her silver hair waft into the plaid towel and onto the slick slate floor. This was so very different from Mother’s ‘harvests’ for Lovely Luxe Locks Ltd. The air in the room shifted like clouds across Naila’s scalp until it was bare sky. When her head was completely shorn, it rose up all on its own.
The barber beckoned the next woman in line. Naila stood and stepped aside, touching her scalp, looking at the scrolls of fallen hair. According to custom, it would be donated directly to the god – she did not have to take it to him. Daddiji’s debt had officially been repaid. But in reality, she knew, her hair would be weighed and sorted and distributed to one of the wig factories in Tirupati. Someday it might mingle with another woman’s hair on yet another woman’s head. Anonymous, profitable, generous – was this the gift economy her nonna had aspired to when she had sponsored the Hi-Fly salon?
The driver was leaning against a wall outside, smoking a beedi with another fixer. Like a bad boyfriend, he took no notice of her haircut and kept chatting. Naila put on her trainers and saw her rucksack sitting at his feet. He handed it over and scolded her for leaving it next to the open window of the car.
He took her to the pavilion to do a bit of tourist shopping. Naila mounted the broad steps bordered with stalls selling medicine and bangles and key chains and Tirumala t-shirts – mementos of loss, of having given something away. At the top of the steps was a station where people were burning coconut. Naila stood in the midst of that nutty, sooty smell, wondering if Daddiji’s ashes – in the box in the bag on her back – were stirring, sensing burnt friends nearby. She looked out at the white temple and the gold temple beyond it, where tomorrow she would visit Sri Venkateswara. She clicked on her Bead, held her middle finger up, extended her arm to zoom, and narrowed her eye professionally. She tapped her index finger and thumb to take the picture, then examined the photo in her palm. Figures were cavorting on every inch of the temple’s facade. Even the walls here had people.
* * *
She knew she was supposed to wash immediately, cleanse herself of the barber’s contamination. But instead she went back to her hotel room, stripped off her sweaty kurti and underclothes – her bra and panties like kelp – and slid under the sheets. Her newly bald head felt tender. She tried to ignore the operatic mosquitoes drifting around her. They looked like flecks of ash. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
What had it been like? Had Daddiji fallen asleep feeling fine and woken up to spasms and death? Perhaps he had eaten supper spiced up with Rivonia mango chutney, then some Earl Grey, a nap in his leather chair with the taste of bergamot on his tongue, and then – what? Spasms and death? Mother had found him. Had she tried to shake him awake? Had she knelt at his feet? Had she washed them before they took him to the mortuary, before they slid him into the furnace at the crematorium? Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down…
Naila woke up with her bladder half full, a comfortable ache. She turned on her Bead and ran through her messages. Four from Joseph – gawd, so needy – one from Gabs just checking in, and a linked article from Tabitha: ‘Revolution is a Slow-Moving Riot’. Naila started reading it, then gave up – insects kept flitting in her face, drawn to her Bead. She got up to pee, and already in the bathroom anyway, she finally relented and took a shower, the water thrilling against her bare scalp. She threw on jeans and a long-sleeved shirt to go out for dinner. She put her passport in the safe and tried to shove the rucksack with the box of ashes in there, too, but it was too big, so she slung it over her shoulder. Better safe than sorry.
Stealing Daddiji’s ashes had been easy. Mother hadn’t hidden the box. If anything, she’d flaunted it, leaving it on the sideboard so she could gesture to it while making her macabre jokes. Getting here had been more difficult. Naila had used up all her savings flying back to Lusaka from uni. She had eventually found an old bank card of Daddiji’s stashed in the back of