Horror · 12 minNew Look

There is a town called Rajupalem on the Peddapuram road, in the East Godavari side. Tea shops, a cloth market, a temple, a bus stand with a lodge next to it. Nothing you would remember.

But on the main road, opposite the cloth market, there is a shop that has been shut since 1958. The shutter was taken off long ago and the door was nailed. The glass window is grey with fifty years of dust. If you stop and look in, and people do stop, you can see one thing inside. A barber's chair. An iron one, the old kind, heavy, with a cracked leather seat. It faces the mirror on the back wall. It has faced that mirror for fifty years.

The men of that town have one rule about that shop. They do not talk about it to outsiders, but every man in Rajupalem knows it from the time he is a boy. If you wake up in the morning and find a tuft of your own hair on your pillow, cut clean, lying next to your head, you have eleven days. That is all. Eleven days. They call it Kondaiah's shave. Nobody in that town has ever found a way to make it twelve.

This happened in 2008 to a young man called Suresh.

Suresh Babu Pasupuleti was twenty-nine that year. His mother, Annapurna, was from Rajupalem, and after his father died she had come back to her father's house on the lane behind the cloth market. Suresh had grown up in Hyderabad. He had trained at a men's salon in Ameerpet, a proper one, with glass doors and air conditioning, and worked there six years. He knew hair. He knew the cuts the boys wanted from the films, and he knew how to talk to a customer so that the customer came back.

In the summer of 2008 he came to see his mother and saw the empty shop opposite the old barber's. It had been a tailor's. The tailor had died, the sons were in Vizag, and the rent was so small that Suresh laughed when he heard it.

"Amma, I can open a saloon here," he said. "There is nothing in this town. The boys go to Peddapuram for a haircut. I will give them Hyderabad here."

Annapurna looked at him and then she looked at the road, in the direction of the old shop, and she did not say anything for a while. Then she said, "Not that shop, Suresh. Take one near the bus stand."

"That shop is free, Amma. The bus stand ones want two thousand."

She said nothing more. That is how she was. She just stopped talking, and he took it for agreement.

New Look Men's Saloon opened on the ninth of August, 2008. Suresh had put in a glass front with the name painted in red and blue. Inside there were two swivel chairs from Hyderabad, two big mirrors, white tube lights, a shelf of sprays and gels, and posters of film stars on the walls with their hair done the way the boys wanted. There was a steel bin with a lid in the corner for the cut hair, because in Ameerpet that is how it was done. Clean. Nothing on the floor.

He had an assistant, Babji, twenty-four, from the next town, quick with the scissors and quicker with his mouth. And there was a boy called Raju, nineteen, who came at seven every morning with a broom, swept the floor, emptied the bin into the municipal cart, and washed the towels.

The first week was good. The college boys came, four and five at a time, and asked for the cuts by the names of the heroes. The bank clerks came on Saturday. Annapurna came once, stood in the door, looked at the glass and the lights and her son in a white coat, and went away without saying anything.

Next to New Look, on the left, was a tea shop. It had been there forty years. The owner was an old man called Peddi Reddy, seventy-three, thin, with white hair down to his collar, which was a strange thing in that town, as Suresh would learn. Peddi Reddy opened his shop at five every morning. And Suresh, who opened at eight, noticed something in the first week that he thought was funny.

Every morning, before Peddi Reddy lit his stove, before he put the water on, before he even looked at his own counter, he walked out to the road and stood and looked across at the old shop. He looked through the grey glass for a few seconds, standing very still. Then he went back in and started his day.

Every morning. Suresh watched him do it for six days and on the seventh he could not keep quiet.

"Tatayya, what is in that shop? A girl?"

Peddi Reddy was pouring tea. He did not look up. "You are the Hyderabad boy."

"Yes, tatayya."

"Annapurna's son."

"Yes."

The old man put the glass of tea in front of him. Then he sat down on the bench, which he never did in the morning, and told Suresh the rules, the way a man tells you which bus to take.

"That shop was Kondaiah's. Barber. Shut since 1958. You know what is inside. The chair. Now listen. In this town, if a man wakes up in the morning and there is a tuft of his hair on his pillow, cut, lying next to his head like a barber lays it aside, that man has eleven days. On the eleventh morning he does not wake up. The doctor writes heart. Everyone knows it is not heart."

Suresh was smiling. The old man was not.

"That chair," Peddi Reddy said. "It faces the mirror. But in the night, on the nights it has somebody's hair, it turns. It turns to face the street of the man whose hair it has. That is why I look. Every man in this town looks, babu. If the chair is facing your street in the morning, you go home and you check every pillow in your house."

"Tatayya."

"I am not finished. It takes only men. Not women. Not children. It has never touched a child. And it is made of hair, babu. Hair is what it was paid in, hair is what it is. Where hair is kept, it can stand. That is why no barber in this town keeps his sweepings. They burn them. Every night, before they close, in the drum behind the shop. For fifty years."

He pointed with his chin at the steel bin that Suresh could see through his own glass front.

"Burn your sweepings, babu. Every night. Do not keep that bin."

Suresh laughed. He could not help it. He was twenty-nine and from Hyderabad and he had just paid for two swivel chairs.

"Tatayya, this is 2008."

"The year does not come into it," Peddi Reddy said, and got up, and went to his stove, and that was the end of it. He did not bring it up again. He was not a man who repeated himself.

Now, Suresh did not burn the sweepings. He thought about it for one day, the way you think about an old man's advice, and then he forgot it. Raju swept the hair into the bin, the bin went to the municipal cart in the morning, and that was clean and modern. Babji made a joke about it every day for a week, and then he got bored of the joke.

But Annapurna did not get bored. On the Sunday she came with his lunch and stood by the bin and said, "Do what the old man says, Suresh. It costs you nothing. One match."

"Amma, there is a cart. There is a municipality. This is not 1958."

"I know what year it is."

"Then why?"

She did not answer. She put the lunch on the counter and went home. Suresh took the bin out that night and thought, I will burn it, it costs nothing, and then a customer came in late and he forgot, and Raju emptied it in the morning.

Remember that bin.

Now listen to what happened in September.

It was a Thursday, the eleventh. Suresh closed late that night because two boys from the college had come at nine wanting colour, and colour takes time. Babji had gone home. Raju had gone home. It was about ten-forty when Suresh pulled the shutter down to the knee, switched off the tube lights inside, and came out onto the road with the keys.

The road was empty. Peddi Reddy's shop was shut. One streetlight was on, near the cloth market, yellow and weak. Across the road the old shop was a dark shape with its grey glass.

He looked at it. He had looked at it a hundred times in a month. But he looked, and for a moment he did not understand what he was seeing.

The chair was facing the road.

Not the mirror. The road. The back of the chair was to the mirror now, and the cracked leather seat and the iron footrest were turned to the glass, turned to the street, turned, he realised with something cold going down the back of his neck, to New Look. To his own shop. To him.

He stood there with the keys in his hand. He could hear his own breathing. Then he told himself it was the light. His own tube lights, before he switched them off, must have been shining in the old glass at an angle, and the reflection had made the chair look turned, and the picture was still in his eyes. That was all it was.

He said it to himself all the way home. He slept, but not well.

In the morning he came at seven-thirty instead of eight. He did not go to his shutter. He crossed the road and put his face close to the dusty glass.

The chair was facing the mirror.

Exactly as it always had. The cracked seat, the iron back, square to the mirror. The dust on the floor around it was thick and grey and had no marks in it at all.

He let his breath out. The light. Of course it was the light.

He turned around and Peddi Reddy was standing in the door of the tea shop with a glass in his hand, looking at him. Suresh raised his hand and smiled.

"Tatayya, good morning. I thought last night it was facing this way. The light, it must have been."

Peddi Reddy did not say good morning. He looked at Suresh for about two seconds, then looked down at the glass in his hand, then turned and went inside. He would not meet Suresh's eyes. Not then, and not for the rest of that day. The old man served him his tea and took his coins and looked at the counter.

Suresh told himself the old man was offended that he had laughed in August.

Then Raju came.

Raju came at seven every morning. That morning he was late, and when he came he was holding the broom in one hand and standing in the door of the saloon without coming in. Suresh was setting out combs.

"What, Raju? Come, sweep."

"Anna." The boy's voice was small. "Anna, the bin."

"What about the bin?"

"I emptied it last night, anna. Before I went. The cart came late, at six-thirty, and I emptied it. You saw me."

Suresh had seen him. "So?"

"It is full, anna."

Suresh went and lifted the lid.

The bin was full. Right to the top. And it was not yesterday's hair. He knew hair. He had cut hair every day for six years. Yesterday's hair was black, young hair, college boys' hair, short clippings, a little gel on it. This was long. Long strands, some of them as long as his forearm. Grey. A great deal of it grey, and some of it white, pure white, old man's hair, old woman's hair. And it was not thrown in the way hair falls into a bin. It was laid. Laid in neat lines, one on top of the other, each strand straight, the way a barber lays a lock aside on the counter when he is cutting and will sweep it later. Line after line after line, to the top of the bin.

Suresh stood with the lid in his hand for a long time. Raju did not come in. Babji, when he arrived, looked in the bin and stopped talking.

"Somebody is doing this," Suresh said finally. "Some old fool from the town. Somebody has a key. Peddi Reddy's people. They want to scare the Hyderabad boy."

He said it loudly. Nobody answered. He had Raju empty the bin in the vacant plot behind the cloth market, told him to put a stone on the lid, checked the shutter lock twice that night, and did not tell his mother.

That was the eighteenth of September. On the nineteenth the bin was empty, the stone was on the lid, and he began to breathe again.

On the morning of the twentieth of September, 2008, Suresh woke up at ten past six, before the alarm, with the feeling that somebody had been in the room.

The fan was running. The window was shut. The bolt was across the door. Nothing else. He lay and listened and there was nothing to hear.

Then he turned his head on the pillow and he saw it.

On the pillow, beside his head, about a hand's width from his ear, there was a tuft of hair. Black hair. His hair. He knew his own hair the way you know your own handwriting. It was about as long as his little finger. It had been cut clean, not pulled, not torn, cut with a blade so that every strand ended at the same place. And it was laid straight on the white pillowcase, every strand in line, the way a barber lays a lock aside on the counter.

He put his hand to his head. Above his right ear there was a small place where the hair was not. Smooth, where the blade had gone. No cut on the skin, no blood. He had felt nothing. He had heard nothing. He had slept.

He looked up.

His mother was standing in the doorway. The bolt was still across the door; she was standing in the doorway of the next room, looking through the inner door, which he had not shut. She had a steel glass of coffee in one hand. She was not looking at his face. She was looking at the pillow.

And her other hand was at her chest, and the fingers were moving. He watched them. The thumb touched the first finger, then the second, then the third. She was counting.

She had already started counting.