Kolkata

In Italy, I enjoyed the sensation a few times, but it’s been a good while. And in Nürtingen I found no one who would give me a decent, thorough wet shave. So my stay in India came in the nick of time. I don’t want to go to a salon, as my colleagues recommend I do. I am drawn to Ramashish Thakur.

The 29-year old has set up an ancient chair a few steps from our office, right at the kerbside. Even the neck support is (like the rest of it) made of wood. So, it’s not all that comfortable, but that is not what I expected anyway.

Ramashish hammered five nails into the wall, which in all likelihood experienced the colonial age and from which the plaster – here black, there brown, here shimmering reddish – has crumbled more and more. One nail a bit farther down, in which he anchored the accurately level mirror with the gold edge, four nails about two centimetres above that and staggered in width, two above each other. He linked these with a string construction so that he can safely set his creams on the top edge of the mirror. Even the branch of an orchid found room there.

In spite of the roadside torture, I feel well and refreshed

He reaches for a tube of “Axe.” Let’s be a little western. The way he strokes the shaving cream around my chin takes a whole three minutes and is something like a facial massage.

Then it can begin, and does. Ramashish places a new blade in his historic shaver just for me and begins to work. It takes several minutes until he has eradicated the very last stubble. He wipes the foam onto his left forearm.

Then he holds a device in my face that is usually used to spray flowers and pumps. He reaches into three pots in succession and spreads one cream after another onto my face. I doubt if I have ever gotten so many cosmetics at one time in my whole life.

Another good spraying, then Ramashish takes a stone (I guess made of salt) from the improvised little table next to him and strokes it over my chin and cheeks. If I understand him correctly, it’s supposed to have an antiseptic effect. Then, he takes on the tiniest hairs in my nostrils with a battery operated hair trimmer.

And still I am not done. Without warning, he suddenly slaps the top of my head with the side of his hands, and then the barber of Kolkata begins to drum all over my head with the underside of his fists. This is followed by a facial massage during which he even plucks at my eyelashes and lids and gently presses on my eyeballs.

Without any warning my shoulders are punched, and then I am pressed towards the wall with a forward shove. Ramashish’s thumbs drill themselves to the right and left up my spine and then he even grasps my matchstick arms, rotates first the right, then the left as if he wanted to tie knots in them and practically pulls my fingers out of their joints – one after the other. In conclusion he gives me another strong blow to the head.

Funnily, in spite of the roadside torture, I feel well and refreshed. Ramashish did quite a job. He asks for 50 rupees (80 cents); I give him 80. When he then realizes that he just soaped up and put a journalist from Germany through the mangle (something some politicians back home dream of doing), he is very excited and sends his son off to fetch tea. It’s free, of course. And he wants a copy of the Nürtinger Zeitung. He says so and writes down the address in front of which his rickety wooden chair stands.