The apartment smelled of rain-soaked jasmine and the faint metallic bite of clipper oil.
Priya had left the balcony door open. Monsoon thunder rolled through Jaipur like someone dragging steel drums across the sky. She stood barefoot in the middle of the living room, the same cream-coloured cotton saree she’d worn to her cousin’s engagement three hours earlier now clinging damply to her shoulders. The bun that had taken forty-five minutes and three hairpins to perfect that morning was already half-unravelled.
She hadn’t cried yet. That surprised her.
On the coffee table lay the things she’d gathered without really thinking: her mother’s old steel bowl, the new cordless clippers still in their plastic clamshell, a pair of kitchen scissors with black handles, a small mirror she usually used only to check her kajal, and one white towel folded into a perfect square.
Her phone buzzed once on the sofa. A message from her mother:
Beta, you reached home safely? Call me when you can.
She didn’t reply.
Instead she picked up the scissors.
The first cut wasn’t dramatic. It was clumsy. A thick rope of hair fell to the floor like a dropped snake. She stared at it for several seconds, surprised by how ordinary it looked lying there on the tiles—black, glossy, slightly curled at the end. Just hair. Nothing more.
She kept going.
Snip. Snip. Snip.
The sound was louder than she expected, each cut echoing in the small room. When the length was gone—chin-level, uneven, ridiculous—she set the scissors down and opened the clippers.
They buzzed to life with a low, hungry drone.
She didn’t use a guard.
The first pass started at the nape. Cold metal kissed skin. Vibration travelled straight into her skull. A wide stripe of bare scalp appeared instantly—pale, vulnerable, almost blue under the tube light. She exhaled a shaky laugh that sounded more like a sob.
She worked in silence after that.
Front to back. Side to side. The clippers hissed through what remained. Tiny black drifts collected on her shoulders, slid down the saree blouse, gathered in the folds at her waist like dark snow. Every few passes she shook her head the way dogs do after a bath, sending a fresh shower of clippings across the floor.
When the buzzing finally stopped the room felt too quiet.
She lifted the little mirror.
A stranger looked back.
Rounder face than she remembered. Larger eyes. Ears that suddenly seemed too prominent. The curve of her skull looked strangely elegant—smooth bone geography she had never really seen before. Rain tapped the balcony railing like slow applause.
She touched the crown first. Velvet. Warm. Alive.
Then the sides—cooler, silkier. Then the back, where the skin still tingled from the fading vibration.
For the first time in sixteen months the weight was gone. Not just the literal kilograms of hair, but the other weight: the one that came with braiding it every morning, oiling it every weekend, hiding the widening parting, pretending the handfuls in the shower drain were normal, smiling through every “your hair is thinning, beta” comment from well-meaning aunties.
She set the mirror down.
Walked to the balcony.
Leaned out into the wet night.
Thunder again—closer now.
Priya closed her eyes and let the rain mist her bare scalp. It felt like the first honest thing her skin had felt in years.
She smiled—small, private, unafraid.
Tomorrow she would call her mother.
Tomorrow she would explain.
But tonight the monsoon had permission to touch her head directly, no barrier, no filter, no performance.
And that was enough.
(End)