Wax and Wane
by Leela Kiyawat
I am talking to Kenza about onions, about caramelizing them with butter, paprika, salt, pepper, turmeric, oregano, and brown sugar, when she pokes me under my chin. You have something, she cries, and my mouth drops open. Horrified, I raise my hand to my chin and tug; the lonely coarse hair on my neck is a full 3 centimeters long, and it sits now in the center of my palm.
I’m holding in my hand something plucked and ugly, something with roots in my neck, which grows back with renewed vigor every month when I least expect it. When I say I am hairy, I am actually saying that my hair makes a forest of me – it stands up on my neck while I watch films, it flops over me in the water, it pokes out and frizzes in July. Over the years, I have cultivated a practice of shaving, snipping, tripping, shedding, and shearing, indulging in a fantasy of a smooth-soft-sweet-small-baby-skin-tiny-pore hairlessness. But when I must yank, from time to time, my bristly chin hair, the fantasy is interrupted, and I feel a familiar terror seeping in; slumbering inside me is a great brown wooly mammoth, fighting valiantly in the Gillette Blade Wars of the early twenty-first century. I shell out tons of money for my weaponry – Target razors – despite warnings from my disappointed mother, who perches like Jiminy Cricket on my right shoulder.
When Gillette Razors arrived in India in 1993, my mother was apparently unimpressed and remains so to this day. Firmly against ushering in an era of razor bumps and folliculitis on her daughters’ legs, she set up a DIY waxing salon in my bedroom. Every month or so, my sister Uma and I donned cotton shorts and tank tops while the smell of bubbling hot honey wax thickened the air. My neighbor-slash-basically-sister Vaidehi, who also suffers from the same subcontinental hairiness, joined us. (Chaitanya, her brother, was always invited but never came: he saw it as a gendered event, a conference in which we affirmed, over and over again, our right to be blue-blooded and bare-legged Indian-American women.)
A vat of wax takes one hour to heat up. Undressed and emboldened, we serenaded my mother with Tia Tamera and layered the strips onto our legs, gossiping about the neighbors, grumbling through the discomfort, emitting anguished screams every so often. The strips collected in piles at our feet, an unsavory salad of gummy wax, short black hairs, and muslin. I learned a lot from these sessions – advocating for myself when the wax became too hot, expanding my pain tolerance, and earning Vaidehi’s trust before ripping strips from her shins. While it was excruciating, waxing at home gave us a luxurious intimacy: I used a popsicle stick or a butter knife to spread the wax on Uma’s legs, and afterward, we’d run our hands over her knees, giggling at the smoothness, kneading coconut oil into her joints.
Of course, at the DIY salon, waxing was strictly for cleanliness, for the sheer joy that comes with banishing dead skin in favor of glossy calves. But the removal of dead skin also facilitated, for me, a crooked improvement: my legs became creamier, my arms fairer, my feet paler. My pearly self and I faced the mirror, armpits slightly bloody (the skin, much too fragile, peeled right off with the wax). I’d indulged, for a couple hours, in a womanhood touched by coloniality, cradled by the great big hairless West, anxiously nudged towards whiteness. I’d made like the moon: waxing and waning my hair to my fancy, charging it with the death penalty.
As Kenza points to the wicked strand on my chin, I am reminded of my mother’s rituals. She and I are both hairy children of the Western empire. We are women who take pride in hacking, hewing, and stripping; we are women who give in to the delicious burden of a beauty standard. I show Kenza my chin hair, and as we giggle at my bare neck, I can barely contain my joy.