Borak: The Best Cut

The hair on my head grows into a puffball every month, resulting in a Chi-fro that calls to mind a cross between a poodle and Harith Iskander's round head. It irritates the hell out of me. And, having my formative dating years coinciding with the rise of metrosexuality and David Beckham's £300 haircuts, it's no wonder that I couldn't find a date by graduation. Which led me to believe that I would look better too if I ditched my barber of 20 years and upgrade to visiting the hairstylist.

This didn't work out the way I planned it out to be. A year later, my head bore the weight of mohawk/puffball that made me look like Doraemon gone punk. In a roundabout way, after wasting a few hundred ringgit, I've learned that sometimes the best things can be the cheaper option—hardly is there a better place for a man to get his hair trimmed, his beard shaved, and his neck cracked for just RM10. And it's not just people like me, but the pop-culture movers too, that are harping about the neighbourhood barber. Barack Obama, Samuel Fogarino from Interpol, and fashion designer Thom Brown, have recently extolled the virtues of the barber. None of them, I figure, were in the least bit inspired to do so by Ice Cube's performance in Barbershop.

It sounds cheap of me to say this, but I never felt that I got my money's worth at the stylist. It's like eating at an expensive Indian restaurant—paying extravagantly for a grand experience—but it doesn't quite satisfy you the way a RM10 banana leaf rice does. I figure that when I pay three times as much, I don't expect to get three times less the amount of hair cut. Add that to the fact that with less hair cut, I had to visit the stylists more often, I couldn't help but deduce that there’s some kind of racket going on here.

It's true that barbers don't have the greatest sense of style, the lingo being restricted to numbers more than words: “dua tepi, empat atas” means a number two shaver on the sides, four on top—a style frequented during the Nu-English Yob era. “Pendek” is the default style, with every other style a variation of it. Tempted as I was, however, I've never pointed at one of the pop star posters on the wall as a style guide. And thankfully so: I shudder to think that once in my youth I could've said, “Macam Tommy Page tu.”

But for all its lack, the barbershop works. There's no other other place where, for RM5 more, I can have the closest shave in the world. Sure, it involves the top layer of my facial epidermis scraped off before being patted down into painful submission with Bay Rum aftershave—a feeling known as hell, or the equivalent of listening to Eagles Unplugged—but it's every sen well spent.

Then of course, is another USP of the barbers—the neck twisting thing they do at the end of the cut. I've no doubt it sounds horrible to place your neck into the hands of someone who will do what Steven Seagal often does to sweaty swarthy extras. But damn, that's something you'll never get at their hairstylists, no matter how much you pay them. Besides, even if death comes, it'll be quick and painless. It's also a wonder how they ever developed this skill—certainly not through trial and error, but hey, those are unnecessary details.

Ultimately, barbers do offer something that stylists don't, and that's little nibblets of stories often shared while snipping hair methodically. Like midnight cabbies, they fill the silence with random rants—the politics of the day, how foreign labour is affecting the barber trade, how they have to open up seven days a week now instead of six, how their sons avoid the trade like a rash, how their hair is growing greyer by the day, bla bla. Meanwhile, you struggle to breathe through the avalanche of hair falling down and try your best not to make any sudden jerky movements.

It's always a little personal at the barbershop—return the next month and they still remember the how the family's doing, the job, your views on Mahatir and the new Prime Minister, which is more than I can say for the competition. More importantly, however, is that they remember your style, and that's what anyone looks for when getting their hair cut.

TEXT John Lim