ODE TO INDOLENCE

A beauty parlour offers much more than a makeover – it offers a few hours of complete indolence and indulgence, an experience so different from the rest of my rushed/panting life that it is almost surreal.

I’m not talking about the ten minute, pop-in-thread-eyebrows-pop-out kind of visit. There you are made to sit upright and uptight in a chair while a beautician painfully plucks out your eyebrows. All tampering, and no pampering.

I’m talking about longer visits, when I can leave all my daily cares outside the opaque glass doors and enter the warm and welcoming red-and-black interiors, lie down in one of the beds in the cubicles (don’t get any wrong ideas, though, it’s perfectly above board) and surrender myself to being pampered and fussed over.

There’s a head oil-massage, which I totally adore because of the way it relaxes my neck muscles. There’s a l-o-n-g two hour facial, which includes a decent back-rub and many complicated things being done to my face (including a thick mask of gooey stuff which covers my eyes and mouth and makes me feel like a sci-fi zombie for fifteen minutes). I close my eyes and go with the flow, rather, rub. My angel of a beautician takes it as a compliment when I doze off, since the whole rigmarole is supposed to be relaxing (the dim lights and soft music help).

Especially decadent is the combined manicure and pedicure, when you have two people simultaneously attending to (cleaning and cosseting) your usually-poor-and-overworked hands and feet. I feel like a thirty-minute celebrity!!!

But the pleasure comes at a price. And some pain, as well. It is not all unmitigated blissful eyes-closed floating-in-a-scented-cocoon kind of experience. When your belligerent blackheads are being dug out of their trenches, or your cussed cuticles being poked into shape, it is a painful battle for beauty. What agonies we suffer, what waxing of reluctant hairs and steaming of recalcitrant pores in our quest for beauty.

But for me, the pain is just a small part of the beauty-parlour-parcel. Even the ‘beauty’-bit is passé. What I crave is the pampering. And the forgetting of the clock and the phone for a few hours every month. When I step out, my freshly-pedicured feet are still floating on air. Till I reach home and come back to reality with an almighty thump.