MB Civic

By Alaka M. Basu | Saturday, June 17, 2006; A19 | The Washington Post

Back then, in a convent school in small-town India, the nuns taught us an English that was at once correct and respectable. We did not make the kind of grammatical errors made by our friends in the lay school next door (“Why you are not coming to school yesterday?”). Nor did we innovate in more picturesque ways, like my friend’s cousin from that other school who announced to us that his teacher “had a mustache under her arm.” Indeed, we were expressly forbidden to speak of such body parts and the hair therein.

In our school, when we talked of hair, it was very clear that it was the hair on our heads. And we never used physical attributes as metaphors for other things. Or at least we never used plausible descriptions of ourselves metaphorically. It was all right to talk about blue eyes and golden curls and the happiness and sunshine that these could signify. But we were to be strictly unconcerned with — if not unaware of — our own physical states. So how could a physical description be synonymous with a state of mind? How could a bad hair day mean anything but a bad hair day? Unsurprisingly, at that time, I had never even heard of the expression. All I knew of was bad hair itself.

But the lessons the nuns taught were clearly poorly absorbed. For even a simple term such as “bad hair,” something on which a clear, literal definition was surely possible, meant different things to us and to those who controlled us. To our mothers, bad hair was hair that was cut so short that, when it was worn loose down the back, one could not sit on it. Bad hair was what resulted when we refused to let Granny massage her home-extracted hibiscus oil into our scalps twice a week. (Here we were one with the nuns, who also gagged on the smell of that oil.) Bad hair was hair that fell in bangs on the forehead, and caused our eyelashes to flutter unduly through them. Bad hair was hair that smelled of some capitalist-conspiracy-inspired shampoo instead of the sandalwood incense in which live coals were bathed for us to dry our freshly washed hair over.

In other words, bad hair was hair that we all secretly longed to have, hair that we vowed to get the day we were released from the clutches of the school-home combine. A few of us longed for it more openly and defiantly; and the even fewer of us who gave in to this longing impatiently ahead of schedule were the “bad hair girls” whom mothers warned their daughters not to play with. But the boys liked us.

We were also liked by Sister Aquinas, the newly arrived nun from Wales, fresh-faced and ready to fall in love with everything about India. She welcomed dissent in any form, whether in our hairstyles or in our refusal to recite “The Charge of the Light Brigade” one more time.

Soon all the bad hair girls formed a bold and confident group around Sister Aquinas. She agreed that it was not immoral to want to look nice (we often wondered if she ever regretted her own clean-shaven head). But she also told us that it was immoral not to discover all the other joys that the world had to offer, joys that did not spring from male admirers alone. So she took us for long walks along the beach to savor the sand under our toes and the sunset above our heads; she introduced us to “How Green Was My Valley” and “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” She assured us that it was important to know our native literature and our own gods as well as we were being taught to know William Golding and Jesus Christ.

And she taught us the true meaning of romance. She cured us of our giggly definition of “romantic” as that which pertained to boys. She explained that one could have a romantic temperament, that there was something called the romantic imagination, that one could have a romance with the seas, with any category of humanity or, as she had done, with God. She explained that the word “romance” and “roam” had the same root — a root that celebrated the urge to let all one’s physical and intellectual senses wander. I have still not discovered if this derivation is correct. If it is not, I would rather not find out.

It was also Sister Aquinas who agreed with us that we were not too young to have unexplained moods and urges. But then the stoic side of her took over. She believed that our “bad hair days” were not to be embraced in the same way as the days on which we could not stop singing. They were to be challenged, to be overcome and to be forgotten. Here we parted company with her. To us, romanticism was as much about unexplained sorrow and anger as it was about being happy. And we were damned if we were not going to squeeze out every last negative impulse that a bad day had in store for us.

Except that we did not call them “bad hair days” at that time. We called them days on which we “had got up on the wrong side of the bed.” These were days on which not only did one look terrible but everything else seemed to go wrong as well. Looking back, I marvel at the frequency and cynical angst with which we complained that we had got up on the wrong side. As if that explained everything. Explained why we were not answerable for our behavior, explained our impatience with those who did not live by our rules, explained our boredom with the pettiness of our small-town lives.

But I see now that what explained all this more than any bed was our cocky youth. Bad hair days are more familiar to the young and the tough. With time they diminish, not because one’s life improves but because one loses some of that callous sense of entitlement. One also learns to one’s relief that few dark days last forever.

But my own respite has also come from an unexpected direction. At long last I have more and more unadulterated, unambiguous and literal bad hair days. There would be no disagreement among my friends, my high school nuns (including Sister Aquinas) and my mother about the awfulness of this bad hair. But how pleasant these bad hair days are when one thinks of their metaphorical alternatives.

And so, on these bad hair days, I beam at the world. Let such bad hair days last as long as they like. What’s 10 literal bad hair days compared with one metaphorical bad hair day?

The writer is associate professor of sociology and director of the South Asia program at Cornell University.