I keep thinking of that time when one of the workers at the local shop started wearing a wig. I’d never dwelt on his baldness before and always recognised him more from his moustache and his eyes. Then one morning I noticed and had to give a little double take before I realised it was the same man with a full head of jet black hair in the slightly mulleted style of an 80s Bollywood star. He cottoned on to my cottoning on and looked slightly abashed. He kept wearing it for a few days and I grew used to it. I hoped he’d fixed it on firmly to avoid any mishaps whenever he crouched down to rearrange the lower shelves that the toddlers keep stealing from. But all that came to nought because one morning he was back to being his old bald self. I wondered about what prompted the reversion. Whether it was the cumulative pressure of all those quizzical double-takes or something more sudden, more wilfully cruel? There was a woman at the big supermarket with a similar issue, a few scant strands of hair billowing from her almost bare scalp. She seemed so much more unhappy, her gaze often fixed to the floor. The on morning she also had a full head of hair, stylishly coiffed. Now she held her head up and smiled and we all smiled back. I wondered which sense of shame was more prominent – the shame of a man wearing a wig or the shame of a woman going without one? Whether we were smiling at her new, stylish confidence or her hidden baldness? How, beyond the orthodoxies of gender, it all seemed to be about how each one of us hides our own private shame from a public that gifted it to us.
6/8/25