Things That Bang

Is it okay to love your Nails Salon? My latest passion is to get my nails done. Monday I got a French manicure done come Friday there is a chip on one of my French manicured finger nail and I am itching to go back to the Salon. I want to get my hands bleached since the Bangalore sun has tanned them to deep honey brown and get my feet massaged for at least ten whole minutes.

Going to the salon is therapeutic. I leave the world behind and generally dumb down. I stop thinking altogether and the only senses that work are the pleasure senses. Someone waiting on me hand and foot is a luxury that in regular life I don’t get to enjoy. Between kids, home, garden and clicketing clacketing on the key board my hands, feet and brain get worn out and the best place to re-energize is the salon.

Putting my feet in the steamy tub, reading a magazine I wouldn’t read otherwise at home has its perk. I am someone else while I am in the Salon. I am not a wife or a mother but a woman getting herself preened and prettied up. No harm there but how many of us would admit that the Salon is not just an essential part of our lives to ‘maintain ourselves’ but it’s a place of womanly sanctuary?

The Nails Salon is a place where I see women of all shapes and sizes getting themselves done. They inspect their nails, they blow at their nails, they just love their nails and that kind of self loving is not narcissistic but merely responding to the fertility goddess within ourselves who requires heavy dose of ferocious self loving.

Loving our nails makes us naturally love everything that has to do with our hands. The ritual of creaming our hands morning and night to keep them supple and soft is taken up, we invest money in the best sub block lotion and keep an eye out for good nail shades when we visit the mall and act like women instead of manish- feminists thrusting our way into board meetings or directing vehicles at traffic signals.

I dream of nails once in a while, oval shaped or square shaped, nails with little stars or flowers painted over them, nails that reflect tiny bits of designs that bolster of the female self- esteem. These little nails like hair continue to grow even when we are dead and buried. Wouldn’t be nice if someone continued to paint them for us even when we are dead? Cut them, shape them and talk to our dead corpses about the world that has passed us by.

Then again maybe not, but loving my nails is all about loving a part of me that could easily be neglected, it is reassuring myself that even the smallest part of me matters.