"The bond between a man and his barber is a sacred one sealed by an emblem of silence". I started laughing involuntarily as a part of an old conversation popped into my mind. Not knowing what's going on, the other guys waiting their turn in the crowded barber shop started to laugh as well.
The barbershop was extremely crowded that afternoon; out of three barbers in the shop only Mahmoud was handling the customers. Wael had to go cut a groom's hair for his wedding, for barbers this is a great opportunity for a lucrative business. Grooms are normally willing to pay a couple of hundred pounds for a thirty or forty pounds hair cut; it's the big day after all. Abdo - the shop owner and the third barber in the shop - on the other hand hadn't been to the shop for a couple of days, earlier that week his father passed away and he had to spend some time with his family.
Normally I don't wait for a hair cut, I leave and return at a later time, but I had nothing else to do and I wanted to kill some time. I was the third in the queue. Before me sat an old man with very short hair and a not so long beard. The old man used to invoke the teenager sitting in front of him, talking about the glory days of his past in what can only be described as a nostalgic euphoria . The fact that nobody cared about his stories didn't discourage him from telling them. He was out of tune from a cruel world to which he was hanging by a straw. He kept repeating the same story over and over and his laughs got louder every time. I didn't really know if he was embracing life or rebelling against it; if he was inviting us to his world or rather escaping into a merciful reality he painted for himself. The teenager sitting next to him was relieved when his turn came to sit on the vacated throne in front of the mirror. He asked Mahmoud for a hair cut I can only describe as funny and a shave to a barely existing beard in an attempt to establish his place among the men. It took ages to wash of the mountains of sticky hair gel from his hair before the real action could begin.
That's when Wael entered the shop angrily. "What happened" asked Mahmoud. Wael started to curse the cheap groom who paid only a couple of hundred pounds. I wasn't surprised when the old man ahead of me forfeited his turn to extend his stay at the shop. I has just sat on the chair when Wael starting blabbering about all kinds of stuff in an annoying curiosity attributed to talkative barbers. It was the same broken record he plays with my every visit. I nodded at his comments, smiled at his jokes and evaded his extremely personal questions. In a sense he was like a shrink, people came and sat on a comfortable chair and talked all kinds of none sense about their lives. The barber laughed at their jokes, complimented their actions, sprayed cologne on them and sent them happy into the world. As a matter of fact, no man will voluntarily let a shrink - or any other guy for that matter - play in his hair or put a knife on his neck yet they let a barber do that!
"Nothing" I replied as he inquired about the reason of another laughing frenzy. In reality, I was just wondering how he handles instructions from a lady, what a scene would that be.
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