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Missing Shampoo

I met up with a friend from a long time ago over the holidays. She is a few years younger than me and grew up in a similar social and cultural milieu. Sitting in my living room drinking tea and chatting about times left far behind, a home we can no longer recognize felt comforting. Her immediate family has immigrated a long time ago so there is really nothing left to return to except for the desire to help her child understand his roots. We got talking about things that were common in our childhood but don't exist anymore - the things that such roots are made of.

We did not miss these things in our lives but when recalled they seemed to be imbued with special meaning. The shampoo that used to be advertised in every commercial break on national television. The model with her long and lustrous hair that the said shampoo had everything to do with or so we thought. Adjusted for age, M still has beautiful hair of her youth when I first met her, she was definitely shampoo model grade back in the day. For a moment, I wanted to recall that smell of that product I have not used in many decades. It is not possible to find something that is a close enough match to trigger the memory - I have tried. It was its own thing, bright yellow with a metallic sheen and a smell that I really loved. You knew if someone had shampooed because the bathroom would smell of it after. 

As a young person, you believed that was the smell you wanted to linger behind you to signal clean, healthy, wholesome and someone with magnificent hair. The reality was the product was just a regular shampoo, it did no better or worse for a person's hair than any other product out there but the woman in the ad for this one was who made all the difference - she signaled something to the kids and youth of the day, something aspirational and a bit out of reach. That product disappeared from the market likely around the time I left India. By then, there were plenty of competitors with bold claims and comparably lush ads. All of this had faded out of memory until we shared stories from childhood in my living room.

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