Cut and Run

I pay two dollars and fifty cents for a haircut in Sohar. This is probably a little more than I should, but because he doesn’t try to rip me off too badly I usually give him five.

I return to the same shop every month, not because it is the best, or because it is the cheapest, but simply because we are all creatures of habit in some way or another, even those of us who can’t stay in the same country for more than a year. This particular shop had only one barber’s chair, and fittingly, only one barber. In the middle of a street dominated by Indian restaurants, and Bangladeshi used electronic stores the barber shop was nestled between a three story building permanently under construction and a small cell phone shop manned by a young Omani. The cell phone shop was remarkable only for the thick cloud of Oud, some kind of Saudi incense that produces thick, acrid smoke.

Apart from the barber chair, the only furniture is three white, plastic deck chairs and a corner table covered in five year old magazines about the hotel industry in Abu Dhabi. Above the plastic chairs is a large picture of Sultan Qaboose standing in front of the vast globe that dominates the famous Sohar roundabout. The picture was at least ten years old, because the Sultans short beard and mustache were in their salt and pepper stage. He often strikes me as a dead-ringer for Sean Connery, should the actor ever play an Arab with a Scottish accent.

One of the things I’ve always liked about this dictatorship was that people had a wide variety of official pictures of the Sultan to choose from. Flipping through a book one might wonder whether Admiral Qaboose or General Qaboose might be more appropriate for their restaurant or hotel lobby. Commander in Chief Qaboose? Holy Warrior Qaboose? Elder Statesmen Qaboose? His line of action figures would be legendary, however there’d only be one Barbie to accompany him, draped from head to toe in black.

But a monarch reigning for 40 years is not an anomaly in this part of the world, nor, is my Pakistani barber, but he interests me far more. Faarooq has been cutting hair in Oman for 17 years. More specifically he’s been cutting hair in this shop for over a dozen. Farooq was a large man, but not a fat one. He had the body of a man whose mirth could not be contained in 150 pounds. He wore the national garb of Pakistani muslims, a Salwaar Kameez. Which is a linen or cotton pair of pants, with a shirt that was as much of a cape as it was a shirt. He has the brown and black staples of this part of the world, black hair, black beard, brown eyes, and brown skin. Though his beard has begun its slow erosion toward gray he has the energy of a much younger man.

When I walk into his shop he greets me with a bear hug, and walks toward his radio to turn the volume down. Every day he listens to the voice of America, in Urdu. Radio stations across the country have been beaming out the news in over forty languages since World War II. When I have to wait for him to finish with another customer I browse through a magazine about new building projects in the Abu Dhabi hospitality industry, and wonder about the parts of the world so shut off from the things we find common place that their main source of news is a battery powered radio.

I had a professor once, a short stick of a Chinese man, for whom eccentric might be an understatement. During the cultural revolution he was taken from his parents and sent to a farm in rural China. He said while he was there he learned the vast majority of his English by secretly listening to the Voice of America when everybody else had gone to sleep. But in the absence of abject poverty or societal upheaval I wonder why anyone would still use such an archaic mode of news transmission.

When I step into the surprisingly comfortable leather barber chair I am greeted to a menagerie of foreign sights and smells. Talcum powder in a pink tube with a smiling Buddha for a logo, aftershave lotion stamped with a Himalayan peak, and razorblade packaging with a multi-armed goddess perpetually akimbo. Before the cut begins we banter in broken languages, mine Arabic and his English.

As the months go by and the hair clippings pile up I learn that he has had a wife and two daughters living on his wages, in Lahore. Like most of the Indians and Pakistanis brought into this semi-gulag wage slavery he cannot bring his family with him here. That privilege is reserved for doctors and teachers and engineers, or anyone with cream colored skin. One of his daughters, the beautiful one who beams from her plastic covering in his wallet, is about to go to college. “In Pakistan or India?” I ask. “India,” he says and taps me on the head, “or America.”

The sacrifice required of so many here is something that slips beyond the realm of empathy, because I cannot imagine working so hard or for so long for a family I’m unable to be with. When I read through some of the travel guides and websites about the Gulf, there is a curious string that runs through them. While sunbathing in the Emirates, or Oman where Western thought has gained an intractable foothold, beware of the sub-continental day laborers, they will ogle on the verge of perversion. These men that build the hotels and restaurants that tourists lounge around in, unable to see their wives, sometimes for years at a time, unable in most cases even to purchase affection for a night, are castigated even for giving attention to attention starved women.

Before he starts today’s cut he turns off his radio, and tunes his small TV to CNN. He asks me if I want anything special, but I gave up long ago trying to describe a haircut to a barber or stylist that doesn’t speak my language. I just give them the benefit of the doubt. As he begins cutting and combing and shaping the mound of wet hair breaking news bursts from pretty woman behind the desk in some labyrinth of an office building. A series of bombings has left dozens dead and hundreds wounded around markets and police stations in Lahore.

At first Farooq slows down, listening to the broadcast but focusing intensely on cutting my hair. Neither of us is smiling anymore. I know that Lahore is where his family lives, but I don’t know which markets his wife goes to buy food, or toys, or clothes. We don’t speak for some time and eventually he walks over to the TV and presses the power button. His distraction is evident by the fact that he passes the remote to get to the TV. The smartly dressed woman had given way to series of talking heads discussing American foreign policy and the war on terror. I can see his face in the mirror in front of me, but it had only been tuned to one setting in all the times I’d come here, happy. I was not sure what part of sadness or anger was currently winning for control of his eyes.

He picked up the razor, flicking the old blade out mechanically, wiping the new blade in alcohol proclaiming Tibetan freshness, and keeping the blade hovering over the flame of a Bic for a few seconds. After he shaved the back of my neck he spent a minute rubbing the loose hair and dead skin off of my head while staring at the ceiling. We hadn’t said a word to each other and the chasms between us had grown far wider and deeper than a lack of language in that awkward space.

When he took off the apron I jumped out of the chair and picked up my bag. I had four one Riyal bills in my wallet so I took them all out and gave them to him. Ten bucks instead of five, it was the height of futility, and possibly an arrogant American way to deal with such a situation, but sometimes, meaningless gestures are all we have.