I’d been putting it off for weeks, waiting for warmer days. Then one day Siddharth came home from maths tuition and said, "Dada, you look like that Australian cricketer, the one who’s always angry! Forget about cricketers. I’ll give you a haircut and make you look like Ronaldo!"
"I don’t want to look like Ronaldo. Or any footballer!"
"A film star then? How about Aamir Khan?"
"The one with a trench down the centre of his scalp?"
"That’s right. He’s very popular just now."
Being too lazy to walk down to the barber’s shop, I gave Siddharth the go-ahead, and he went to work with an old pair of his mother’s scissors (normally used for cutting cloth), and every now and then, I yelped as tufts of hair were tugged out by their roots from my scalp. I would readily recommend his method to police thanas that experience difficulty in extracting confessions from those in custody.
When it was over, I looked in the mirror. There was still some hair left on my scalp, though it looked like a map of Newfoundland. I thought I detected a resemblance to someone famous, although I couldn’t be sure just who. Certainly not Ronaldo. Nor Aamir Khan. And then it came to me—Hitler!