CURLS GONE WILD

In a country where silky, straight locks have always been championed as a woman’s crowning glory, girls with curls are often forced to spend hours in salon chairs, subjugating their tresses into compliance. Sneha Mehta, a curly-haired disruptor, looks back on how she reclaimed a narrative from which she’s always felt excluded

ONE OF MY LONGEST-HELD BELIEFS, one that my best friend never fails to roll her eyes at, is that women who regularly blow-dry their hair into sleek, effortless waves are uniquely primed for success. But this notion didn’t simply wriggle past my own tangle of tresses into the crevices of my brain overnight. Years of observing relatives and friends who made weekly appointments at swanky South Bombay salons and had permanently plugged-in hair straighteners in their homes, left a firm imprint on my mind that smooth, bouncy hair was the unattainable ideal that only truly put-together women achieved. If you could devote the time, effort and suffering into controlling your hair—arguably one of the most traditional markers of femininity, both politically and culturally—you had my respect.

For my part, I spent my late teens and early twenties doing the only thing I knew: trying fiercely to tame my unexceptional, long, wavy hair into dutiful submission. I straightened, oiled, over-conditioned, brushed, braided and chemically relaxed it over and over, all while publicly decrying the humidity or my genetics as the enemy when my hair would stubbornly retain its frizz despite my efforts.