The first lock fell into her palm like a secret finally told.
Mira stared at it — a soft, dark curl she’d spent years oiling, braiding, pinning, worrying over — and felt an unexpected lightness bloom somewhere behind her ribs. The salon mirror reflected a version of her mid-transition: one half familiar, the other newly revealed. The humming clippers paused.
“Still okay?” asked Latha aunty gently, her voice softer than the machine.
Mira met her own eyes in the mirror. For the first time in weeks, they didn’t look tired.
“More than okay,” she said. “Keep going.”
Two months earlier, she had sat on her apartment floor surrounded by unopened mail, deadlines, and a grief she couldn’t organize into neat thoughts. Everything felt heavy — expectations, conversations, even her own reflection. Her hair, once a comfort, had become another responsibility: wash days, detangling, loose strands on pillows, a reminder of routines she no longer had energy for.
One evening her grandmother had called.
“You sound like you’re carrying a full pot on your head,” Paati said after a pause. “Sometimes you must empty it.”
Mira laughed weakly. “If only it were that simple.”
“Why not?” Paati replied. “When I lost your grandfather, I shaved my head. Not because I had to. Because I wanted a beginning that matched the end.”
The idea stayed.
At first it frightened her — what would people say? Would she still look like herself? Would she regret it the second the scissors touched? But slowly the fear revealed something underneath: curiosity.
What if she didn’t have to look the same to still be herself?
Now, as the clippers traced a cool path across her scalp, stray hairs drifted onto the blue fabric draped over her shoulders. Each pass sounded like static dissolving into silence. She felt air she hadn’t noticed before — light, clean, immediate.
Her shoulders relaxed.
Memories surfaced not as weight but as snapshots: childhood braids before school, oil massages on Sundays, her mother’s fingers weaving jasmine through thick strands. None of it disappeared. It simply changed form — carried inside instead of worn outside.
The last patch came off. The buzzing stopped.
For a moment the room was completely quiet.
Latha aunty brushed the tiny hairs from her neck and turned the chair toward the big mirror.
There she was.
No framing, no curtain — just her face, open and clear. Her eyes looked larger. Her smile arrived before she realized she was smiling. She lifted a hand and touched her scalp, surprised by the softness, the warmth of her own skin.
“I look…” she began, searching.
“Like you can breathe,” Latha aunty finished.
Mira nodded.
Outside, the afternoon sun warmed her head directly, a sensation both strange and comforting. A breeze passed and she laughed aloud — it felt like standing in rain after years indoors.
Her phone buzzed. A message from Paati:
Done?
Mira snapped a photo — wide grin, shining scalp, no hesitation — and sent it.
The reply came instantly:
Ah. Now your mind has space to grow again.
Mira slipped the phone into her pocket and walked down the street lighter than she had in months. Nothing dramatic had changed in her life — the same job, same city, same worries waiting patiently.
But something inside had shifted.
She hadn’t removed her past.
She’d simply made room for her future.