Essay: Taming the Unruly

In this personal essay, Mahi Ramakrishnan recounts her path toward embracing her curly hair and finding joy in it.

My curls enter every room before I do. They arrive like rumours; unconfined, electric, shimmering with their own stubborn language. Each coil has its own logic, its own defiance, as if it remembers an ancestry of women who refused to bow their heads. From the time I was a teenager, I have been told to straighten them, sometimes with affection, sometimes with quiet disapproval. “Tie your hair when you go to the temple.” “You’ll look tidier if you comb it properly.”

I learned early that my hair was not just hair. It was a map of disobedience. It unsettled people, this wilderness sitting below my shoulders: too alive, too loud, too unwilling to be domesticated.