malay. I recognised stock phrases that established instant bonds, how a few choice words could act as miraculous levellers. Malay is a subtle and complex language, and its many modes of pronoun address are enough to give me a headache. Take, for example the word 'we'. In Malay, two versions of 'we' exist: one, 'kami', excludes the person addressed to, and 'kita', includes this person. If I take such examples of exclusion and inclusion further, then it is possible to conclude that Malay society is extremely stratified, going back to its early feudal roots, where separation was enforced between the court and the rakyat, the formal and colloquial. So back again to last night, where I had Fared hovering around me, snipping away. Another barbershop, another chance at redemption. People like Fared, Alin, Gene, Ema, Moli, Khai, Rafaat, Sani, Yem and Helmi were instrumental in easing me to a refamiliarity with the Malay language. As all the dead weight fell around me, accumulating in a black halo at my feet, I spoke about falling in love again, this time with a girl, about the directions one takes in one's life, how sometimes detours can take you full circle. I spoke first in Malay, and then unconsciously switched to English. It didn't matter. I was being understood. And I thought of that barber from Bugs Bunny, who oppressed a 12-year-old and initiated a cycle of self-recrimination, with his disgust at my inadequate grasp of the language. Living in Singapore for so long, and having served customers of many races, was it even possible that he could not have comprehended my English? I thought of all the purists who appoint themselves as the linguistic police, who insist on rigid notions of cultural authenticity. A humble pair of paper scissors. My hesitant, half-fucked Malay, my over-mannered English. As I admired my hair in the mirror later on, I thought: never judge the handiwork from the tools.
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