#45 - on going grey

And honoring the truth in our hair

hima // grey hair

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I started to go grey when I was 17. It was a pretty shocking moment considering all the events that led up to it. Before that, my hair, which was long, dark and thick and aligned with the codified expectation and banal sense of beauty for Indian women was treated akin to a family heirloom. My grandmothers would ask about my hair when they called from Mumbai and London. Every day, my mom would braid my hair before school. Every week, she massaged it with almond oil. And every month, she would trim an inch, to help it grow thicker.

I didn’t really understand the big deal, until aunties and strangers would stop us on the street to compliment my mom on my hair. Almost immediately, she would shoo them away, and place another black dot behind my ear to stave off their assumed envy. During my dance recitals, it would take 2, sometimes 3, aunties to coil my hair into a traditional bun. Elastics would break, and there were never enough bobby pins to hold up the weight, but the aunties would laugh with glee that hair could be this thick. They would show off the bun as an example to the other moms, who were furiously trying to get their daughters ready for the stage, as if they could change the nature of their children’s hair at the 11th hour. It was odd to be at the centre of attention for a genetic chance.

I inherited my hair from my mom. There are pictures of her with long, dark, thick hair that fall well below her bum. But I never saw it with my own eyes, because after she gave birth to three children, most of it was lost. She would tug and kneed and comb and braid our hair as a transference of care and matriarchal wisdom, while trying and testing Ayurvedic medicine and Chinese herbs to revive and restore her own.

Having long hair wasn’t always a Bollywood film. It would take over two hours to wash, comb and dry it. The one time I begged my mom to let me wear it out loose, free and unbraided - gum got stuck in it, and later that evening we were cutting out the beehive that it turned into. When we came back from India with lice, my mom spent months, painstakingly shampooing our hair with Nix, using a metal-tooth comb to fish out the dead and living parasites, and clinching her fingernails through long, single strands to unlatch, unhatched eggs. As soon as one sister was close to being lice-free, another’s would flare-up, and the cycle would begin again. My mom said she almost lost her mind.

So not surprisingly, when I spotted my first grey hair at 17, she was furious. Looking back, I suspect it felt like a disregard for her years of dedicated labour. ‘You ruined your hair by using the blowdryer,’ she would tell me. Distraught, I ran to my family doctor for a solution, who plainly looked at me and said, ‘sorry honey, it’s genetic.’ At the time, I couldn’t have known the connection between trauma, stress and the body, but given the circumstances, I now know my body assumed we were older than we were.

I was well aware of the adage that plucking a grey hair would grow back two more, so I decided to snip them as close to the root as I could. Though this meant every few weeks I would have tiny sprouts of new hair peeking through my coif, it was the best I got. Soon, there were too many strands to snip, and I began a 13-year period of living on six week dying cycles.

Week 1-3: Box dye my hair at home (~$15 // 3 hours)

Week 3-5: Wear a hat

Week 6: Get my hair dyed at a salon (~$100 // 3 hours)

Rinse and repeat. Literally.

I estimated that I spent nearly $27,000 over 13 years in the cost and time of dying my hair, and that is conservative. As someone who has been mostly self-employed for the last decade, and is not a homeowner, I don’t even know how to reconcile this number. Dying my hair was the ultimate act of dissociation. I would hold my breath through the whole process, internally raging at the seeming birthright I did not sign up for. I did not ask for. The smell of the toxic chemicals made me want to pass out and if that is not a metaphor I don’t know what is.

I wholeheartedly advocate for women, for all people, to choose how they want to decorate and adorn their bodies and hair. For a long time, dying never felt like a choice, along with hair removal and getting my eyebrows done. For me, it always felt like the duty of being a ‘woman’. It made me not want to be a woman.

On some hopeless nights, I would spiral through the Internet to find ‘natural solutions’ to reversing my grey hair. Onion juice, raw food diets and gimmicky sales funnels about silver bullet solutions were always bountiful. Once, I came across an article about Jennifer Lopez going grey around 23 years old, and I recall feeling some kind of affirmation that maybe I had not done something gravely wrong to deserve this fate. The article went on to share that Jennifer dyed her hair every week, because looking beautiful was part of her job.

When I decided to stop dying my hair in March 2017, I had hit a breaking point. The 6-week cycle had turned more into a 2-week cycle; my grey hair fighting to surface and be seen. Why am I spending so much time and money resisting who my body wants to be?, I finally asked myself.

I remember going to an India Arie concert years prior at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto. I was a huge fan, and the concert was a right of passage after listening to her album, Acoustic Soul, nearly 12 dozen times. She walked on stage and took a seat, wearing long, luscious locks and connecting with the crowd in her deep, soothing voice. As India began to sing her famous single, ‘I am not my hair,’ she boldly plucked the wig from her head and threw it towards the audience, revealing a bald crown. Stunned, I realized in that moment that I am my hair. From the early days of praise, my hair had become a part of my sense of self. I adopted the beauty narrative because it suited me. I had the goods after all. Even still, I was so tired of dying my hair, and I was so tired of carrying all the lives and versions of me that were held in my hair. Something needed to change.

The process of going grey was grueling. I didn’t recognize myself, and had to contend with a manufactured feeling of ‘ugliness.’ If it weren’t for the encouragement of my friends along the way, who would tell me they loved it, that it looked ‘cool’ and was in ‘style’, I would have caved and given up. It took two years for my grey to grow out, for the last ends of dyed hair to fall away, and strip so many parts of my self in the process.

My parents were flummoxed by my decision, and begged me to change my mind. We are in our 60s and we still dye our hair!, they would say. How will you get married now? they would worry. Every few months, the issue would resurface: when my little sister got married, when family was coming into town, and when we went to a family friend’s wedding. They would call me and begin with, ‘Hima, can we talk to you about something?,’ and I knew what was coming. ‘Please please dye your hair, just for this occasion. We will pay for it.’ If long, dark and thick hair was the beauty standard for Indian women, then grey hair was indicative of some kind of flimsy, rebellious, feminist stance, of parents who had no control over their daughter’s choices, and most importantly, not marriage material. As someone who typically takes a rebellious stance, it was ironic that in this instance I was not trying to make a specific point. I really was just tired and fed up. After years of this repetitive and mind-numbing conversation, I finally told my parents we are never allowed to speak about my hair again.

As stormy grey mushroomed from my crown, my hair became an identifier in a way that I did not anticipate. Unless, I am performing, my preference is to be invisible and I know I energetically communicate this because most people I meet never remember me, even though I remember them. It use to really bother me, but I now I know its a choice. The grey hair changed my capacity to be as free and invisible as I sometimes like to be.

For instance, an Indian food delivery person scolded me in an elevator for not dying my hair like the ‘rest of us.’ A person at my local crosswalk bewilderingly asked me ‘how I could be so young and have grey hair.’ And another person followed me while running to tell me that my hair was tripping them out because I looked ‘so young.’ Women and non-binary folks constantly stop me to tell me how much they love my grey hair, and while I am sincerely flattered, it is again odd to be offered attention for a genetic chance.

However, the conversation has changed since the beginning of the pandemic, which became a time not only when hair salons and regular beauty services were not accessible, but instigated a period of serious self reflection and re-evaluation. Many women, and folks in general, decided to let their grey hair fly free. Sure, some cases were out of sheer circumstance, but others reflected on the fact that they had a ‘safe way’ to explore it, without the gaze, commentary and questioning of co-workers, friends and family. They had the space to gradually let go, adjust through the awkward grombre transition and fall in love with a new version of themselves. Now, I have so many silver sisters. And, on top of it, after all the grief my dad gave me, he secretly decided to go grey (but really white) too.

I love my grey’s mostly because they are a part of me, and I am a part of so many stories of living and existing and being and dying. These grey’s are intentional and precise, because they are infused with the molecules of my ancestors collective truth - even if it has been one of fighting and tussling between who we are and what is expected of us.

This hair, these subtle sensory antennae’s are sacred in any form, colour, length, texture, or visibility they take, and we know this because of how hair is offered as a symbol of devotion in Sikh and Islamic communities for instance, and equally has been weaponized as a tool for control and oppression, as experienced by Black and Indigenous communities from colonial forces.

I will not deny my hair of it’s truth in the same way I work to not deny myself of the same and I hope we all have the opportunity to love and know ourselves through the wisdom held in our hair.

Much love,

Hima x

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Inner/Interwebs

Caroline Monnet // NINGA MÌNÈH at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

I had the opportunity to interview artist Caroline Monnet for Newest Magazine and I left floored by her thoughtfulness in transmuting materials and traditional patterns as a form of rewriting futures for Indigenous communities.

You can read our virtual conversation here.

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