Hair
If you look at pictures of me when I was younger, you'll find a small, bald child toothily smiling back at you from the photograph. At the time, I never really cared about it; it was just another thing that my parents did and that was that. My parents shaving my head then constituted my very first transformation; from the curly-haired toddler that I was before to the bald four-year-old you'll see in those very same pictures from what seems like eons ago. A couple years later, I asked my mother about what happened to that hair. She told me, like all South Indian parents tell their children, that she loaded it into a Ziploc bag, mailed it to India, and had my grandmother and grandfather climb to the top of a mountain in Andhra Pradesh to offer my hair to the gods. Now, to the typical non-Indian reader, this may seem weird, or foreign. But the reason for this is quite poignant. In Hinduism, creation is less of a genesis, and more of a becoming. Those acquainted with Kabbali...
