HAIR APPARENT.

I just saw one of the seamstresses in the building opposite ours standing with her back to me in front of the massive SUV driven by the company's owner. She was using the shadowy glass of the driver's side window to put her hair up, taking a slow and dreamlike pleasure from gathering the strands together, pulling them straight, knotting the hair over on itself, the early morning light angling down through her mind's still waters. The knot complete, she turned her head to left and right, considering herself, then pulled a few strands down at the front and popped a single lock behind her ear. The other women who had been chatting on a nearby step stood up and began to make their way back inside. The morning break was over and she moved to join them, perhaps a little nervously, straightening her skirt, eager to be noticed. The reason I loved this so much is partly because of what she used to check her hair; choosing the boss' car for a mirror seems full of the incidental poetry of life, because instead of looking through that window to covet the unattainable life inside, she was using it simply as a means to an end, the tool for doing something inalienably female that the relative status of those two women, the boss and the employee, couldn't detract from. The other reason I enjoyed the moment was because I knew it would never occur to me to look at myself in that way, nor could I ever derive the same meditative pleasure from the process. Seeing a woman doing something so quintessentially and inalienably female always makes me want to sing out for the difference between us, because seeing women be so different from men and honouring that difference without the confusion of desire or 'captation' is our reward for loving them. It reminds me of the time I went off on my own in India and did the last bit of the Sandakphu trek. It was dawn when I left and I was alone for the first two to three hours of the walk, clambering up a rocky river bed and then descending through eerie mist-wraithed pines. It was still early as I came back down from the mountain and passed through a little village, just a few brightly coloured wooden houses perched on the hillside, woodsmoke in the air and a dog barking. I came out on the far side, scuffing happily down the track, when I heard a noise from the yard to the left. I looked back and saw water pouring steadily into a green plastic bucket, the silver thread bright with the newly risen sun, enshrining a crystalline spherical view of the distant hills, folded waves of tangerine and lime. Beside the tap a young Nepali woman sat in her sari, socks and flip-flops, combing out long black hair fresh from washing in the icy water off the mountain. I remember feeling pierced by the moment, the way it distilled my loneliness and yet produced a feeling of commonality, of shared humanity. I was conscious of intruding, though, so I walked quickly on, never to see that woman and probably not those hills again. And yet, thankfully, these moments leave their mark.