Bapa’s Hair Oil

My father was known to everyone as Bapa.

When I was a boy, Bapa always insisted on making herbal hair oil, not only for our family in Calcutta, but for our relatives in Bombay, Rajamundry, Madras and his village of Amreli, in Gujarat.

Preparing the hair oil was a major undertaking – it was one of the ten or twelve events of the year. First a special stove had to be made, from Hooghly mud, on the open terrace outside our rooftop rooms. Then Bapa accumulated medicinal plants of all kinds – a cornucopia of the entire Ayurveda. Most were in the form of dried twigs, which he piled up by the stove.

He would fill a big pot with sesame oil, and add the twigs to it. We children would sometimes play a trick on Bapa, by slipping a few of the regular bits of wood used for firewood into the herbal twigs, and laugh as he solemnly put them into the pot along with the rest.

The oil and its medicinal plants would be heated for several days and nights, until it became dark brown, like strong tea. Then all the empty bottles that could be collected were brought out, washed, and their original labels removed. Bapa would paste on new labels saying ‘Bapa nu tel’ – Bapa’s oil. (All glass bottles and jars were recycled repeatedly, so this labelling was important.) The oil was strained into the bottles, and labelled for each family member, near and far.

All this was fine, but then I had to actually put the oil in my hair and go to school. Most of my friends, unlike me, were wealthy, and they wore ready-made, perfumed oil in their hair. As soon as they smelled me coming, they would make fun of me for my oil’s absence of perfume and smell of burnt wood. At the same time, they envied my thick hair, so some of them would come back to me privately, and I would give them small bottles of Bapa nu tel.

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Some people had asked me for the formula for Bapa nu tel. Here is my reply:

I give up on the hair oil recipe, because I cannot either recall or lay my hands on papers from my childhood. But then, I can vouch for most branded Indian hair oils which are Ayurvedic, like Himalaya, Navratna, Dabur. In case you want their formula, I have them in the therapeutic index, and if you ask for it, I'll send it to you. Sorry, but it looks like Bapa no tel has ended. Fortunately, man's preoccupation with hair growth or its loss can continue to entertain us, one way or another, while we last.