Where has the Beast disappeared?

In my early days of living in Singapore, I remember sitting through the movie Beauty and the Beast with difficulty: the film had lacked that drama and pizazz necessary to hold the raptured attention of an action movie buff whose last cinematic experience had been Mission Impossible II. I had got suckered into this outing in the first place, along with my wife, by a friend whose children had been pestering him for days to watch this Disney entertainer.

“Let’s all go,” my friend had said to me enthusiastically on the phone, “I understand it’s fantastic.” Later I learnt that he had understood this, not — as I had assumed — from some eminent film critic of the New York Times, but from the very six-year old twins who had wanted to watch it in the first place. Talk about a biased sample! Anyway where was I? Yes, I was walking out of the theatre with relief that this particularly move experience was behind me.

“How did you like the movie?” my friend Ravi said when we exited.

I smiled gently to convey: “It was awful, but I’m too polite to tell you that.”

He interpreted it differently. “Exactly! I loved it too.”

“Me too,” said his wife Rita. “But the concept of ‘beauty and the beast’ is no longer valid.”

My God! I thought, don’t tell me watching that drivel wasn’t enough: we’re now going to analyse it too?

“What I mean is,” she continued, “the idea of woman as beauty and man as beast with a heart of gold is archaic. Today men are as concerned about beauty as women.”

“No!” I cried. I couldn’t let such blasphemy go uncontested. “Men are unconcerned about looks and beauty and suchlike. Before coming to India, just two months ago, I attended a biggish wedding in India. As is customary for Tamil weddings, the guests arrived at 6.30 am Despite the early hour, the women had taken pains to dress in resplendent Kanchipuram saris. Their noses, necks, ears and in many cases waists were decked with a few kilograms of jewellery.

Their faces — whatever was visible behind the jewellery — were perfectly groomed. Most of the men, in sharp contrast, had landed up wearing a veshti — something like a white bed sheet — wrapped around their lower body, and a shirt. The few who had taken the trouble to comb their hair had not done it with care. Many had neglected to shave. In fact, that wedding looked like an intensely magnified version of Beauty and the Beast, with 100 beauties mingling with 100 beasts.”

“Where did you say the marriage took place” asked Rita.

“Chennai,” I said.

“And what was the average age of the men you described?”

“I’d say about 55,” I said. “There were many wizened septuagenarians in the crowd — veteran wedding-attenders looking at the easy camaraderie between them — who raised the average.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Rita. “When I said ‘modern men’, I did not mean septuagenarians from Chennai. I meant contemporary yuppies of today — in Singapore, for example — who are obsessed with beauty.

I was not convinced; so when I reached home, I typed ‘beauty treatment for women’ into Google. I got about eight million hits.

“Women are definitely keen on beauty.” I told my wife who was standing behind me, equally curious.

“According to Rita, so are men,” my wife said. “Check out among men.”

I typed ‘beauty treatment for men’. My jaw dropped a second later: nine million hits.

“That’s a million more!” I cried in shock. My wife looked stunned too.

“Of course, the fact is men are uglier and would need more treatment,” I said, “but the stunning thing is that they are seeking treatment in the first place.”

My wife and I looked at each other in wonder. Perhaps it is true. The beast does seem to want to metamorphose into a beauty, just like in the film.

The next day I got more evidence that this is true. I went for my first haircut in Singapore, along with my son, and discovered there were salons for men proudly displaying prices ranging from $30 to $50 (Rs1,000 to 1,600) for a haircut. And they were filled with men with no apparent signs of insanity taking up the offer, some of them leafing through a magazine in the reception area as they patiently waited for their turn to cough up.

I avoided these places and finally found a more modest establishment with the sign, “Haircut for men: starting at $10” on its window. My son and I sat down happily (or I should say relatively happily — $10 was still Rs300) and had our heads shorn.

When the time came to pay, we accompanied the hairdresser, a soft-spoken Chinese man in his forties, to the cash register.

He turned to me and said, “Your son? $10.”

I nodded and prepared to take out two $10 notes from my wallet.
He continued, “And you – $16.”

“What!” I said, “$10 itself is huge. Why should I pay more? I have less hair than he does.”

“Yes!” he said, “Very less, lah. Have to cut carefully. So much scalp showing already. See.” He pointed out all my bald patches in the mirror, holding up a second one to introduce me to those at the back of my head.

“My cousin runs a hair implant clinic,” he continued gravely. From a drawer at the cashier’s desk he took out a brochure and opened it to show me ‘before and after’ pictures of bald men transformed miraculously — and in many cases, hideously — into men with a thick crop. “I get you appointment, lah. And a discount. You get nice hair, you look beautiful!”

I paid him silently and left.

The author is a freelance writer based in Singapore
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