I am a twenty three year old girl from the state of Kerala in South India. A rural village near Palghat is my birth place. I lived there with my parents till I was nineteen. At that time, my parents who are native Brahmins married me to a school teacher. His name is Dilip and he is from Coimbatore. My father is a respected landlord in our village and our marriage was an arranged one. Our house was very conservative and nobody ever talked about sex. Dilip taught biology in a girl’s convent in Coimbatore. He liked my beautiful face and long black hair, and agreed to his parents’ proposal. I was studying for B.A in Music in a college in Palghat when our marriage took place. I was taking bus to the college. I was one of the best looking and homely girls in my college. Our wedding was according to the Brahmin tradition filled with elaborate rituals.
Few weeks after marriage, my husband took me to his workplace for settling down in his home. My father had given a large sum of cash, refrigerator, and color TV as dowry. Dilip’s was a large family including his father, mother, one elder brother, and three younger sisters. His parents who were also people of our caste were very conservative in sexual matters. Girls in their home, including me, never came to the front of the house or wore make up. Dilip and I seldom spent time together. Our married life was a low key one.
Two years after our marriage, Dilip saw an advertisement in the Sunday job section of the English newspaper, Hindu, for biology teachers in a school district in America. He did not have much hope of getting selected when he mailed a resume to the post box given in the advertisement. The advertisement was given by a recruitment agency in Coimbatore on behalf of a school district near Washington who was very much in need of biology teachers. Dilip was surprised when the Human Resources Manager who interviewed him gave a hefty contract on the spot. In July of that year, my husband flew to the U.S leaving me behind. We did not have much contact during that year.
Next year, I also joined him in America. We were living in a luxury apartment in Annapolis in the suburbs of Washington. Before my arrival, my husband had purchased sexy clothes like miniskirts and sleeveless tops from an outlet of Fredericks of Hollywood, for me. I was some what thrilled to go to bed with Dilip in them.
One Saturday, while relaxing on the living room sofa after breakfast, Dilip said that I would look more beautiful in short hair. He took me to a beauty salon run by two white ladies in their thirties. It was the first time in my life I was entering a hair salon. I felt very shy and nervous. Back home in India, society is so orthodox that boys and girls have separate sections in college.
The hairstylists were wearing black aprons. The salon was part of a town house owned by one of them. The elder hairstylist was cutting the hair of a teenage girl. Dilip told the younger of the two stylists to shorten my hair. She took me to the shampoo chair and wetted my hair with warm water and shampooed. Then she took me to the chair and started cutting my long hair. While doing this, she tried to talk to me, but my shyness kept me quiet. By the time my hair was shortened to the neck, Dilip was turned on. He asked the stylist to shorten it again. The stylist obliged and reduced it to four inches. Then he asked her to shape my side burns and back with a trimmer. I looked very different by the time I left the salon.
I avoided seeing other young men from India in grocery store and other public places for a few weeks. Slowly my hair started to grow and cover my ears. Dilip sent some photos of me in short hair to my mother. She did not show them to any one else due to embarrassment. But I started liking me more with a new look.
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