‘What are you made of?’
Every once in a while, one of the girls tried to give a different answer: water, bone, snow, sugar, animal, vegetable, mineral. But Mother did not want innovation. She simply waited until each girl gave the correct sound-off.
‘Hair.’
‘Hair.’
‘Hair.’
‘Hair.’
Naila sometimes mentally echoed the question back: And what are you made of, Mother? She pictured Mother’s lips turning down as she said: ‘I’m made of veils.’ This seemed the likeliest answer because of the wedding photograph on the bedside table in her parents’ bedroom. Naila often snuck in to stare at it – Mother suspended in mist or dust, translucent layers with a sepia tint.
* * *
Naila asked about it once. Love Luxe Locks Ltd had managed three harvests thus far. She and Mother were packaging hair into packets in the dining room, wrapping it around cardboard and squeezing it into plastic rectangles.
‘Where’s the dress?’ Naila asked.
‘The dress?’ Mother looked up from her busy hands but her eyes immediately skipped off to her other three daughters. They were playing quietly in the corner, their newly shorn heads making them look like little monks. Bald Gabriella made a zooming noise and bald Lilliana started beeping – they were being spaceships. Bald Contessa was near tears – she did not know what sounds to make.
‘Your wedding dress,’ Naila pressed, keen to take advantage of having Mother alone.
‘Wedding dress.’ Mother stared at the packets on the table. ‘It was your grandmother’s.’
‘Nonna’s?’
‘Yes. She was beautiful in her day, you know.’ Mother’s voice was growing irritated. She began sewing hair onto a wig scalp – it was Gabriella’s, the shiniest and thickest.
Naila knew her grandmother was beautiful in her day because she was still beautiful now – but it did take a moment to process the picture of Nonna in a white dress. Naila had only ever seen her in those big, colourful West African dresses with embroidery lathering the chest.
As if they had conjured her, Nonna Sibilla appeared in the doorway, removing the shawls with which she veiled her appearance outside the house. She was coming from the Italian School, where she spent a few days a week using fairy tales and puppets to teach the students how to speak the language of her childhood. She had offered to teach Naila and her sisters too, but Mother had declined the offer. The girls attended Namununga, a mixed school with mostly Indian teachers, English-language instruction, and a high tolerance for practices like tonsure. The way Mother saw it, why would they ever need to know Italian in Zambia, anyway?
Naila watched her sisters race to their nonna and throw themselves into the folds of her purple boubou. Nonna expertly feigned wonder at their shaved heads, running her hands over the fuzz on their skulls. Naila knew Nonna disapproved of the family business: she had tried to explain to Naila once why it was wrong, using words like servitude and slavery and child labour. But her sisters looked less like slaves and more like puppies to Naila, nestling up to Nonna, all giggles and warmth, exaggerating the force field of their love to prompt their mother’s notice. Rather than hush them, Mother looked to Naila, who gathered them up and whisked them out, giving Nonna a peck on her hairy cheek as she passed.
In the sitting room next door, Naila organised her sisters into a new game, offering absentminded suggestions – they could devise an alien language or introduce a robot – until they were once again absorbed. Then Naila snuck to the door between the two rooms and cracked it.
‘…least I finally have a job,’ Mother was saying.
‘This is a job?’ Nonna Sibilla gave a throaty cackle. ‘Using your children to pay your bills?’
‘I have not harmed a hair on their heads.’
‘Everything you do harms the hair on their heads! And poor Naila is made to—’
Naila held her breath at the mention of her name but Mother veered in another direction.
‘They are not like you,’ she said. ‘It is not their friend. It’s just hair. And it literally grows from their heads. An infinite resource. In fact, you could—’
‘I could what?’ Nonna interrupted. ‘Join you? Give you my…infinite resource? No. Just be happy that your girls didn’t inherit this thing that I have.’
‘But they did! They inherited the best part of you – their hair grows much faster than mine. Five centimetres a month! Do you know what kind of profits—’
‘Profits! What has become of you, Isabella Corsale?’
‘It is Isa Balaji now,’ Mother said