Beauty parlours in Varanasi are quietly brewing a feminist revolution—one pedicure at a time

Indu Khatri knows that if a woman wishes to enjoy some downtime, it’s a long time before she can kick back and relax. “A man lives his life freely because he does so on his terms. A woman has to listen to her father, brother and husband, never to herself,” she says, as we sip tea from little kulhads at Palak Beauty Parlour, tucked away on the first floor of a three-storey residential building in Varanasi. “As working women, we need to have the freedom to wake up at nine in the morning if we want to and not cook if we don’t want to. Left to our own devices, our husbands and in-laws will never want us to step out.”

She is accompanied by her elder sister-in-law, Rekha Khatri, who is getting her eyebrows threaded two feet away from us. Less than 24 hours ago, Indu lost her other sister-in-law to a sudden cardiac arrest. Before I spoke to her, the owner of Palak Beauty Parlour, Savita Singh, informed me that “Indu-ji is sad behind the smiling face.”

Indu shares what she feels about working women in north India because she is one. After seven years of visiting Palak Beauty Parlour as a customer and bonding with Singh, they recently pooled a lifetime of personal savings to open a second parlour together. “Seven years ago, I started my journey in the guest room of my in-laws’ house in Varanasi with a mirror propped against the wall and a small plastic chair,” Singh says. “Whenever we had guests, we’d request them to adjust in the other bedroom. My husband insisted that my little beauty parlour set-up not be disturbed.

Photographed by Keerthana Kunnath