To become a hero, what else does one needs other than an immaculate ‘hero-like’ hairstyle. This is what Guddu has been trying to achieve for the past many months, but to no avail. This time again, he is sitting in another hairdressing outlet and restlessly waiting for his turn to jump in the hairdresser’s chair and then emerge as a real hero no one could help looking at and saying ‘Wow’.

Unfortunately, such appreciative compliments are hard to come by, particularly when one’s hairdresser is not competent enough to give the looks one rightly deserves, or when one’s friends and classmates severely lack the aesthetic sense to acknowledge good looks when they see it.

Whatever the reason is, Guddu has yet to emerge as a real hero to stand out from the crowd, replete with ordinary-looking people and poker-faced souls devoid of any charm, colour and attraction, let alone beauty. However, Guddu does not want to look like an ordinary figure and is desperately trying to become everybody’s favourite, a dream that has yet to come true.

In the last five months, this is the sixth new hairstylist who is being tried out by Guddu in pursuit of his coveted objective that is still out of his reach. Is it just a matter of bad luck or a well-orchestrated conspiracy hatched against such a dashing guy like Guddu, who now seems to be touching the point of depression and is rapidly developing negative thoughts, reducing him into an anti-hero-like personality, instead of helping him become a celebrated person, an apple of everybody’s eye.

Guddu is really worried and is unable to understand the factors that fail him time and again. After all, he is quite tall and handsome, has built up a muscular body, boasts a fair complexion, has a glowing skin and has had a style to complement all of these physical attractions. But nobody has ever called him a ‘hero.’ What a shame!

Exuding a confident stature supported with physical strength and bodily elegance, Guddu has had all the things that can make him noticeable amongst a hundred others. For instance, his father has gifted him a wristwatch with a small laser-light torch which can emit light in up to four colours at a time. He happens to be the only boy in his team who brings his own cricket kit, comprising a bat, ball, cap, helmet, a pair of spiked shoes, leg and thigh pads as well as gloves and even a pair of wicket-keeping gloves, despite the fact that he is an all-rounder and is able to play any role except stand behind the batsman’s wicket for long.

Guddu is the only boy in town who can ride a motorcycle and can also drive an automobile no less than a skilful driver. It is another matter that his father does not allow him to control the steering because of him being underage. He wears imported sunglasses, uses a solar-powered scientific calculator and unlike other classmates who usually rely on manual methods to erase spelling and arithmetic errors on the page, Guddu is the only one in his class using quite an expensive digital mark-remover for the same purpose. Last but not least, his mobile-phone set is the latest of its series, has a built-in biometric lock and contains scores of extraordinary features beyond imagination of a common man. Still, his journey towards being a publicly-known hero continues with no end in sight in the near or far future.

There must be something wrong somewhere, but Guddu believes it’s his hairdo that urgently needs a revamp to render him a picture-perfect look, an essential requirement which is severely missing at the moment. Guddu is helpless.

Spick and span from head to toe, he tends to spend most of his time in combing and arranging his hair and utilises all available hairstyling products to harden and rearrange his hair into a particular style.

Wearing textured spiky hair to look like a coltish teenager to flaunting a slicked back undercut to appear more manly, Guddu has tried almost all hairstyles and now he looks a bit fed up with such a hopeless exercise that always produces the same result at the end of the day. Wasting his time, money and energy altogether, he sees no light at the end of the tunnel and seems to be losing hope in his quest to achieve a hero-type look.

“This is now your turn,” shouts the hairdresser to jar Guddu from his deep thoughts, as if he has entirely lost himself in a never-ending dream.

He leaves the bench, hurriedly sits in the hairdressing chair and leaves his hands free, allowing the hairstylist to do the rest of the job, which looks easier in foresight, but only Guddu knows how difficult it is to have a perfect hairdo, a mission never accomplished.

As soon as the hairstylist loosens the front buttons of his shirt to cover it up with a white cloth and starts draping it around his neck and shoulders, Guddu raises his head up to look into the large, wooden-framed front mirror that is clearly showing the road behind him, snarled with heavy traffic and congested footpaths with considerably high pedestrian flow at this point in time.

“Spiky hair or a pompadour style?” asks the hairdresser, while spraying the hair with water.

“Ammm ... simply a hero-cut,” replies Guddu in a frank tone without feeling any need to explain what it means by a hero-cut. After all, who else can know better about it other than a professional hairstylist?

Guddu can still see the road through the front mirror. It is totally jam-packed with bumper-to- bumper traffic of all sizes and weights, leaving almost no space for passerby to cross the over-occupied road.

“Oh my God!” Guddu cries at the top of his voice, as soon as he spots a toddler crawling on the roadside and trying his hardest to jump down the main road all alone.

“No,” Guddu removes the white cloth draped around his neck and widely runs across the road to save the little child, who is now merely a few inches away from falling down the road crammed with vehicles of all kinds that are trying to move on with no regards to pedestrians and other people using the road.

“Stop baby, stop!” Guddu shouts again and finally reaches across the road to hold the little baby in his hands who looks innocently clueless about what is happening around him.

Once Guddu holds the baby tightly, he finds the toddler’s mother coming after her baby as if she had lost him somewhere in the roadside market.

“My baby! My baby!” cries the mother in joy with loads of tears rolling down her cheeks.

“What a wonderful sight it is to behold,” feels Guddu with tears appearing his eyes too. He feels a sense of achievement that fills him up with happiness.

“My friend, you are a hero indeed!” says the hairdresser standing behind Guddu along with many other people who have also arrived on the scene that is filled with emotions and joy, and the person in the spotlight is none other than Guddu, the hero.

Published in Dawn, Young World, July 7th, 2018