At The Barbers with Dikrek | Unexpected Compensation

Why is it always better to have your hair cut under frangipani trees?

H.R. Managers are in their happiest pace when discussing either redundancy terms or the compensation package that will tempt you to leap across to their well-moisturised limb of corporate life, and begin, once again, the ascent up the greasy ladder.

There is the salary, of course, sometimes, but not always, cut up into digestible, discussable sections, each adorned with dependencies like earnings longing to glitter. Each is a niggling dialogue.

Then there is the bonus: this is always deliciously Byzantine and requires fortitude and a sure command of a longish dictionary to negotiate fully.

Then there are the allowances: a car perhaps, or travel; schooling maybe for those many children that may now ripen like fruits on the branch of a well-sustained tree? Clothing?

The cigar allowance has sadly become a thing of the past, and even the allowances for recreational drugs in the music industry appear to have been phased out. But never mind, there’s the golden hallo; the parachute (also golden); the softer accessories: office, equipment, aromatherapy diffuser. Then the Gordian knot of working hours and the working-from-home options. On and on it goes, a menu that challenges even that put up in Paris by La Tour d’Argent.

But never once do they mention barbers.

Dilrek, the barber, is most certainly one of my main elements in the compensation package that comes with running an estate and hotel in the middle of the jungle in central Sri Lanka.

Like all barbers, Dilrek is always changing his hairstyle.

His hair is thick and black, endowed with a vigour that ensures it grows as fast as Formula 1 cars at Silverstone. Sometimes, the sides are shaved to a brutal Number 1, leaving the middle section standing proud as a soufflé above his forehead. Sometimes it is all cut soldier-style, or trimmed neatly everywhere, like the well-meaning coiffure of a young accountant.

Occasionally, Dilruk turns his full attention to the sideboards, fashioning them with a careful attention to detail so that they curl out in luxuriant twists like tiny croissants. Rarely – but most grandly – the beard and moustache are brought into the mix, often cut in the opposite style to the head hair, so presenting you with a magnetic Before-and-After image.

Dilruk is a mere WhatsApp away and arrives, gear in hand, right down to the hair sheet, at precisely 8 am.

He sets up his barbering chair in the shade of a frangipani tree.

Today, yellow and orange orioles flit from branch to branch. On his last visit, it was a baby giant squirrel.

Before me stretch long dewy lawns, acid green topiary hedges (than even now Janaka is trimming), and brick paths lined with gothic mothers-in-law tongue. Four schnauzers chase suicidal squirrels before coming to rest under my chair. I have tried to persuade Dilruk to lend them a simultaneous fur cut; given what feats of fashion he lavishes on his own beard, I don’t doubt he would make something splendid out of schnauzer beards and moustaches. But dogs, it seems, even schnauzers, appear to be firmly outside his bailiwick.

The radio is playing a discussion led by little Melvyn Bragg about the Sun King, Louis XIV, which seems apposite given the grand hairstyles adopted in Versailles by his courtiers, though the guests, all academics in early modern history, have little to say about either Marie Antoinette’s Pouffe or the exuberant wigs worn by the men around her.

Dilruk’s style is very mellow. Softly does he wield his long, sharp scissors; they move like elven whispers around your head. Although built with the sturdy compact efficiency of a Challenger 2, Dilruk is so light on his toes that you never know where the next cut will land.

He gives off no smell or sound as he steadily moves around my head, so different to the boisterous Italian barbers on Fulham Road who rattle through the colourful highlights of their day and life like Hello Magazine. Instead of coming out of the encounter like a chocolate sundae sprinkled with too many hundreds and thousands, Dilruk leads you out of it as if you had both been on the same meditation.

And what compensation package, you have to ask yourself, can ever compete with that?

That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbirck at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.