Calcutta Photo Tours

There’s a quiet gravity in moments like this.
A man sits before a barber, the world around him blurred into old stone and morning air. His head is being shaved clean — not as fashion, not as vanity, but as a final offering in the wake of loss.

In Hindu tradition, when someone close dies, the family performs antim sanskar — the last rites. It’s a journey of releasing: ashes to the river, prayers to the sky, memories into the hands of whatever we call the divine. One of the oldest rituals is this—the shaving of the head, a symbolic shedding of ego, identity, and the everyday self. A way of saying: I am stripped down. I am changed. Their departure has altered me too.

To a Western eye, it may simply look like a haircut.
To a Hindu, it’s a small earthquake.

And standing there with my camera, watching this man surrender his last layer of normalcy, I couldn’t help but feel that maybe this ritual is also a kind of lifeboat. A mechanism the old world built to survive heartbreak. Grief is so abstract, so untouchable — it sits inside the chest like fog. But losing one’s hair… that’s concrete. Immediate. You look in the mirror and you see a version of yourself that cannot pretend everything is the same.

Maybe that’s the point.
Maybe when you can’t make sense of the loss inside, you shift something outside. Trade one ache for another, more manageable one. A fresh bald head instead of the unbearable emptiness left behind.

This photograph is that moment — the exact second grief takes physical form.
A palm resting gently on a skull, a blade whispering across skin, a man trying to hold himself together in the only way his ancestors taught him.

And somehow, in that surrender, there is a strange kind of strength.

© Manjit Singh Hoonjan.
All rights reserved. 2025.