"It just won't do," she said, discussing the matter with Ishvar. "Thanks to you, the boy is going to take on a big responsibility. But what kind of husband and father will he make with a stomachful of worms?"

"How can you be so sure, Dinabai?"

"He complains about headaches, and itches in private places. He eats a lot but continues to be skin and bones. Those are definite signs."

Next day, she showed Ishvar the dark-brown bottle of vermifuge she had purchased at the chemist's. "It's the best wedding gift I can give the boy."

The pink liquid was to be ingested in a single dose. He examined it, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the top to sniff: not a pleasant smell. How good it would be if Om were cured before the wedding, he thought. "But what if it's something else, not worms?"

"That's okay, the medicine won't do any harm. It just acts like a purge. He must fast this evening, and take it late at night. Look, it explains on the label here."

But the directions were quite complex for his rudimentary English, lost when it strayed too far beyond chest, sleeve, collar, waist. He promised to make his nephew swallow the dose before going to bed.

The more difficult part was to persuade Om to miss dinner. "Such injustice," he complained. "Starving the cook who makes your chapatis."

"If you eat, the worms eat. They need to be kept waiting hungrily inside your stomach, with their mouths wide open. So when you take the medicine, they swallow it eagerly and die."

Maneck said he had once seen a film about a doctor who became very tiny, in order to go inside the patient's body and fight the disease. "I could take a tiny gun and shoot dead all your worms."

"Sure," said Om. "Or a tiny umbrella, to stab them. Then I won't need to drink this foul stuff."

"One thing you are forgetting," said Ishvar. "If you are very tiny in the stomach, the worms will be like giant cobras and pythons. Hahnji, mister, hundreds of them swarming, seething, hissing around you."

"I hadn't thought of that," said Maneck. "Forget it. I'm cancelling my voyage."

Dina lost count after Om's first seven trips to the toilet next morning. "I am dead," he moaned. "Nothing left of me."

Then late in the afternoon he burst out of the wc, shaken but triumphant. "It fell! It looked like a small snake!"

"Was it wriggling or lifeless?"

"Wriggling madly."

"That means the medicine couldn't sedate it. What a powerful parasite. How big was it?"

He thought for a moment and held out his hand. "From here to here," he pointed from fingertips to wrist. "About eight inches."

"Now you know why you are so thin. That wicked creature and its children were eating up your nourishment. Hundreds of stomachs within your stomach. And none of you believed me when I said worms. Never mind, it won't be long now before you put on weight. Soon you'll be as well built as Maneck."

"Yes," said Maneck, "we have three weeks to make a strong husband out of you."

"And the father of half a dozen boys," added Ishvar.

"Don't give bad advice," said Dina. "Two children only. At the most, three. Haven't you been listening to the family planning people? Remember, Om, treat your wife with respect. No shouting or screaming or beating. And one thing is certain, I will not allow any kerosene stoves on my verandah."

Ishvar understood her allusion, veiled though it was. He protested that bride burnings and dowry deaths happened among the greedy upper castes, his community did not do such things.

"Really? And what does your community say about male and female children? Any preferences?"

"We cannot determine these things," he declared. "It's all in G.o.d's hands."

Maneck nudged Om and whispered, "It's not in G.o.d's hands, it's in your pants."

Om took a day to recover from the vermifuge. Next evening Maneck made plans to celebrate the return of the appet.i.te with bhel-puri and coconut water at the beach.

"You are spoiling my nephew," said Ishvar.

"Not really. It's the first time I'm treating him. Previously his pet worm did the eating."

Ishvar stared at the man in the doorway, trying to place him, for the voice was familiar but not the face. Then he recoiled, recognizing the greatly transformed hair-collector. His scalp was smooth and shining, and he had shaved off his moustache.

"You! Where did you come from?" He wondered whether to tell him to get lost or threaten to call the police.

Shoulders drooping, head bowed, Rajaram would not meet his gaze. "I took a chance," he said. "It's been so many months, I didn't know if you still worked here."

"What happened to your long hair?" asked Om, and Ishvar clicked his tongue disapprovingly. He didn't want his nephew to get familiar again with this murderer.

"It's okay to ask about my hair," said Rajaram, raising his head. The expression in his eyes was empty, the fire of relentless enterprise extinguished. "You are my only friends. And I need your help. But I feel so bad...still haven't returned your last loan."

Ishvar withheld his disgust. To get involved in police business, with just days left before the wedding trip, would be most inauspicious. If a few rupees could get rid of the killer, he would do it. He stepped backwards to allow Rajaram to enter the verandah. "So what's wrong this time?"

"Terrible trouble. Nothing but trouble. Ever since our shacks were destroyed, my life has been filled with immense obstacles. I am ready to renounce the world."

Good riddance, thought Ishvar.

"Excuse me," said Dina. "I don't know you very well, but as a Parsi, my belief makes me say this: suicide is wrong, human beings are not meant to select their time of death. For then they would also be allowed to pick the moment of birth."

Rajaram stared at her hair, letting moments elapse before responding. "Choosing the ending has nothing to do with choosing the beginning. The two are independent. Anyway, you misunderstand me. All I meant was, I want to reject the material world, become a sanyasi, spend my life meditating in a cave."

She regarded this as much an evasion as suicide. "It's all the same thing."

"I don't agree," said Maneck.

"Please don't interrupt me, Maneck," she said, turning to Rajaram again. "And how is my old haircutting kit? Does it still work? It is a Made In England set, mind you."

He blanched. "Yes, it's working first cla.s.s."

Then he would speak no more of himself in the presence of Maneck and Dina. "Can I buy my two old friends a cup of tea? What's that restaurant you go to Aram?"

"Vishram," said Ishvar, and checked if he had enough money in his pocket for tea. Although the invitation was the hair-collector's, chances were, he would end up paying.

They walked silently to the corner, and settled around the solitary table. The cook waved an oily hand from his corner. "Story time!" he shouted happily. "And what is today's topic?"

The tailors laughed, shaking their heads. "The story is, our friend is thirsty for your special tea," said Ishvar. "He has come very far to meet us."

Rajaram looked about him awkwardly; he had forgotten how tiny and exposed the Vishram was. But he was grateful for the privacy afforded by the din of the roaring stoves.

"So what's all this fakeology about sanyasi?" asked Om.

"No, I'm serious, I want to renounce the world."

"What happened to barbering?"

"That's where the whole problem started. I was a failure right from the first day. My hair-collecting years had left me useless for barbering."

Ishvar was unwilling to believe a single word from the mouth of this killer. "You mean you forgot how to do haircuts?"

"Much worse than that. Whenever a customer sat on the pavement and asked for a trim, he ended up almost a baldie."

"And how did that happen?"

"Something would come over me. Instead of clipping and pruning, shaping the hair, I hacked off everything. In a way it was funny some of them so nice and polite, when I held up the mirror they would say, 'Good, very good, thank you.' They probably didn't want to hurt my feelings and tell me I was a lousy barber. But most customers were not kind. They shouted angrily, refused to pay, threatened to beat me up. And I just couldn't stop my clippers or scissors. My hair-collecting instinct had become too powerful, I was like a monster."

Word got around of the maniac with scissors, and no one stopped anymore at his pavement stall. Soon he was left without a choice. It had to be full-time hair-collecting again. But there was a problem: he had no place to store the bags of low-value clippings, which were his stock in trade. "And you could not have kept it in your trunk either. You need a small warehouse for that. You saw my hut in the colony, how it was stacked from floor to ceiling."

Rajaram wrung his hands and shook his head. "If I could have obtained even one set of twelve- or fourteen-inch hair every week, I would have survived. It would have paid for one daily meal. But there was no long hair in my horoscope."

"What about the packets you left with Shankar?" interrupted Om. "They contained long hair."

"That came later," he said. "Be patient, I am making a full confession." He gazed wistfully in the distance, as though at a parade of longhaired lovelies. "I will never understand why women hang on forever to their long hair. It's beautiful to look at, yes, but so much trouble to take care of."

He took a sip of tea and licked his lips. "I wasn't ready to give up. Not yet. Now I started offering free haircuts to beggars, vagrants, and drunks." Late at night, after the hustling and drinking was done, he would approach the ones with long hair. A few needed tempting with a small coin. If they were comatose, or too impaired to know what was happening, he just helped himself.

But the venture failed. The quality of his harvest was very poor. The agent said this type of long hair, knotted and dirty, was worth no more than the snippets of pavement barbers. Besides, the supply became erratic when the police started their Emergency roundups under the Beautification Law.

Hungry and homeless, Rajaram would stare ravenously at women who pa.s.sed with their tantalizing dangling plaits, taunting him with the wealth they carried on their heads. Sometimes he picked one to follow, a well-dressed society lady, a likely candidate for a visit to the hairdresser, who just might be planning to have her tresses lopped off. The women he pursued led him to their friends' homes, doctors' offices, astrologers, faith healers, restaurants, sari shops, but never to a hair salon.

He scrutinized long-haired men, too: hippies, foreign and local, in their beads and beards foreign ones gone native in chappals, kurtas, and pyjamas, local ones slouching in sneakers, bell-bottoms, and T-shirts, and all of them equally smelly. He wondered how much a head of blond or red hair might fetch, but did not bother following them, for he knew they would never get a haircut.

It was a pity, he began to muse, that hair was so firmly fastened to the owner's head, making it so difficult to steal. Firmer than the most tightly clutched purse, snugger than a fat wallet in skin-tight trousers. Beyond the fingers of the most skilful pickpocket. Or pickhead. To think that something as fine and light as hair could cling so tenaciously was truly an amazing thing. The way its roots clutched the scalp, it might have been a powerful banyan tree anch.o.r.ed to the earth. Unless, of course, alopecia set in and the hair fell out.

To pa.s.s the time, Rajaram told the tailors, he dreamt of being the first pickhead to go into business. He dreamt of developing a system that would overcome healthy hair's natural reluctance to relinquish the head. Perhaps invent a chemical which, when sprayed on the victim's scalp, would melt the roots but leave the hair untarnished. Or a magic mantra that would hypnotize the individual and make the hair jump off, the way ancient Vedic shlokas recited by sadhus could inspire flames to leap from logs or clouds to pour rain.

Dreaming away the hungry hours, he concluded that in reality a pickhead needed no new invention or supernatural power: the existing techniques of pickpockets, with a few modifications, would suffice. In crowded places it would be easy, using roughly (and smoothly) the same procedure as cutpurses. They were known to employ a sharp blade to ease a restrictive pocket; he still had his razor-keen scissors. One snip and the hair could be his.

At some point, Rajaram's fanciful notions took on a serious aspect. Now he began to believe there was no ethical connection between picking pockets and administering unwelcome haircuts. One was a crime, which deprived the victims of their money. The other was a good deed, the alleviation of an enc.u.mbrance, the eradication of a lice-breeding pasture, which would save the victims time and effort and itchy scalps, not to mention the frivolous expenses of shampoo and hair lotions. And "victim" was hardly the correct word in this case, he felt. Surely "beneficiary" would be more accurate. Surely it was vanity that kept people from realizing their own good, and a helping hand was necessary. In any case, the loss would be temporary, the hair would grow back.

"I began training earnestly," he said, stroking his bald head while the tailors shifted on the bench in the Vishram, rendered speechless by the hair-collector's story thus far. "I travelled through the suburbs till I found a place in the barren countryside where I could rehea.r.s.e."

There, removed from the gaze of human eyes, he stuffed a bag with newspaper to produce a ball the size of a human head, but much lighter, light enough to sway at the least disturbance when suspended with twine from a branch. To the bag he tied lush cl.u.s.ters of string. Then he practised severing them close to the head, without shaking the bag. For variation he would weave the strings into plaits, or hang them in a thick ponytail, or spread them loose like cascading curls.

As his skills advanced, the setup was modified to simulate real-life situations. He held a cloth bag beneath the plait to catch it as it fell, dropped in the scissors, and drew the bag shut all in one smooth movement. He performed this drill in very tight places, to discipline his hands to work within crowds. And when they were trained, he returned to the city's jostling streets and bazaars.

"But why did you go through all this madness?" asked Ishvar. "If your hair business collapsed, wouldn't it have been easier to collect something else? Newspapers, dabba, bottles?"

"I have been asking myself the same question. The answer is yes. There were dozens of possibilities. At the very worst, I could have become a beggar. Even that would have been preferable to the horrible road I was starting on. It's easy to see now. But a blindness had come over me. The more difficult it was to collect long hair, the more desperately I wanted to succeed, as though my life depended on it. And so my scheme did not seem at all crazy."

In fact, when it was put to work, he realized he had developed a brilliant system. With his cloth bag and scissors he would elbow himself into a crowd, selecting the victim (or beneficiary) with care, never impatient and never greedy. A head with two plaits could not tempt him to go for both he was happy with one. And he always resisted the urge to cut too close to the nape the extra inch or two could be his undoing.

In the bazaar, Rajaram stayed clear of the shoppers who came with servants, no matter how luxuriant the hair. Similarly, matrons with children in tow were avoided youngsters were unpredictable. The woman he singled out to receive the grace of his scissors would be alone, preferably someone poorly dressed, engrossed in buying vegetables for her family, agitated by the high prices, bargaining tenaciously, or absorbed in watching the vendor's weights and scales to make sure she wasn't short-changed.

Soon, though, she would be short-haired. Amid the milling shoppers, Rajaram's sharp instrument emerged unnoticed. It went snip, once, quickly and cleanly. The plait dropped into the cloth bag, and he disappeared, having delivered one more fellow human of the hindrance that, unbeknown to her, was weighing her down.

At bus stops, Rajaram chose the woman most anxious about her purse, clamped tight under her arm, its leather or plastic hot against her sweltering skin. Semicircles of sweat would be travelling like an epidemic across her blouse. He would join the commuters, another weary worker returning home. And when the bus's arrival converted the queue into a charging horde, the nervous woman hesitated at the periphery long enough for the scissors to do their work.

He never operated twice in the same marketplace or at the same bus stop. That would be too risky. Often, though, he returned empty-handed to the scene of his crime (or beneficence) to listen to the bazaar talk.

For the first little while there was nothing. Probably, as he suspected, the women were too embarra.s.sed to make a fuss. Or maybe no one believed them, or thought the matter not serious enough.

Eventually, however, quips and wisecracks about lost, stolen, or misplaced hair started to sprout. One joke making the rounds of the paan shops was that under the Emergency, with the slums cleaned up, a new breed of urban rodents had evolved, with a taste not for rotting garbage but for feminine hair. At the docks, mathadis unloading ships cheered the exploits of the mysterious hair-hunter, convinced that it was the work of a lower-caste brother extracting revenge for centuries of upper-caste oppression, of Strippings and rapes and head-shavings of their womenfolk. In tea stalls and Irani restaurants, the intelligentsia wryly commented that the Slum Clearance Programme had been given a larger mandate due to bureaucratic bungling: a typo in a top-level memorandum had the Beautification Police down as the Beautician Police, and now they were tackling hair as crudely as they had tackled slums. The inevitable foreign hand also put in its appearance, in the form of female CIA CIA agents spreading stories about missing coiffures in order to demoralize the nation. agents spreading stories about missing coiffures in order to demoralize the nation.

"Since everyone was joking about it, I wasn't worried," said Rajaram. "My confidence grew, and I thought about expansion."

The hippies, whom he had long regarded as perfect but impossible beneficiaries, became the focus of his ministrations. He discovered that in the early hours of the morning they lay in drug-filled slumber around the dealer's addaa where they bought their hashish.

Relieving catatonic foreigners of their locks was child's play. If someone among them happened to open his eyes and see a companion being sheared, he a.s.sumed it was a hallucination; he giggled stupidly, or whispered something like "groovy, man" or "wow, real cool" and went back to sleep after scratching his crotch. Once Rajaram even cropped a fornicating couple. First the man, who was on top, and then the woman when, halfway through, she mounted him. The rocking and pumping posed no problem for the hair-collector's expert hand. "Oh man!" said the man, excited by his vision. "Far out! I see Kama, grooming you for nirvana!" And the woman murmured, "Like, baby, it's instant karma!"

Rajaram felt things were finally looking up for him. He welcomed the invasion of foreigners, unlike the conservative section of the citizenry that complained about degenerate Americans and Europeans pa.s.sing on filthy habits and decadent manners to the impressionable youth. As long as the aliens possessed hair down to there, shoulder-length or longer, Rajaram was happy to see them pouring into the city.

Around this time, beggars reoccupied their places on the pavements, as the Beautification Law ran its schizophrenic course and grew moribund. The hair-collector's professional eye noticed immediately. Of course, with his business flourishing, he no longer went after the beggars' dirty, knotted hair. Some, recognizing him, would call out to him, requesting their free haircuts, but he ignored them.

"And if only I had continued to ignore them," said Rajaram, sighing heavily, "my life would have been so different today. But our destinies are engraved on our foreheads at birth. And it was beggars that brought about my downfall. Not the beautiful women in bazaars, whom I was so scared to approach. Not the hashish-smoking hippies, who I thought would beat me up one day. No it had to be two helpless beggars."

Rajaram paused, eyeing the cashier-waiter who was smiling at them from the counter, still hoping to be invited to share the story. The tailors did not acknowledge him. "We know all about the beggars," said Ishvar quietly. "Why did you have to kill them?"

"You know!" exclaimed Rajaram, horrified. "But of course! Your Beggarmaster but I didn't! I mean, I did ...I mean it was all a mistake!" He hid his head in his hands upon the table, unable to look at his friends. Then he sat up, rubbing his nose. "This table stinks. But please help me! Please! Don't let -!"

"Calm down, it's okay," said Ishvar. "Beggarmaster doesn't know about you. He only mentioned that two of his beggars were murdered and their hair stolen. We at once thought of you."

Now Rajaram looked injured. "It could have been another hair-collector, you know. There are hundreds in the city. You didn't have to think of me straight away." He swallowed. "So you didn't say anything to him?"

"It was none of our business."

"Thank G.o.d. I meant the beggars no harm, it was such a terrible mistake the way it happened, believe me."

One night, while he had been out on his rounds, he came upon two mendicants, a man and a woman, asleep under a portico, their knees drawn up to their hollow stomachs. He would have walked right past them, except that the streetlight revealed their hair. And it was beautiful. Both heads glimmered with a full-bodied l.u.s.tre, a radiance he had rarely seen during his extensive travels. Hair such as this was the stuff that advertising executives' dreams were made of. Clients would have fought to feature it its brilliance could have promoted products like Shikakai Soap or Tata's Perfumed Coconut Hair Oil to new heights of profitability.

But how strange, thought Rajaram, that such a treasure should adorn the heads of two shrivelled beggars. He knelt beside them and gently touched the shimmering tresses with his fingertips; they felt silken. Unable to resist, he heaped them in his hand and revelled in their texture. His fingers stiffened in sensual agony, as though they would steal the secret of the shine and softness.

The beggars stirred, breaking the spell. Rajaram remembered his professional duty. He took out his scissors and set to work, starting with the woman. For the first time in his career he felt regret. It was a crime, he thought, to separate hair this gorgeous from its roots its magic glow would fade, as surely as the blush of a plucked flower.

The locks came away in his hand. He twisted the tresses together and packed them in his cloth bag. Then he worked on the maris hair. It was virtually indistinguishable from the woman's.

Just as the hair-collector finished, she awakened and saw him crouched beside her, the scissors glinting in the dark like a murderous weapon. She let out a heart-stopping shriek. It woke the man, who released his own bloodcurdling yells.

"Those screams," said Rajaram, shuddering as though they still rang in his ears. "They frightened me so much. I was sure the police would come and beat me to death. I begged the beggars to stop the noise. It was all right, I said, I was not going to hurt them. I clipped a lock of my own hair to show that what I was doing was harmless. I pleaded, I pulled notes and coins out of my pocket, and showered money on them. But they kept on screaming. On and on and on! It drove me crazy!"

He panicked, raised the scissors and struck. First the woman, then the man. In the throat and chest and stomach: in all the wretched places that were pumping the breath and quickening the organs to create those terrible screams. Again and again and again he stabbed, till there was silence.