Malay Sketches by Alfian Sa'at

Author:Alfian Sa'at [Sa'at, Alfian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

The Barbershop

We made a makeshift barbershop in front of our bunk, along the corridor.

I was seated bare-bodied on a folding chair, directly under a fluorescent lamp. No mirrors placed in front and behind me to replicate my image towards diminishing eternity. No rectangle of cloth pegged at the back of my neck. No TV screen playing football matches. No stereo system blaring dangdutº songs, with those distinctive bass beats that sound like the frenzied burst of magma bubbles. No electric shearers caressing my head, its serrated nib so close to my scalp I could feel my skull vibrating drowsily. And none of those after-cut treats: the chill of rosewater lathered along my mandible by a shaving brush, the razor blade scratching against my sideburn follicles in that most satisfying manner: along the grain.

“Boss, how you want?” Sudin asked. Sudin was a storeman from the QM branch. I was a sergeant from Bravo company. We had both been confined for the weekend; him, for losing one of the brushes from his rifle-cleaning kit, and myself, for forgetting to sign the book in/book out book.

I noticed something as Sudin snipped my hair and itchy tufts fell on my bare shoulders. I had an urge to talk. My memories of haircuts, when I was a child, and teenager, was one of humiliation. I visited a Malay barbershop near my old home in Tampines, one called Bugs Bunny but which had, in addition to the eponymous rabbit, pictures of Woody Woodpecker on the glass doors. One might think that the environment would have been one that was child-friendly. After sitting down on a cushioned plank placed across armrests, I would then be asked in which style I wanted my hair to be cut.

This was when terror would strike me, unfailingly. Because the question would be delivered in Malay, and I couldn’t answer in Malay. I was scoring quite distinguished Mother Tongue grades in school, but when it came to banter, I found myself rummaging through a mental dictionary. Furthermore, it was a dictionary submerged in water, soaked to the spine, its pages wrinkled and warped. The very act of diving to retrieve such a wreck involved breathlessness and the deceleration experienced when one enters another medium. What words to choose without sounding stilted or straying to silence in mid-sentence?

In retrospect though, I think it was my fear of not getting the inflections right that paralysed me, more so than a lexical poverty. Maybe I knew the words to use, how to string them together, but had no idea how to achieve that unreachable diction that would disguise the fact that these very words had been frantically translated from English.

So I would answer in English: cut the sides short, don’t cut so much at the top, leave a slope at the back. There was one time, though, when the barber frowned and asked sarcastically, “You don’t know how to speak Malay, is it?” I remember blushing when those words pierced me, my ears turning red, wishing the barber wasn’t so close as to notice such obvious signs of shame.

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