Beauty Parlours are Scary

Pakistani women, it seems, are just hairy. And so the quintessential Pakistani girl is an obsessive visitor of the 'porlor', a place, quite honestly, I am deathly afraid of. Not because I'm excessively hairy or because I fear getting my 'stache vaporized - but because of the people. All those ladies - old uns, young uns, 'beauticians' et cetera - are S-C-A-R-Y.

First off, I don't dress like any almost-eighteen-year-old girl should dress. I'm not wearing shalwar kameez, and I'm not wearing sandals either. I like to be mobile and travel without excess baggage, so I wear pants with lots of pockets to avoid carrying a bag and like big comfy t-shirts, and I'd rather wear any old pair of sneakers than pretty, uncomfortable sandals. My hair's tied back most of the time too, because unlike most girls who look like that villain-woman from Captain Planet, I value seeing out of both eyes.

So the old aunties, they glare. I'm too mod-ren for my own good.

The other young girls, they stare. How can I not want to look pretty (read prissy)?

The parlour girls, they despair. Why does this girl look so... unconcerned about her appearance?

But they're not the only ones disconcerted. For the most part I'm completely comfortable in new situations where I don't know very many people and need to communicate. At beauty parlours, though, I freeze up. My normally loud voice is a hesitant murmur, often a mumble that forces me to repeat myself over and over again. The 'laddiss' despair further - the child cannot even speak Urdu! I speak Urdu just fine, thank you. It's just all of your eyes boring into my skull, all you tall women with your heavily-make-upped faces and scathing looks that makes me forget what I came to do.

So yeah, laddie bucks, lay off. I'm not the one that steals special Chinese  orange-flowers from the beauty parlour garden that the owner of the house has been carefully cultivating. I'm not the one pointlessly getting my hair blow-dried to go to a casual dinner for 5 at my best friend's place. I'm not the one that hosts 'coffee mornings', a concept that I cannot, for the life of me, fathom.If anybody should be giving scathing looks, it's me, no?