Hair has always been a part of a woman's identity. Be it short, long, thick, fine, curly, straight or wavy, it plays an important role in shaping her persona. I remember watching my grandmother comb out her thick, long, straight hair that fell beyond her waist. It was black with streaks of silver and looked like a magical waterfall to an eight-year-old me.
I also recall whispering in her ear, “I want hair like yours.” And thanks to her carefully crafted hair-care regime, I had thick, waist-length hair till my late teens. My relationship with my curls fell through when they started misbehaving and the straightening bug bit me. Each woman's journey with her hair is different.
Model-turned-photographer Sheetal Mallar's photobook Braided conveys just that and more. Some of the pictures in the book evoke nostalgia; some are poignant, while some others are portraits of Mallar's mother and grandmother. The book also comprises illustrations, done by Mallar, and personal notes.
As one flips through Braided, one realises that this is Mallar's ode to her relationship with her mother and grandmother. “We have been very tight-knit. My grandmother lived with us for several years. I have been very close to her,” she says. “Mothers and daughters generally tend to have a close bond. But then, it is also a bag of mixed emotions. At one point, you tend to rebel. You want to go away, do things your way. The bond is very interesting; it shapes your life in many ways. You choose to do or not do certain things because she (your mother) might have done it. You realise more and more as you grow up emotionally.”
Explaining the very first picture, which has a side note stating that she and her mother cut her grandmother's hair while she was asleep, Mallar says it was because her grandmother has Alzheimer’s. “She would think that she has combed her hair, but then she wouldn't have. Her hair started getting matted,” she says. “So, we decided to cut it.” Considering the “feisty matriarch” that her grandmother was, they could dare cut her hair only while she was asleep. Mallar says it has been a treat to revisit the village of Padubidri in Karnataka where her grandmother grew up. “Sometimes our memory fails us, so this book is a way of keeping them close,” she says.
Mallar has looked at hair metaphorically to look at all the rituals we have around it. “Braiding each morning before school is something that has happened for several years. I miss that intimacy, the bond the ritual formed, the quiet time. The whole thing goes deeper than hair and that's what I wanted to bring about, an apt beginning to the story I wished to tell,” she says.
In her book, Mallar has showcased everyday objects like sari, remote control, talc and comb as part of the narrative “to evoke a sense of nostalgia”. As she rightly puts it, sometimes just smelling the talc or the soap can remind you of a person. Mallar's Braided is just what you need if you crave for some nostalgia, much like a warm lihaf (quilt) on a cold Delhi winter evening or a cup of filter coffee on a sultry afternoon in Chennai, or in my case, dosa and sambar after a long weary day.
Mallar says she was always attracted to the visual medium—be it photography, drawing or painting. So, when she quit modelling, she took up one of these mediums. She does stay in touch with friends from her modelling days, like Jesse Randhawa. The self-published memoir is not a money-making exercise for Mallar; it is just something she wanted to do for her and her mother—a keepsake of sorts.