Delhi: for a close shave with a speedy barber

YOU get what you pay for and outside the sari shops of Babu Market in the Sarojini Nagar neighbourhood of Delhi, where tailors busily take up hemlines and let out seams on pedal-powered Geminy sewing machines, I might have just paid for my own demise.

Mr Prasad, one of countless alfresco barbers snipping away on the edge of India's traffic-choked streets, has me arched back in a chair that ergonomics forgot, neck exposed to a very sharp razor.

It could be a scene from a Bollywood The Demon Barber of Fleet Street except I can scarcely breathe, let alone belt out The Ballad of Sweeney Todd. At least Mr Prasad's razor is not rusty. The same can't be said of his scissors, which look as if they once trimmed Gandhi's moustache.

The little boy next to me is clearly not enjoying the bowl cut Mr Prasad's apprentice is scissoring him, crying as his father holds him down to prevent escape.

In contrast, my 50-rupee ($1) haircut - I'm making a special effort for my friend's wedding - has given me no cause to complain.

Choosing a style was as easy as pointing to a poster of Salman Khan, Bollywood's biggest male star. Mr Prasad shrugs his shoulders and gestures to his barber's chair. Once seated, he slings a blue cape around my shoulders still covered in hair from the previous customer and pushes me into an awkward slump so he can reach my scalp. He selects a comb and begins snapping his scissors like a pair of castanets.

A chai wallah trundles past in a three-wheeled bicycle selling "Special Tea" but his gentle pestering of passers-by is drowned out by the screech of a Bollywood singer over the market's PA system and the sobbing child next to me. Hopefully, they're distracting shoppers from watching Mr Prasad as he snips at my nostril and ear hair.

Admittedly, I'm not wearing glasses and his mirror is clouded with age and grime but he seems to have disguised my receding hairline, plucked a few grey hairs and not drawn any blood. The crying child's mother, meanwhile, is dabbing her son's ear to staunch a nick. Head dealt with, Mr Prasad surveys the unruly grey-flecked beard straggling across my chin and down my neck. He mows my jawline with what look like wool shears, then snaps open a fresh razor, presses me into the intoxicated slump position and moistens a finger to wet my neck and sprays it with liquid from a bottle labelled "Dunhill agricultural spray".

An inability to communicate with someone wielding a razor blade a hair's breadth from your carotid artery has its drawbacks but Mr Prasad dabs and scrapes at my beard like an artist painting a canvas.