A rural Purelander lass

When you have an autoimmune disease that severely limits energy & movement, you have to plan each day carefully. If I bathe today will I also be able to stand long enough to cook? Can I manage 74 stairs roundtrip to check the mail? Do I have it in me to run that errand 4 blocks away (plus the stairs)? In TMBCE, I also have to factor in the constant hills & chart the flattest course possible. On some days, the flat line between the couch & loo is about all I can manage.

Sometimes though, you just have to laugh in spite of it all. Like the whole Wax Factor. Lying in the hospital unable to do much beyond basic grooming is at first embarrassing & then just amusing. My eyebrows look like Brooke Shields circa the 80s & seemingly have found a fine fertilizer in the on-going steroids course. They are very, very expressive.

We Purelander women are a hardy lot (all Purelander men should exit now to keep their delicate sensibilities about their maaji/biwi/bhenein/betis intact. In fact, if you’re male, good-bye.). Nature has bestowed us with both a hot country and a natural pelt to keep us warm. Go figure.

We each tumble into the world endowed with a full set of Archie brows and the dashing beginnings of a mooch (see photo above) and proceed to spend the rest of our waking lives tracking down hairs in the manner of big game hunters obsessed with depopulating the Serengeti.

Waxing, threading, bleaching, shaving, depilatorying, epiladying, plucking, lasering, & generally trying anything grimace-inducing just to stay smooth is routine from a tender age. And I’m not talking about normal areas that woman around the world seek to clear reasonable paths through – I’m talking about faint hair in ridiculous areas like ear lobes, elbows, & the smalls of backs which no one is going to notice anyway.

They might not see it, but you’ll know it’s there, the waxing-crack lady whispers when you’re 13, drawing you into forking over your allowance, & you’re hooked into the full-body wax ordeal for life. Which is fine in Pureland, where a hundred rupees gets the job done, but in Freeland the slash-and-burn can cost hundreds of dollars a pop. Thank goodness for the chilly year-round TMBCE weather & salon-trainable husbands for hard-to-reach spots.

Save up enough cash to walk into a Freeland spa & one leaves refreshed, if ginger, for they take care to ply you with cucumber water & gentle touches between the godawful ripping. The soothing music & sweetly scented pillow muffling one’s mouth all go a long way to maintaining the ambiance & serenity – of the other customers at least.

In a Pureland salon, forget any notion of privacy, though they may bring you a glass of sweaty water, if you’re a regular. The likelihood is that you will be sharing cramped un-airconditioned space with at least two other women, the wax will be boiling & so shall sear your skin upon spreading, and the attendants will be so busy chattering to each other about their latest hairstyles that they will quite cheerfully ignore your screams of agony as they mistakenly thread off half your brow – the half you need to express basic daily emotions like happiness or surprise – and instead leave you with the other bit that looks like a Neanderthal overhang.

And they will blame you for it, because if anything goes wrong it is always the customer’s fault since your hair was too short or too long, your skin was oily so the wax didn’t stick properly, you moved, you breathed, & so on & so forth. (Purelanders have a real issue with taking responsibility, but that’s a whole other blog.)

I attended a women’s Deen Intensive & when a Hanafi fiqh teacher responded to a persistent questioner (whom we were all trying to gag) by finally saying that while mooch removal was encouraged it was haram for women to touch their brows at all beyond removing the bit in the middle, a horrified silence descended upon the well-plucked crowd. And it lasted a good long while…until everyone had successfully repressed that particular fatwa.

My mother was with me & she smugly arched her perfectly-shaped brows, and tinkled, “Thank God I had electrolysis before I knew that!” The teacher tried to make the best of it by saying we only had to deal with this for around 60 years & then insha-Allah could walk around in bikinis in heaven. Masha-Allah, she had huge brows so this came across as very sincere.

In the olden days apparently they’d rub a wheat & cream mixture all over infant girls regularly to rip out any hair & ensure adult smoothness. When my sister A heard about this she seriously considered it, for her daughter Hado was born last year with the trademark big brows & dashing mooch of our clan, bless her. Luckily, we persuaded her not to torture the child, so she too is very, very expressive, just like her Khala Baraka. People look at her painstakingly Garbo-eyebrowed mother & wonder, but we just point accusingly at the father’s side.

In light of all this, I would like to celebrate my newest niece Shaalo for being the first moochless girl born into our family in living memory. We all cooed around her crib in amazement & marveled at her hairless, smooth skin. She barely has brows either. It was almost too much to bear, really, masha-Allah. I hope she enjoys it while it lasts, for the last report was that a mooch is beginning to make a faint appearance at just four months old.

What can you expect, she’s getting mooch fertilizer through her mama R’s “hairy” milk daily. SubhanAllah!