When I was six, I contracted a severe case of typhoid. I had to get injections for ten days straight.
My relatives recommended that I shave my hair off. I would be willing to shave my hair for the right cause today without hesitation, just like my favorite fashion designer, Vivienne Westwood.
She shaved her hair to raise awareness for climate change. But this was too terrifying for my six-year-old self. I had grown my hair out for a while, and I was afraid to let it all go.
Furthermore, I was too sick to even understand what was going on with me. I only remember sitting on the balcony under the sun with my Naan while she carefully brushed my hair and ran a razor over my head.
That was the first time I remembered how my face looked without hair. I was quickly taught the realities of society that hair is everything, especially if you are a woman.
One of my favorite scenes from Fleabag is when her sister gets a bad haircut in a moment of weakness, and she reframes it by saying, “Claire, it's French," because the worst thing you can do as a woman is not look palatable and resist the patriarchal male gaze.
To become the worst thing this society has encountered is to be an angry feminist who doesn’t shave her body hair or cuts her hair too short.
Hair is political, be it for Black women who had to fight to be taken seriously in their Afro hair or Chinese women who dye their hair pink right before graduation to honor Zheng Linghua, who committed suicide because she was cyberbullied for her hair color.
In a world where Iranian woman Mahsa Amini is beaten to death because her hair was not properly covered, it is equally political if you are a South Asian or Bengali woman raised in a conservative Muslim household.
I grew up in a small, secluded area in Puran Dhaka called Hazaribagh. Boys played cricket and rode bicycles, filling my neighborhood. Meanwhile, little girls enjoyed playing Kanamachhi and Ekka-Dokka.
I was a restless, clumsy, boyish child whom the boys made fun of because I wanted to play with them.
When I was about four years old, I stole my brother’s shirt, wore it, and ran away from my house. I assumed I was indistinguishable from boys my age which could not be further from the truth.
I was a rebellious child with a bowl cut who wanted to play cricket with boys and ruin my clothes with dust.
People around me didn’t quite like it. My parents were desperate to find a school that was as diligent about grades and cultural activities as it was strict about instilling manners.
They found the school they wanted. With its merits, this school also instilled in me a fear of judgment.
My mother used to make two ponytails when I had short hair; it was the dress code. I never questioned it. I did not have long hair until I was in third grade.
When my hair grew longer, different rules started to apply to me. Now, it was mandatory for me to make two braids. I still did not question it.
Every morning, my mother would braid my hair. Meanwhile, my father ironed his shirt, humming "Amar Sara Deho Kheo Mati" by Andrew Kishore.
As I never questioned the decision of making two mandatory pigtails, I never suffered the consequence of breaking the dress code.
Until my mother received a diagnosis of a chronic illness at the end of my fourth grade, I had nobody to braid my hair.
I brushed my hair in a disheveled manner and made one big ponytail. My father dropped me at school. For the first time, I was about to break the rule.
So long, I had only seen what happened to the girls who didn’t brush their hair according to the rules.
Sometimes, if you were lucky, you were only yelled at.
If your class teacher was strict, you got threats of having your hair chopped off.
If your luck was terrible, you might get slut-shamed for your hairstyle. This would happen even if you were in grade four.
Accusing you of luring men at an all-girls school is both unfair and ridiculous. You only wanted to style your hair differently.
After fifth grade, I switched to a different school. It was a combined school where boys would study in the day shift and girls in the morning. I was hoping things would be different here.
To my disappointment, your hair still dictated your reputation. Breaking the rule of two mandatory pigtails was equivalent to wearing the Scarlet Letter.
We were taught to treat people like they were aliens or as if they were a different species just on the basis of our assigned genders at birth. Segregated schools made it worse.
It’s as if we are peeking at the zoo animals when one shift ends and another one starts.
It didn’t help that most of our teachers were head-to-toe misogynistic; some of them were women. Male teachers and female teachers showcased different cases of misogyny. Male teachers displayed either benevolent misogyny or inappropriate behavior.
Benevolent misogyny meant they believed women needed protection, so they wouldn’t hit female students but felt free to abuse boys.
Inappropriate behavior included flirting that bordered on harassment and even attempted grooming.
From female teachers, the accusations felt more guttural and personal. It typically began with thinly veiled concerns and concluded with slutshaming.
Despite society's constant pressure on girls to meet beauty standards, they still face shame for their hairstyles and their desire to look ornate.
There was a strong association in the minds of these women that these school girls only wanted to doll up, wear their ponytails instead of two braids, and plump their lips with fruity chapsticks to entice the boys from the day shift.
They would try to warn us by telling us that we should be independent instead of chasing a man, but their heteronormative assumptions that only a boy can be the object of desire in a girl’s world, suggesting that this is the sole focus for teenage girls, reinforce harmful stereotypes and promote heteronormative behavior.
This type of social indoctrination is what keeps so many women in shackles of compulsory heterosexuality.
Today, I am in university, and I have the freedom to cut, dye, and wear my hair however I want.
To this day, I still cannot find the answer to a question.
How is your hair a testament to your character?
Asmita Mehefin likes to look at the moon and write poems and compare how the celestial bodies are similar to the web of life inside our own bodies.