That moment around your ears. You draw and hold your breath, as if that could suspend your fear or stop the unmentionable from happening. In steady notches, the barber's razor follows a perimeter around one ear, along the neck, to the other ear.
The sideburns, if you are lucky to still grow some, get a single, swift, scraping razor action, with the barber's spare thumb pressing against your temple, and the rest of that hand squeezing the top of your scalp, making sure you absolutely do not move.
I grew up in Mauritius terrified of my father's barber, André.
On the dreaded Saturday afternoon, André announced his arrival by ringing the bell of his black Raleigh bicycle at our gate. Hiding behind curtains, I watched him; always dressed in a suit and tie, André removed his leg straps before pushing his bicycle, with his work satchel looped over the top bar, to the back of our house.
My mother lent André a chair and a small table, and he set up in a shady spot across from the washing pegged to ropes tied between casuarina trees. Soon some of his grooming tools were soaking in a jar of blue tinted Barbicide water.
My father sat down first, with a towel placed over his shoulders, André worked slowly with his manual clippers cutting upwardly the hair on my father's nape and sides. The two men enjoyed catching up. They talked politics and current affairs.
For the longer hair on top, André changed to scissors in his right hand and a comb in the left, holding the strands between his left middle and index fingers, and snipping a straight line across the ends. To finish, after the razor trimming, André squeezed talcum powder on a neck brush and dusted off my father, before a vigorous Brylcreem hair massage, a styling, and a mirror inspection.
I was then summoned and dragged to the chair where the towel was passed on to me, and I wriggled and twitched and writhed. André did his best to keep his calm with me. I must have tested his nerves to a limit when, with neither of my parents in sight, he told me of the day he so badly severed one ear of a young boy who wouldn't sit still that a pig's ear had to be stitched on in replacement. For life. 'I don't believe you,' I replied, but sat frozen from thereon.
"I