A Dying Art

I belong to a time when letter writing was the only means of communicating with people at distant places.  Other than sending verbal messages through people travelling to places, letter writing was the only means of communication.  There was a place called “Wireless Station”, but I was not clear how it delivered messages then, and people did not use it to send love letters.  So it was the good old post office that we turned to and a fifty chhetrum stamp was enough to get a letter going, to whichever places in Bhutan your letter was destined.  But it took ages to reach its destination.  I remember once, receiving a letter that took forty five days, from a place where it today takes eight hours by road!

Impractical Fool

As I barely sat down to write something that has been bothering me lately, the door bell rang and simultaneously the door opened, revealing a massive head, with a crew cut hair.  The face beneath it looked weather beaten and riddled with potholes.  The nose looked like a genetically altered over-sized carrot.  The traces of curls in the short cropped hair spoke of a wild curly hair, if not attended to on a regular basis.  The bulge in the mid-section of the trunk showed signs of prosperity, as we, the Bhutanese, say, and the shiny brown Hush Puppy shoes confirmed it.

Bad Hair Days

Existence of barbers or professional hair cutters does not feature in any history of Bhutan.  I suppose it is safe to assume that such professions did not exist in Bhutan.  From the time I remember I saw people cut each other’s hair in the villages.  Mothers cut the hair of their children, though the first haircut of a child was always done by the maternal uncle or a big lam, the reason of which I still do not know.