The pain of beauty

Beauty is serious business in Delhi, and it’s not especially pretty. Crammed into tiny ladies' salons, customers stretch the skin around the eyes, the mouth while a woman with thread held between her lips goes to work on unwanted hair. Pluck, pluck, pluck, strip, strip, strip. The rest have violent head massages that leave scalps tender and red, or facials that involve rubbing around worry or laugh lines up and down, up and down, as if agelessness could be achieved with enough repeated pressure. Healing human touch. Customers with eye closed and nails still wet are moved around in a game of musical chairs while the staff shimmy behind, the occasional pair of breasts brushing the back of heads. We are all so close here. Manicures and pedicures and blow drys fill the tiny space with hot air and poison. What's left on the floor is layered, a wasteland of skin cells and shed identities. Women emerge scrubbed and rubbed and stripped shining new. Worth all the rupees, that.