Waxing Women and Police

It’s disconcerting to have a one-day weekend. The torpor of the week barely takes you over before Sunday night starts nudging and elbowing in. I’ve spent the day marinating in a stew of DVDs and books. One of the breaks made was for the waxing woman, apparently on Waxing Planet the ice-breaking questions are “Why aren’t you married?”, “What do you tell your father when I come?” and “Don’t you think it’s sad to have only one sibling?”. In the end I had to put on Fawlty Towers and pretended there was nothing more magnetic in the world than John Cleese. I’m sure it gave her time to think of what she will tell other customers about my body. Ugh. I just feel vile about them sometimes, for instance when they will bring along apprentices and set them to work simultaneously on, for example, completely hypothetically speaking, the legs. And oh the pain. My neurons go berserk trying to find a focal point for the sensations; the atrocity reduces the mind to stardust. All men and all boys in all age ranges are peculiarly inquisitive about the exact process that occurs behind closed doors, the secrets of that ritual whose remains they stumble upon: a large sheet on the floor, tattoos of talcum powder, dollops of sticky honey colored goo, butter knives, cups of tea rimmed brown and wads of cloth strips. Not to mention a girlfriend/sibling/wife acting queenly. It is in their number one item on Things to Ask God, followed closely by item number 2: how does a halter neck stay up and what EXACTLY does it look like. My question to them I guess would be why they get so furious if they are smacked on the head?

If you think about it Waxing Women are rich material for literary abuse: it is the best way to rob a house in stealth, no woman would ever deny her waxer an entrance; it is the best way for investigating a potential match (this I speak of from experience, have heard of many waxing women who act as informers, to be fair, in an entirely benign sense at times); if there was anything like CSI in Pakistan, waxing women would be prime corroborators. However there is nothing like CSI in Pakistan. I have doubts about the existence of a truly sober police force even. When H’s sister was getting married, his house was robbed a day before the wedding. The police van came careering around the corner and out jumped our resplendent men armed with lean-mean bamboo sticks, because guns are so passé, dahling. The police officiously powdered the whole house with what H says smelt suspiciously like baby powder because it was flying like dust everywhere. Everything in the house was covered within an inch of its life with powder and policemen, but they couldn’t locate any external or for that matter any internal prints. Except for the cat, they found the cat’s prints. It turns out even if they had, it wouldn’t have done any good because apparently we don’t have a fingerprint database. I’m hoping that’s just a rumor.