I am the new head barber of “The Seven Scissors.” Please don’t come to our shop.

My name is Jamal, and this is my dying declaration.

Or maybe it isn’t. I’m not really sure, to be honest.

I’m not sure if what’s coming for me is worse than dying, or better, or something different entirely. That’s not me being dramatic. It’s just who I am. I’ve never been sure about anything in my whole life. I second-guess directions I’ve walked a hundred times. Indecision isn’t a flaw I have, it is a part of my identity.

But I’ve always been sure about what I wanted to do for a living.

I was seven years old when my father took me to get my hair cut, by a man named Mr. Munshi. His shop was called ‘The Seven Scissors’. It was small and dim, smelling like talc and old wood. Mr. Munshi didn’t speak more than four words the entire time. But I watched his hands. I watched the way the scissors moved like they weren’t being held, like they were an extension of something older than his arm. I walked out of that shop and told my father, with the kind of certainty a seven-year-old has no right to, that I was going to do that too.

It’s the only decision I’ve never once doubted.

I know it might sound weird to you. But in the country I grew up in, barbering isn’t just a trade. It is closer to a calling, the kind of profession old men speak about, the way they’d speak about a poet or a soldier.

And in the lane where I grew up, no name carried more weight than The Seven Scissors.

I didn’t learn the full story until much later. Pieces of it, anyway, from old men in the market who liked to talk a little too much. Decades before I was born, seven barbering families had crowded into that same short stretch of shops. All of them fought for the same customers, the same reputation, the same right to call themselves the best. People jokingly called it the Barber Wars. And from what I’ve heard, things got vicious. Sabotaged appointments. Stolen apprentices. Rumors spread deliberately to ruin a rival’s name.

Six of those families had money, charm, and generations of technique behind them. The seventh had almost nothing. A dying shop, a mountain of debt, and a young man who’d inherited a business he had no right to survive in. That man was Mr. Munshi.

By the time I was old enough to understand what any of that meant, Mr. Munshi’s shop was the only one left standing. He was the undisputed winner of the Barber Wars. The other six shops had been absorbed, gone, or renamed under his. Nobody knew how a man with no talent, no money, and no name, had outlasted six families who had all three.

I didn’t know either. And I wish it stayed that way…

By the time I was fourteen, my mother had passed. A year later, my father remarried. I suddenly had a stepmother. And with her came her son from a previous marriage- a quiet kid named Rahim. He attached himself to me almost immediately, the way younger kids do when they’ve decided you’re worth admiring. I wasn’t always kind to him. I was fifteen and grieving, and I didn’t want a brother I hadn’t asked for. But he kept showing up anyway, like my indifference was a puzzle he was determined to solve.

My father died when I was sixteen, and everything he’d built went with him. All of it was swallowed by debts I didn’t understand fully. We lost the house first, followed by the small businesses he used to own. I dropped out of school. Not because I wanted to, but because there was suddenly no version of my future that included tuition fees. There was a massive fight- over what little remained, over blame, over who had let the businesses fail. I said things to my stepmother, and to Rahim, things that I’ve never quite forgiven myself for. When the dust settled, I walked away from all of it. I didn’t know if I’ll ever have a place to call home again.

What I did know, with a stubborn certainty, was that I wanted to cut hair for a living. And I wanted to learn from the only man who lit that fire inside me.

I went to The Seven Scissors, and asked Mr. Munshi to take me on as an apprentice.

He looked at me for a long time before he said anything. I remember thinking, even then, that he wasn’t really looking at my face, but my hands. Then he said,

“You’ll sweep the floor for a year before you touch a single head.”

I said fine. I would’ve said fine to almost anything.

I ended up staying five years.

Those years are hard to describe in order, because most of what I remember isn’t a single event, but a texture- the smell of talc that never left my clothes, the ache in my forearms after a twelve-hour day, and the particular silence of a man who genuinely didn’t care about anything except his work.

Mr. Munshi didn’t talk. Not about politics, not about family, not about himself. If you asked him a question that had nothing to do with cutting hair, he’d either ignore you, or answer with something so short that it barely qualified as language. He was one of those rare people, who had narrowed his entire existence down to one obsession, and simply let everything else atrophy around it.

I was the opposite. I couldn’t stop noticing everything else.

Customers used to talk while they waited, the way people do in small shops. I observed two of them in particular, a pair of businessmen who came in every few weeks, always mid-conversation about some new venture. They became an accidental education for me. I didn’t understand half of what they said, but I absorbed the words like a sponge.

Scaling. Optimizing. Maximizing.

They talked about businesses the way Mr. Munshi talked about scissors, like the words themselves were sacred. I started turning those words over in my head while I swept the floor. I started looking at our shop- one chair, one mirror, a queue that sometimes stretched into the lane. And I couldn’t stop thinking,

‘This could be SO much more than this !’

I pitched Mr. Munshi constantly. Why can’t we have a second chair? Or maybe a sign that didn’t look thirty years overdue for repainting? How about a price increase then, just a modest one?

Every single idea was shot down. Sometimes he wouldn’t even look up from what he was doing. Just a small shake of his head, like I hadn’t said anything worth acknowledging. Other times, rarely, something in him would flare. He’d say something sharp enough to end the conversation entirely. But he never actually explained why he acted up the way he did, when the shop could definitely use some scaling, optimizing, and maximizing.

There was one time I didn’t just pitch an idea, but acted on it. I’d been saving tips for months at that point. It was enough to buy a quarter-page slot in the local newspaper-

‘The Seven Scissors: best barbershop in the city. Walk-ins welcome. Ask for Jamal.’

Yeah, it was cheesy. And yes, I put my own name on it. But trust me, it worked.

It ran on a Thursday. By Saturday, the queue outside the shop had nearly doubled, spilling further into the lane than I’d ever seen it. Mr. Munshi found out around midday, when a customer complimented him on “finally advertising properly” and asked, half-joking, if he could finally afford a second chair now. I watched his face change in real time. It was not confusion, not curiosity. Something closer to alarm, quickly buried under something colder.

He didn’t say anything until the shop emptied that evening. Then he asked me, very quietly, if I’d placed an ad. I said yes, thinking that the doubled queue would speak for itself.

I’ve never seen him like what happened next. He didn’t shout exactly. It was worse than shouting. His voice dropped into something low and shaking, and he asked me, again and again, who told me I could do that, who told me I had any right to put this shop’s name in front of that many people at once. He told me that I didn’t understand what I’d just done, and that I didn’t understand anything at all.

‘You should be thanking me !’ I exclaimed, ‘Don’t you see the potential of maximizing profits? Don’t you see that the business is getting scaled?’

Suddenly, he stopped. He sat down on the sweeping stool, like his legs had given out. He put his head in his hands, and spoke so quietly that I almost missed it.

“Jamal, you don’t scale a thing like this. You don’t know what you’re feeding.”

I asked him what he meant. Feeding what?

He didn’t answer. He told me to go home. The next morning he acted as though none of it had happened, like the outburst had been a fever that broke overnight and left no memory of the sickness.

I stopped pitching him ideas after that. But I hadn’t stopped noticing things. If anything, I’d started noticing more.

A journalist came into the shop that spring- a woman writing some feature on vanishing trades for a lifestyle magazine. She’d heard about The Seven Scissors, and wanted to interview “the legendary barber behind the name.” At one point, she looked around the shop, and said something. I don’t think she meant as an insult, but it landed like one anyway.

“This is it? THIS is The Seven Scissors? I expected something… bigger. It’s been around for what- five decades ? Should’ve scaled into something a bit more… impressive by now…”

Something in her sentence lodged itself under my skin and stayed there.

‘Scaled into something more impressive.’

That night, lying awake in the small room above the shop, I made a quiet decision that had nothing to do with newspaper ads. I decided that when the shop was finally mine, whenever that day came, however far off it seemed, I wasn’t going to let it stay this small.

I had no idea how soon that day would actually arrive, or how little warning either of us would get…

The day Mr. Munshi suffered a stroke was an ordinary Tuesday. I was sweeping near the door when I heard the scissors stop. I got to him before he hit the floor, though I don’t remember crossing the room to do it. The ambulance took eleven minutes to arrive, though it felt considerably longer. In the back of it, strapped down, still fighting to speak clearly, he said my name. It was followed words I couldn’t quite understand. I could only make out a few syllables at best-

The cut…

The tool…

The pull…

Then there was something that sounded like “don’t” , stretched and garbled, followed by more of the same desperate noise.

The doctors said it was a severe stroke. He was, thankfully, alive and stable. But the recovery, if it came at all, would be slow and uncertain.

I took over The Seven Scissors as its new head barber. There was no time for a real handover. There was no ceremony, and no proverbial passing of the torch. Just a lawyer who brought me a small cloth bundle. Mr. Munshi had apparently asked it to be delivered to me before the stroke fully took his voice. Inside the bundle were his personal pair of scissors, the ones I’d watched move like they weren’t being held at all, wrapped the way I imagine his father had once wrapped them for him.

Grief, it turns out, is an excellent business partner.

Within the first month, I raised the prices. Modestly in the beginning, then less modestly once I saw that people paid without blinking. Within three months, I’d hired two more barbers to work under me in shifts. And I finally did what the businessmen in the waiting chairs had been talking about for years- I found investors to scale the shop.

It wasn’t hard. The name alone opened doors I hadn’t expected. Turns out “the last surviving shop of the legendary Barber Wars” is the kind of story that people with money find irresistible. Within six months, we’d signed for three new locations across the city. And these were real storefronts, with glass frontage, proper signage, and neon lights.

I brought in a marketing consultant. She brought in influencers- a stream of people with good hair and better cameras, filming themselves getting shaves in our newest branch. We even came up with a motto for the shop-

‘Centuries of tradition, scaled for the modern man.’

I watched the follower counts climb, and patted myself on the back. I moved out of the room above the original shop, and into an apartment with air conditioning that actually worked. I bought a car, and even hired a chauffeur for it, because I was way too busy to take driving lessons.

I used to visit Mr. Munshi in the hospital once a week, then once a month, and then I stopped going altogether. I told myself that the visits upset him more than they helped. He was more of a vegetable than a human at that point- barely conscious, and hardly coherent. I never told him about the expansion of The Seven Scissors. I didn’t want to burden him with the stress of watching his protégé become something he never wanted him to be.

But deep inside, I couldn’t stop being proud of myself. Every metric I could measure said I was succeeding- revenue, locations, followers, margins.

It would be months before I understood that something else was being measured too, scaling right alongside everything I was so proud of…

The first time it happened, I was the one holding the scissors.

It was a regular: a mid-level bank employee, who’d been coming to the original shop for the past four years. Same day, same time, same request: trim the sides, leave the top alone, don’t talk too much. I liked cutting his hair precisely because it required nothing from me except competence. That Thursday, I had him in the chair, comb in one hand, scissors in the other, halfway through the left side.

And then, between one snip and the next, something in the mirror wasn’t him anymore.

I don’t know how else to describe it. His face didn’t change at all, but everything else did. His shoulders, which had been slouched the exact way they always slouched, straightened by some fraction of an inch. His breathing shifted- shallower and faster, like he’d just climbed a flight of stairs. My hand was still resting against the side of his head, angling it for the next cut, and I felt the muscles under my palm tense, in a way it never had in four years of me cutting his hair.

I froze with the scissors half-closed.

He looked at me in the mirror and smiled. It was the same smile I’d seen a hundred times before, but something about it felt malicious. He asked me if something was wrong. It was his exact voice, pitched slightly wrong, like an actor who’d studied the recording but never met the man.

I said no. I finished the cut. My hands did not stop shaking until he’d paid. He tipped more generously than he ever had before, and walked out the door.

I told myself I’d imagined it. That I was exhausted, running on the fumes of three new locations. People shift in their seats. People’s breathing changes. It didn’t have to mean anything.

It happened again six days later, to a young man getting what looked like his first proper adult haircut. A nervous energy radiated off him, the way it does off boys that age. I had the clippers against the back of his neck when his posture changed under my hand. The tension left his neck all at once, replaced by something looser and more confident, in a way that felt too abrupt, and too wrong . He kept talking through the rest of the cut in the same voice, the same words even, but it felt… rehearsed, if that even make sense. Whoever was sitting in that chair by the time I finished was not the boy who’d sat down in it.

I told myself, again, that I was imagining it. Scaling to so many locations at once was doing something to my nerves, making me feel things in my hands that weren’t really there.

I had no idea, yet, that my hands were the one part of me that couldn’t possibly be wrong.

After the second time, I started keeping track. I didn’t write anything down, but I kept a private tally in my head, with details that I turned over obsessively while lying awake at two in the morning.

One week after the boy with the rehearsed laugh, it happened a third time. Then a fourth, ten days after that. By the second month, I could no longer pretend that the intervals were random- they were shrinking. The gaps between incidents were closing, the way a fever climbs degree by degree, until I was sitting with the horrible arithmetic of once every few days becoming once every couple of days.

I tried, in the beginning, to find some kind of proof. I asked one of my boys, casually, if he’d noticed anything different about a customer, whose posture had changed under my hands not ten minutes earlier. He looked at me like I’d asked if the sky had changed color. I soon came to the conclusion that nobody else saw it. Nobody else felt it. Whatever wrongness passed under my palms in those seconds, between one snip and the next, it left no trace anywhere, except in me.

I started dreading certain regulars before they’d even walked in, wondering if today would be the day. I started studying faces in the mirror, with the kind of intensity that made customers uncomfortable.

I thought, more than once, about seeing a psychiatrist. It’s the kind of thought that scared me, almost as much as the substitutions themselves. Because it meant considering the possibility that none of this was real, that the pressure of running four locations at once had genuinely cracked something in my head.

But a quieter part of me, the part that had spent five years learning to read a scalp better than most people read faces, refused to accept that explanation. That part of me knew, with the same stubborn certainty I’d had at seven years old, that the feeling under my hands was real, whether or not I could prove it to a single other living soul.

I just didn’t understand what “real” was going to cost me…

It was the day my stepbrother Rahim showed up.

I hadn’t seen him in six years. I knew, distantly, that he’d finished school, that he’d gotten some entry-level job at a logistics company, that my stepmother occasionally mentioned him in the brief messages she still sent me twice a year, out of some obligation that neither of us had the courage to end. I hadn’t reached out. I told myself there was nothing to reach toward, that whatever had existed between us had died along with everything else.

He walked into the flagship branch on a Sunday afternoon, and I didn’t recognize him for a full three seconds. He was taller than I remembered, broader through the shoulders. But the moment he smiled at me- nervous and hopeful, he looked exactly like the fifteen-year-old who used to trail me around the house, waiting for scraps of attention. With that smile, six years of friction collapsed into nothing at all.

“I saw the ads,” he said, before I could say anything. “Figured I’d come see if you’re actually as good as they say.”

It was obvious that he didn’t come for a haircut. He came looking for me. He came looking for the brother he loved, hoping to rekindle a fire that was extinguished. And some small, starved part of me wanted to give him that.

I sat him down myself.

We talked while I worked. It was a careful conversation, the kind two people have when they’re testing whether old wounds have actually closed, or just scarred over badly. He asked about the expansion. I asked about his job, his life, and whether he was happy. He said he was doing alright. He said he’d missed me, in a voice that cracked slightly on the word. I had to look down at the comb in my hand instead of his face in the mirror.

I was about to tell him that I missed him too, more than he could imagine. And that’s when it happened.

I was halfway through the left side when I felt it. His shoulders straightened under my palm. His breathing shifted. And I looked up into the mirror already knowing, already screaming inside my own skull for it not to be true. I watched my brother’s face hold perfectly still, while everything underneath it, the subtle things that made him him, simply wasn’t there anymore.

He kept talking. It was the same voice, uttering the same unfinished sentence about missing me, stretched out a half-second too long, delivered with a smile that used the right muscles in the wrong order. I stood there with the scissors in my hand and my brother’s borrowed face in front of me. Something in me that had been holding on for months- through the bank employee, through the boy with the rehearsed laugh, through every unproven and unspeakable thing I’d swallowed alone- finally broke.

I dropped the scissors. I don’t remember deciding to. I just remember the sound of them hitting the tile, and the thing wearing my brother’s face turning to look at me. He had an expression of polite concern, asking if something was wrong.

“I’m fine,” I said, and the words came out steadier than I had any right to expect. “Dropped them. It’s been a… long day.”

I bent down and picked the scissors up off the tile, and my hands had never felt heavier in my life. Every instinct in me was screaming to grab him- to grab it- by the shoulders and shove him to the ground. I wanted to ask him where my brother was, and what he had done with him. But some colder part of me remembered five years of Mr. Munshi’s silence, remembered the word he’d choked out in the back of that ambulance- ‘don’t’ . And some animal part of my brain understood, without being told, that whatever was sitting in that chair, would not survive being questioned. Or that I wouldn’t.

So I finished the haircut.

I don’t know how I did it. My hands moved through the motions on some kind of muscle memory that had nothing to do with the rest of me. When it was done, he stood, checked himself in the mirror, turning his head side to side, almost mechanically- like a robot programmed to do so. He reached for his wallet.

I told him it was on the house. Family discount, I said. The word “family” nearly closed my throat entirely.

He hugged me on his way out. It smelled like him and it felt like him, solid and real against my chest. But there was no warmth in that hug, no semblance of the positive energy that I felt when Rahim had entered the shop.

It said, in Rahim’s voice, that he’d missed this, that we should do this again soon, that he was glad he finally came. Then it let go, walked out the door, and disappeared down the street. I stood in the doorway watched him disappear into a crowd of people who had no idea anything had happened at all.

I locked up early that day. I told my staff I wasn’t feeling well, which wasn’t a lie.

I told my driver to take me to the rehabilitation facility, one where Mr. Munshi had ended up in after all those months I’d stopped visiting. Because I was done pretending I could carry this alone, and because somewhere underneath the fear, I needed him to tell me that my brother wasn’t gone forever.

Mr. Munshi had improved more than I expected. Whatever damage the stroke had left him with, months of therapy had clawed back enough that he could speak in full sentences now. He was sitting up in a chair by the window when I walked in, and the moment he saw my face, something in his own expression shifted from surprise to alarm.

“Jamal,” he said. “You don’t look well. Sit down, my boy.”

I didn’t sit. I told him everything, the whole account spilling out of me in the wrong order- the bank employee, the boy with the rehearsed laugh, the tally I’d kept in my head, and finally, about Rahim.

He didn’t answer right away. He asked me a question instead, quiet and careful, like a doctor checking for a wound he already suspected was there.

“Have you changed anything about the shop?”

I told him about the investors. The new locations. The influencers, the motto, the revenue. I watched his face while I said it, and I watched as the color slowly drained away from it.

“Oh no, we’ve been scaled ! Oh Jamal, why would you do that? I gave you specific instructions on what to do and what not to do !”

I raised an eyebrow when he said ‘specific instructions’.

“What are you talking about? What instructions? When did that happen?”

Mr. Munshi went silent for a moment, like a quiet realization had dawned upon him.

“After the stroke,” he said, “At back of the ambulance. I told you everything you needed to know. At least I thought I did. It may have sounded like a bunch of gibberish to you, since my words weren’t coming out the way I wanted them to. Oh God, it’s all my fault. Should’ve told you the truth a long time back…”

That’s when he told me about the Barber Wars, properly this time, not the sanitized market-gossip version I’d grown up hearing. He told how he was on the verge of losing everything to the six rival families, how he was days away from declaring bankruptcy, and how he was desperate to make things change for the better. He told me how his desperation led him to the path of the occult. And he told about the night he made a deal, with an entity he still has no name for, who offered him three gifts:

‘The Cut’, so that every haircut he gave would be flawless, every single time. ‘The Pull’, so that customers would return to him again and again, compulsively, without knowing why. And ‘the Tool’, so that the very sound of his scissors would draw people in off the street, like a tide finding its low point.

The gifts bound to the shop itself, he said. Not to him, not to any single barber, but to the walls and the chair and the mirror, lasting through anyone who ever worked there, for as long as the shop existed. And in exchange, the entity only asked for ‘the silence’. No questions could be asked, ever, no matter what he saw, no matter how wrong it felt.

“I said yes,” Mr. Munshi continued, “because I was drowning, and drowning men don’t ask what’s in the water before they grab it.”

He then described how the six families fell, one by one, absorbed into a shop that could never lose a customer and never give a bad cut. He told me how, within a few years, he started to notice- the way I’d started to notice- that some of the people sitting in his chair weren’t quite who they should’ve been.

He then explained the part that broke something loose in my chest- that the substitutions weren’t random. The frequency of substitutions scaled with the ‘shop’s ambition’, which was tied to the barber’s desire- how much he wanted, how much he reached for, and how much he craved beyond what the deal had already given him. The one year he’d considered opening a second chair? Two customers had vanished into someone else’s face within the month. The one time, decades ago, he’d let himself dream, briefly, of a second shop across town? He’d stopped himself before finishing the thought, because the fourth substitution that same week had been a child.

“That’s why the shop stayed small,” he said. ” I spent forty years making myself small enough, so that the entity wouldn’t have anything to feed on. Everyone thought it was humility. It was never humility, Jamal. It was my starvation, so that other people wouldn’t have to feed something they never agreed to feed.”

I asked him, with my voice barely holding together, why he never told me. Why he let me apprentice for five years, inherit the shop, walk directly into the same trap he’d spent his whole life avoiding.

He looked at me for a long time before he answered, and when he did, it wasn’t an excuse. It was worse than an excuse. It was the truth.

“Because I saw myself in you, the day you walked in asking to learn. The same hunger. The same debt. I thought if I trained you hard enough, disciplined you long enough, you’d learn to starve it the way I did. I thought I had time to teach you that, eventually, once you were ready to hear it.” His good hand tightened on the arm of the chair. “The stroke didn’t give me that time. I tried to tell you, in the ambulance. The cut. The tool. The pull. I was trying to warn you what the shop was, before it was too late. I couldn’t get the rest out.”

“What happens to them?” I asked. “The ones it takes. Where do they go?”

Mr. Munshi looked afraid. After a brief pause, he said,

“I don’t know. I never knew. I was too afraid to find out.”

“You never asked?”

“I couldn’t,” he said. “That was the price, the one it called ‘the silence’. No questions asked, remember? I don’t know if they’re dead, Jamal. I don’t know if they’re trapped somewhere, or transformed, or simply gone away. I’ve spent fifty years not knowing what I did to the people who disappeared through my chair, and it never stopped being the worst thing I’ve ever lived with.”

Neither of us spoke for a long time after that. Outside the window, the evening traffic moved the way it always did. Somewhere across the city, four storefronts with my name on them kept humming along, still profitable, still growing, still feeding an entity that scaled itself with my ambition.

It was me who eventually broke the silence.

“The last time I came to visit you,” I said, “You told me that you still had one more good cut left in you. Do you remember that?”

It was an offhand comment he made when he was joking about his recovery. I’d laughed it off at the time.

“Yeah, I meant it,” he said. “I still mean it. Whatever this hand can still do, I have one more cut in it. But I don’t know what good that does either of us now.”

I thought about Rahim’s face in the mirror, holding still, while everything underneath it disappeared.

And I made a request to Mr. Munshi, the only one that felt like it mattered anymore.

“Let it be me.”

He looked at me like I’d said something in a language he needed a moment to translate.

“Let your last cut be mine,” I said. “Wherever it’s taking them, wherever Rahim is, wherever all of them are… I want to go there too. I don’t need you to explain how. I don’t need to know if it’ll work, or if it’s even something that can be reversed once it starts. I just need you to cut my hair, one more time.”

“Jamal, my boy…”

“I fed this thing for months without knowing it existed,” I said, and my voice finally gave out entirely, cracking apart on every word after that. “I don’t know if I can save him. I don’t know if I can save any of them. But I can’t keep standing in the shop, doing nothing, telling myself I didn’t understand what I was building. I’ve understood enough. I wanted to scale. I wanted the growth. And I wanted it so badly that I stopped visiting the one man who could’ve stopped me before it cost anyone anything !”

Mr. Munshi’s eyes filled, and for the first time since I’d known him, I watched him cry without trying to hide it. He didn’t argue. He didn’t tell me it was foolish, or that we needed more time to think, or that there might be some other way we hadn’t considered. He just took my hand in both of his and looked at me with teary eyes.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said, “Keep the shop ready. I’ll do this properly, my boy. I’ll do this for you, one last time.”

*************************************************************************************

It’s 4:47 in the morning. I’m typing this on my phone, because my hands won’t hold a pen steady enough to write it by hand. The car left for Mr. Munshi’s facility twenty minutes ago. I have maybe two hours before it comes back with him in it.

I didn’t sleep. Not for one minute. I lay in bed until midnight, then I gave up and drove here instead. I’ve been sitting in Mr. Munshi’s old chair since, running the same three thoughts on a loop I can’t switch off.

The first is Rahim. I keep thinking about the years he spent trying to get my attention, the way he used to wait outside my door, the way he showed up at my shop after six years of silence. I never told him that I loved him. I want to write that plainly, because I’ve spent six years finding softer ways to avoid saying it, even to myself. He loved me the whole time, without asking for anything back, the way only a kid can love someone who keeps flinching away from him. And I let him keep loving me like that, instead telling him he had a brother who loved him too.

The second thought is every other name I don’t have. The mid-level bank employee. The boy with the rehearsed laugh. The dozens who suffered the same fate after that. People who had no say in it. People who didn’t get a choice, the way I’m choosing this. I can’t stop thinking about the others who might have been substituted, in branches I wasn’t standing in, by the barbers I hired, who had no idea what their hands were participating in.

The third thought is the ugliest one, because it is the truth, and it’s mine.

I’ve spent months telling myself that I scaled this shop because I saw its potential, because I wanted to honor what Mr. Munshi built by giving it the size it deserved. Sitting here now, at five in the morning, with his chair under me, I don’t think that’s true. I didn’t do this for the business. I did this so the world would know my name, the way it never got the chance to know my father’s, before his own failed businesses buried him in debt. I turned his failure into my personality and called it ambition, and I let it eat people while I called it growth.

I don’t know how to carry that and still believe I deserve to try fixing it. But I’m doing it anyway.

If you’re reading this: please know that every branch of The Seven Scissors is closed indefinitely, starting now. Please don’t come. Please don’t send anyone you love to any of our chairs, not until you hear otherwise, directly from Mr. Munshi himself. Not from a staff member. Not from a rumor in the market that things are open again. And definitely not from me, because I don’t know whether the man walking out of that shop in a few hours will still be me, or something else wearing what’s left of my face.

I just know that I won’t let it take one more person who never agreed to be taken. If it wants another body today, it can have mine, and it can have it with my consent, which is more than it ever gave anyone else.

The sun’s coming up. I can hear the car outside.

My name is Jamal, and this is my dying declaration.

Credit: Dr_AK_Myst

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