My mother's hair was like the Sunsilk ad on television: straight, jet-black and silky. Strong enough to haul up princes when plaited. Amma said that during their honeymoon, Appa would rub her hair with coconut oil, beginning at the scalp and slowly working his way down: from the roots to the curling tips of each waist-length lock. "Things changed after my pregnancy," she said. "After we came here."
After her first post-natal hair loss, Amma filled two of our four bathroom shelves with hair products: shampoos and conditioners with colloidal oatmeal, shampoos and conditioners without colloidal oatmeal, hair serums with henna extracts, hair serums with jojoba oil extracts, styling creams, volumisers, sprays, Dabur Amla hair oil – the products changing every time the pharmacy on Bani Malik Street had new stock. "I believe that my wife was a hairstylist in her previous birth," Appa told any guest who had to use our bathroom.
Amma's stylist, a Pakistani woman who ran a beauty parlour in a downstairs apartment, said that hair loss was common in places like Jeddah because of the high water density. Amma did not agree. She continued comparing herself to her own mother, who had had three children without losing as much hair or gaining as much weight. "It's my own fault," I heard her mutter once. "I didn't take enough care of myself."
My friend Alisha did not like it when I complained about my mother. She said that unlike other parents, my Amma rarely compensated for her own flaws by trying to fix me. "You're so lucky and you don't even know it. If you actually screwed up the courage to tell your mother you wanted to be a cartoonist instead of an engineer, I bet she wouldn't even mind."