Untamed For Life: Growing Up As A Curly-Haired Girl

At a recent video shoot for an advertisement for a business group, the creative director kept adjusting my hair, tried to tuck a stray strand behind my ear, kept trying to smoothen out the frizzy mini hair standing in attention at various angles. I tried to tell him that it won’t work, you can’t tame the curls, I haven’t been able to tame it in the last 37 years, you will have to work with the frizz and so on. I am yet to see the final footage but I am sure it is going to be airbrushed into complacency. That has been the journey of my life. My wild curly hair and attempts to tame it. If I ever write a memoir it is going to be titled "Untamed".

One of my earliest memories is keeping my head on my grandmother’s lap to read a book and she complaining that my hair is prickly, it hurts. I would still continue to rest my head like that and keep reading but somewhere deep inside me I would feel pricked. She was not wrong though, my hair was very thick, very unruly and dry. And all everyone believed was that if you comb curly hair enough and keep it locked into two plaits, it will straighten out.

But alas, my hair, and of countless other women in India is like a dog’s tail. Always curly, never straight. Wagging left and right, it has a mind of its own, everywhere all at once, but never straight.

Growing up my hair situation was the butt of many jokes. When I used to leave it open clasped with a small hairclip at the back, people would call it a bird’s nest, maggi noodles, make racist jokes about how I have an Afro look, some kids in my class would throw little balls of paper in my hair and it would get stuck there. Till I went home and combed it the next morning , those little pieces of paper would stay frozen in my hair. The only solution to this problem was to keep it into two tight braids secured with ribbons at the end and it would make me look so unglamorous that someone would think I have come out of an old black and white magazine. Those were my two options. Get ridiculed for the messy frizzy hair or appear dated and old.

All those years growing up, I did not know that curly hair shouldn’t be combed every day. I did not know that it shouldn’t be shampooed with harsh chemicals every week, the over-the-counter shampoos damaged my hair much more than they did anything good for the scalp. I had no clue that my type of hair needs to be conditioned every time and some sort of a leave in conditioner also needs to be applied. There was also a belief that if you comb your hair in the shower, it will lead to hair loss, how wrong was that! It made me suffer through countless hours of combing through dry hair trying to detangle it. My hands would ache while sectioning my hair and detangling the ends and then moving to the top. And by the time I was done with one section, it would again get knotted because that’s just how their structure is. Curly hair needs to be combed when wet, with conditioner in it, so that a wide toothed comb can glide through. But we did not know any of these things, we tried to treat it like straight silky think hair and it would lead to lot of crying and tantrums on my part. All we tried to do in my Maharashtrian household, my mom and grandmother, aunts, everyone was to comb my hair and braid it with oil in an attempt to straighten it. There was just not enough information.

There was no representation of curly-haired women on screen either. Kangana Ranaut, Mithila Palkar, Taapsee Pannu hadn't happened by then on Indian screens, and somehow hair was always supposed to be clean and tamed, it reflected on the personality of the woman who was also supposed to be very demure and homely.

That’s when I also started fancying about adopting a girl when I grow up so that she doesn’t inherit my hair. She doesn't have to go through what I did. Little did I know that there is a way to manage the curls and accept them for what they are.

The first time I found out that my hair type is curly and could be beautiful and not just messy was when I was around 18. Noemie, an exchange student from France had come here to stay with my best friend and she had soft beautiful blond curls. I would always marvel at her hair, but I thought she is beautiful because she is white. I later found out that she had a styling mousse which she would apply to her curls and not comb them for 2-3 days till she washed her hair again and reapplied the mousse. She generously left me 4-5 bottles of it before going back and my hair game was set for the next couple of years using it only for special occasions. It would give a superb hold and make my hair dazzle. I used the products way beyond the expiry. But it made me look fabulous and finally made sense of my hair, expiry date be damned.

That was also the time when I got my first boyfriend, a Tamilian guy who was perhaps not so mortified by my hair as everyone else used to be. Now looking back I realise why I liked to hang out with South Indian guys, because they did not make me feel ugly and unkempt, they understood my hair, they had seen it around them and did not wish it to be changed. I was suddenly the girl their momma would be happy to meet.

In the later years, I chemically straightened my hair two to three times and for the first few weeks, they were magic. Silky hair, brushed out in a few minutes, made me feel like Cinderella. But then the roots would grow out very curly again and it felt outrageous to have the head full of waves and dropping into broom-like straight hair towards the ends. I stopped doing it after three rounds and found a brilliant curly hairdresser Avani Yashwin in Bandra who finally taught me to fall in love with my natural textured hair.

Every girl has different kinds of body-image issues growing up, it’s only later on in life that we learn to accept it as it is and not give a damn about how different we look from the norm. Realistically speaking curly wavy non silky straight hair is the norm. Most Indians have textured hair. But we are also a predominantly hot tropical country and the heat and humidity messes with the curls. The heat also makes us want to plait it or put it in a bun, away from the face, creating more space for air to circulate at the nape of the neck.

It could also be Hollywood and the fair skin and blonde silky hair that made the definition of a good-looking girl and, while I was quite fair I had dark thick curly hair which made me not a beautiful girl by the movie standards .

The Curly girl method was introduced by Loarraine Massey in her book, The Curly Girl handbook, in 2001 and it took another 10 years for it trickle down to India. It changed the way we looked at ourselves, the way we treated and took care of our hair, the CG method as we call it was nothing but Godsent for us. We adopted a regime and started using Sulphate and Silcone-free products, and combing our hair only when they have conditioner on, in the shower.

Now that I have accepted my hair, accepted the curly girl method, heck I have even started my own curly hair care product range with another curly woman under the name The Curl Co. I am proudly displaying my mane. From business perspective it is my fixed asset and I use my own inventory on my own hair. Hair care is now free, and I walk around as an advertisement of my products. Whenever anyone stops and tells me my hair looks great, (it happens at least 10 times every week), I whip out some sachets of our product and hand it out. The power that this gives me to be able to own up to my tresses and perhaps change the life of another curly messy girl is immense.

(Rutvika Bhide Charegaoankar is the co-founder of The Curl Co.)