The New Yorker:

The headwear is burdened by stereotypes—but it can carry, too, the pleasures of self-invention.

By Manvir Singh

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.

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