<nervous foot tapping>

I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about this. Even my therapist couldn’t break it out of me. So many years of this being swept under the carpet, I wouldn’t know where to begin detangling it.

<bites lower lip>

I started losing my hair when I was 12. At one point I blamed the lice I had caught from a cousin, a fungal infection, at another. Today, I know it was neither.

When I was 14, my father took me to a hair specialist who would prescribe homeopathic (sugar) pills. They were fun to take for a child. That doctor, though, never had a diagnosis, just prescriptions. ₹2,00,000 and 3 years of treatment later, we admitted it wasn’t working.

<reaches over, takes a sip of water>

I can’t remember how exactly I looked at the time. But what I do remember is being petrified of being photographed. Angles I hadn’t brushed my hair for, profiles I hadn’t first practiced in my mirror a hundred times—all on shocking display.

Is this what I look like? It makes sense now why nobody wants to be friends with a girl this ugly.

After the homeopathic hack, I bounced around a few more clinics. Endocrinologists, dermatologists, and every time, the same story. “Period?” Normal. “Ultrasound?” Normal. “Take this medication, and less stress, sweetie.”

But my hairfall was no longer a source of stress. It was a sadness that had become a brick in my belly. Just a part of my life in ways it wasn’t for other people. An obsession with nutrition, hair masks made of onion puree and eggs on Fridays so that I wouldn’t have to shampoo it away until Monday, new hair oils brewed at home—the smells of gooseberry and curry leaves lingering for hours after. Each time it was a new hack a nosy aunt would drop on her way out the door.

A girl can’t be bald! Especially at such a young age! Who will marry her then?

<scrunches nose, almost tasting the putrid smell of sulphur at the back of her throat>

I would never change my hair, always keeping it short and worn in the same way every day in case it drew attention. Never got bangs, highlights, hair beads or any of the other mistakes young teens would make. I would crack jokes before anyone else could, beating them to the balding punch.

Things took a particularly bad turn when I was in Austria in 2019. I’d gone there to do my Masters, and the change in water had made it so much worse that I bought a wig (one that gave itself away if you looked too closely).

Once, I was riding the metro with a friend, and in conversation I had joked, “Oh the heat is so frustrating I want to rip my hair out!”

To which he muttered, “that would be a waste of great hair.”

I got home, deleted his number, packed away that wig and never spoke to him again.

<deep sigh>

After I moved back home, I found my miracle doctor. My father had managed to find a dermatologist who’d studied male pattern baldness—a pioneer in the research. And he was located right in my city!

After 25 years, the billionth blood test, ultrasound and a scalp biopsy, I had a diagnosis—androgenetic alopecia, or male/female pattern baldness, caused by hormones and a genetic predisposition.

Today I’ve realized something profound for myself. Healing from shame happens one unsuspecting day—when you wake up, look at yourself in the mirror, say the meanest thing to yourself, and then get absolutely sick of it.

When I was younger, I spent so long ashamed of the body I was in that this shame kept me obsessed with trying to be prettier and more likable. As I grew up, the idea of time started to become a lot more tangible. It’s a long life, and this is the only body I have been given. What the shame and obsession spiral does is make me afraid of myself—it’s a personal prison of my own making.

I’m tired of my mind being the most unsafe place for me. Now, the pitying looks I sometimes get, do not land on shame—they land instead, on indignant.

Time does that to the traumatized. Those, for whom positive self-talk sounds ridiculous because they were never taught self-acceptance. How can you ‘gentle-parent’ yourself when you never had a gentle parent who showed you how it’s done? You haven’t been programmed to respond to that—it sounds bizarre.

There is literally nothing I can do to change this hair, it is what it is.

<small smile>

My hair today is doing better than it was five years ago. I’ve been spending so much of my own savings and my father’s retirement fund on PRP treatments, serums and pills. But one day, I know I’ll give up. I will be done trying to save something that cannot be saved. Give up the illusion I have been intercepted with—

that a woman’s appearance is in her control.

Ashrita Achar is a Bengaluru based audio journalist, podcast producer and sound artist. For the last four years, she’s worked across genres of history, development, climate and gender. She does audio stringing (on-site field reporting) for news and radio channels that require it, writes and presents, does translations/dubs for local languages, builds immersive audio installations with fellow artists, and also produces audio tours for museums. On her own, she makes sound art where she tinkers around with sounds, speech and rhythm as she explores personal themes of memory and identity through mini sonic vignettes. She adopts a heavily research-based practice, but with the malleability that allows for asking the question—what are the colours of sound in that story?

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Hair-ed!