Slate of hand

A friend of mine has beautiful hands. Spare bones under surprisingly soft skin, with long fingers and well-kept nails, the kind of hands that would do a great job soothing a frazzled nerve or two or even making them buzz with a new life. They would probably work brilliantly stringing pearls onto silk or folding a sari into intricate pleats or even shaping chocolate frosting to form delicate peaks and valleys. Or in tickling a kitten or rolling up a roti or leafing through an old manuscript or unbuttoning a shirt or sifting through a pile of photographs. But I digress from the main subject here and have, I hope, managed to make my friend blush…

Hands are indicators of a life lived, interestingly or routinely. My hands are rough, calloused by dish-washing detergent, my fingers tipped with tiny hard spots created by a daily dose of bashing at a keyboard. They have the most intricate network of almost-visible scars and dark lines of scabs, all to the credit of Small Cat, who likes to chew on her slaves for fun, her sharp-ended paws locked into skin as she does so. There are small blue spots of bruises earned from playing with the feline and being gripped too hard, bumping into woodwork and bashing into the edge of the metal shelves at work. And they speak of stories written, meals cooked and hugs given.

The hands that I perhaps know best just by their function belong to my hairdresser. She tunnels her fingers with their brightly painted nails into my hair, digging under the strands to examine my scalp, lifting and feeling each lock to decide on what to do with it during that session. She will gently massage my head, parting the hair in sections, testing it for weight and texture and finally giving it a gentle tug before sending me on to the next stage in the routine. She knows, by just a touch, what I have been doing to my head and how to fix it.

On the rare occasions I am at the salon, I watch fascinatedly as the experts use their hands to bring beauty to others’. I have never had a professional manicure and will probably never do so, but I stare as it is done to various clients – the cleaning, the creaming, the curing…each step is like a little dance, its movements carefully choreographed to give the customer pleasure right through the process. And as they are massaged and primped and painted, I sigh with a certain envy, wanting to go home with hands as pretty and beautifully groomed, but knowing full well that it will never happen.

Once upon a life I had hands like that and used them well to express the emotions of a hundred heroines that I became on stage. Each nuance in gesture was a tale told, a facet of a woman bared to the audience. The red alta painted on my fingers and palm added fire and focus, becoming symbols of love and anger, devotion and grief, longing and living. Today, I have become a passive watcher, seeing her being lived in someone else’s hands, through someone else’s wordlessness. And then my hands get to work, typing out my feelings as I watch someone else’s unfold.

And my friend? Those hands tell a whole new story…