the crown and forehead.
‘But I had no real talent for barbering,’ he admitted. ‘And no real interest either. You see, I was a businessboy long before I became a businessman.’ His eyebrows danced.
When young Balaji had been caught selling scraps of hair on the side to wig traders, his precocious business acumen had been punished, then leveraged. As soon as he came of age, Balaji had been sent to live and study with his uncle, who profited off the leftovers, all of the masses of hair that Venkateswara didn’t need.
‘Big-wig business!’ Balaji grinned, ‘in South America and China and Hollywood, too. But the biggest wig biz,’ he snapped his fingers snazzily, ‘is with the blacks.’
He had grown up in Tirupati with his Uncle Andhra and Aunt Pavithra, then moved abroad with them, first to Kenya, then to South Africa, and finally landing in Zambia in the 1980s.
‘Ten years later, and the Africans are still thirsty for hair. And Zambia is a good-good country. The politics do not interfere with business here.’
The Colonel, who had plenty to say about the political interferences he had suffered while building Kariba Dam, might have objected to this, but he had fallen asleep in his chair, his empty stein nestled in his lap. Balaji kept talking anyway. Isa nodded blankly beside him. Sibilla looked at the pair of them, her daughter with those grey eyes as vague and vacuous as rainclouds and this boisterous man nearly twice her age, riddling the air with his doublets and triplets of words. How funny that boring little Isa should have chosen such a man!
Isabella had been a sweet, cheerful baby. But she had grown into a sulky, haughty creature, neither Italian nor Zambian, and disdainful of both. Sibilla couldn’t help but feel there was something pointed about the choice of a wigmongerer for a fiancé. Yes, an in-betweener like Isabella herself. But a man who made his money off the scalps of strangers?! Sibilla bristled at this more than at Balaji’s age or ethnicity, though she knew Isabella was daring her parents by asking for their approval of an older Indian man. Everyone knew how the Colonel treated brown people and black people, despite his staunch humanism and liberal pretensions.
Sibilla had fought with her husband about this practically since they’d arrived in this country, from the moment she had tried to be an emissary for the Tonga villagers before the floods at Kariba. His callous dismissal of them, those old people who simply wished to drown with their gods, had made her see him in a new light. She had never tried to leave him – they shared too many secrets. What could she do without his protection? Where could she go? But Sibilla’s marriage had long felt like a handbag that she had neglected to empty out, that she still carried around even though she kept her money, handkerchief and comb elsewhere on her person.
Perhaps it was just as well that Isabella had found this strong, capable man to take care of her. The girl was so helplessly subject to her whims and grudges. She hadn’t been bright enough to make it into university, and now she skulked around Lusaka with nothing to do, and seemed to blame everybody else for it. Sibilla looked through the scrim of her hair at Isabella knotting her fingers, at Balaji bullying the silence, at the Colonel snoring in ginny slumber. Well, if the old man couldn’t be bothered to stay sober long enough to pass his contemptuous judgment on this marriage, on his head be it. Sibilla stood and clasped her hands.
‘You will make wonderful spouses,’ she said to the couple, only half-believing it to be true.
Isa smiled cautiously, her gaze darting between her dozing father and her doting suitor. Balaji stood too, rattling off promises to take care of Isa ‘forever-and-ever’, his head wobbling solicitously. Sibilla walked him to the door, his apologies and thanks dribbling behind him in triplicate.
* * *
Isabella Corsale, pallid, skittish and tense, strode through the house in a wedding dress. She had found it in the back of her mother’s closet, behind the rainbow of boubous that Sibilla always wore to cover her hair. Isa had tried the dress on immediately, batting at the layers of frangible lace, holding her breath to zip it over her ribcage, plucking at the loose shoulders and rotating the twisted sleeves. It was perfect. She was rustling down the corridor to examine it in the full-length mirror