Hair-A Memory

By Shaik Faizah

The gray just popped up. It didn’t roll out like the embroidered carpet in our last family gathering. Neither did it grow in from the sides like the new plants in my neighbor’s garden.

I remember when I first saw my dad’s gray hair. It was the talk of my family. The youngest looking man in the family finally had signs of aging. Shocking. Younger men had it coming but not my dad, no.

I knew when it began though; I saw his hair up close everyday when he dropped me off to school. Day after day. Week after week.

The way my school schedule never changed, so didn’t our routine. I would hop up behind him on our decade old Honda activa, fix my skirt and my bag, and stare at his hair, waiting for the scooter to start. It was what I bragged to my friends, the youngest looking man of all their fathers. The darkest hair among a sea of grays, what I saw as the peak of enthusiasm and energy. Our schedule never changed, a memory built of years of monotonous routine. It was carved in rock, right after the first day.

First day at my new school, he dropped me off at the school gates. We had driven through the short but winding streets of Patamata. I brushed a strand of hair from his shirt and waved goodbye. He told me he would find a faster way to reach school so I could go in faster to catch up with the other students. That was enough for me. And I caught up with them. I grew up with them. This was when school whizzed by and the monotony came into play. My dad dropped me off and I ran into school. For those early days when I had to get ready for an event. For those late afternoons when a competition ran late. My mind was still smothered by my age, but I always noticed his hair. When it whipped with my long ribboned braids along those early morning roads. When I still got tears in my eyes from the morning wind.

I saw his dark hair, parted at the right, not just on the road to school.

I noticed his disheveled hair when my family found my hair beneath the bed. I envied him for his hair then. That was when I first saw the grays underneath his ears. They were still slight. But I was more worried about my own. I had a hair disorder, very common the doctor said, but still jarring for a conservative unproblematic (usually) family. Its called trichotillomania, the disorder where you pull out your hair. It was the stress that caused it, joining a new school does that to people (said the old bald guy who treated me).

My hair grew back, hands to my heart, but that was when I stopped noticing his.

My priorities changed. So did my attention span. I was growing with my peers and I didn’t want to notice the little things. Not anymore. Events piled up, and I could finally differentiate myself among my peers. His hair kept changing for the next two years, and those two years were lost in the quick whirlwind of me trying to balance school, my clubs and searching for new dreams. At this point, is when I believe my family caught on to my dad aging. Where was I during that time? I have no idea.

I noticed his hair again last year. When I went back to school after the lockdown. And there it was, those bright gray hairs. Starting off from the sides, not like those bushes I saw on the way to school, forming their own path. And all I could do was stare. That slight shade near the ears had led to a full sprouting. There was no bright-eyed kid bragging about her father (and how close they were).

It was my first year again, but this was away from home. No streets to cover on a scooter, no things to chat about on the way. To travel hours away from home every day to attend a school with better opportunities. The hair was just a reminder of how fast life was moving, and how my relationship with my father (and with myself) was changing. Those little details I would rather not notice, they weren’t so little anymore. They were now memories. I have used my dad’s hair as the perpetual example, but it is just a hair in the haystack (pun intended). Every small detail was an indication of my life and a part of me growing up. A part of a father-daughter relationship. And a proof of how life moved on.

In retrospect, I know now that this is when I had to notice better. To keep what I notice as keepsakes of my life and of important relationships.

It were those details, like my dad’s hair, that helped me understand how much I had grown and how much my relationships had changed. This was and is just a reminder to appreciate the present and hold on to memories, materialistic form or not, good or bad, as they are a part of me. They are me.

By Shaik Faizah