The Barber’s Chair
Wake with a tuft of your own hair on the pillow, cut clean, and you have eleven days. In that town the iron chair in the shut barber shop turns in the night to face your street.
In a town on the Peddapuram road a barber shop has been nailed shut since 1958, and through the dusty glass you can see the chair. In 2008 a young man trained in Hyderabad opens a modern saloon opposite it, with glass, lights and a bin for hair, and does not burn his sweepings. This is the story of Kondaiah, the barber of the dead, what the town did to him with his own razor, and the eleven-day rule that nobody has ever stretched to twelve.
