I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff in my life. Needless to say majority of them have been embarrassing and some even downright humiliating. Like the time I went for my first Christmas party in Delhi and it was only towards the end that I realized that my fly was open. Or the time I threw a fit with my mother because I wanted to shave my head bald.
But there’s one episode that stands out or rather cuts through. The year is 1999 and I was in class five. I was doing pretty well in school. I was a prefect. A public figure in school if you must. Then one fine day, my head intoxicated with beliefs of indestructibility that can come only with the authority one gains from being a prefect, I proceeded to trim my eyebrows. I had a very Christian upbringing where I was not allowed to apply kohl even till I passed out from school. Rebelliousness in such a stifling environment is only natural and different people have different ways to act it out. I could’ve just cut my wrists. But no! I had to shave my eyebrows.
It was like that moment in How I Met Your Mother, where Marshall shaves the middle of his head on his wedding day. At least that could be covered with a hat. But I had no device, no piece of clothing to hide my trimmed eyebrows. Damage control. I decide to cut off the front off my hair into bangs so that the eyebrows are hidden. I don’t have to spell it out. The bangs were an even bigger disaster. When I cut on one side the other side seemed longer; when I cut that side the first side seemed longer. So after several rounds of trimming my bangs looked disastrous to say the least. Not only did it look like a lawnmower had done a job on my eyebrows but my bangs also looked like it had been cut by a blind barber!
When my mom came home that evening I looked like this:
As you can see I tried my best to cover my shaved eyebrows with my mutilated bangs. But to no avail. I received quite a thrashing from my mother that evening. But it was nothing in comparison to the embarrassment I had to face the next day in school. Throughout the day I carried in vain, a stunned expression with raised eyebrows, or rather what used to be my eyebrows, all in an effort to hide my shame. But I always inevitably ended up relaxing my facial muscles thereby exposing my mowed eyebrows.
Twelve years have passed since that distressful event and my eyebrows have grown back since then. And as the Azerbaijani proverb says ‘I tried to draw the eyebrow, but I ended up poking the eye.’
I have learnt my lesson.
