By Manvir Singh | The New Yorker | United States |
On a spring day in 1993, my mom drove me to a hair salon in Linden, New Jersey, and got me a haircut. It was my first. I wasn’t yet three. She knew that she was jeopardizing her marriage. She knew that she was crossing a line my dad considered nonnegotiable.
The question of my hair had weighed on her since before I was born. Like my father, she is an adherent of Sikhism, a South Asian religion that emerged in Punjab in the fifteenth century. Sikhs cannot cut their hair. Men are supposed to wear turbans. Some families are looser about the rules, but my mom’s was not. After one of her great-uncles was forced to cut his hair and abandon his turban, in the mid-twentieth century, he was beset by a shame so unbearable that he killed himself. Yet my parents, both Indian immigrants, knew few Sikh boys in the United States who had been raised with long hair. So when it was time to send me to preschool, my mother said, “It became, like, Oh, my God. I cannot have this kid going there with a joora,” or topknot, “because I was so afraid kids would tease you.”
The fallout was painful. My mom had a handful of family members in the United States. A few supported her; many did not. An uncle called to say that he couldn’t accept her decision. A distant aunt berated her during a social visit. Her marriage descended into a state of tense fragility, “not too different from when people get divorced,” she said.
My parents hosted my third-birthday party shortly after. I don’t remember it, but I watched the tape during a trip home from college. It opens in the back yard of the house where I spent my first five years, in Woodbridge, New Jersey. The footage is grainy and bleached out. Seven Sikh men, five in turbans, sit in a loose semicircle on white lawn chairs. A Punjabi song blares in the background, the singer’s voice jubilant and winding through verses I can’t quite discern. The camera zooms in on my father. He wears a loose-fitting, short-sleeved shirt with a geometric print. His turban is black and tied in the Kenyan style, a smooth, tailored look that originated among Sikhs who immigrated to British East Africa. His mannerisms—especially the way he speaks with an open hand that closes whenever he finishes a point—are instantly familiar.
A small head with a bowl cut bobs across the bottom of the screen. The camera follows. The head belongs to a boy. He’s dressed in Nickelodeon colors: a bold yellow polo with red-and-green lining; bright-blue checkered shorts that hang past his knees. He climbs off his kiddie car and reaches for another kid’s ball and plastic cricket bat. Someone calls his name, and he turns. I saw him—this boy whose face looked like mine and who answered to my name. And, with my mom sitting next to me, I started to cry.
My parents never cut my hair again. My dad persuaded my mom to give long hair another try. I was happy, he said. No one was hassling me, and, if they did and I was upset about it, he promised to support a haircut.
My mom’s fears of bullying turned out to be unnecessary. Kids were more accepting than she’d anticipated, at least in our pocket of New Jersey suburbia. But my hair—and the patka, or proto-turban, that I wore over it—brought other complications. Without the cue of a gendered haircut, I was often mistaken for a girl. People stared a lot. When I told my mom this, she suggested that I glare back until they looked away. Over hundreds of showdowns, I honed an expression somewhere between blankness and defiance, not unlike today’s “resting bitch face.” Uncomfortable moments were transformed into confidence boosts as I stared down anyone whose gaze lingered, many of them adults.
Manvir Singh, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, is the author of “Shamanism: The Timeless Religion.” For the full story, click here. (The New Yorker, June 21, 2025)
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