A week ago, the night before I was to take the bus to Bagan, I dreamed that half my hair just came apart in my hands while I was combing it. It was not a neat partition, and what remained were jagged edges, an asymmetrical, tangled mess, clearly indicating that this was not a premeditated event. My hair had fallen off against my preordained will. I felt a supernal loss.

Sometime in 2012, after I returned from my trip to Paris, I had made a conscious decision to let my hair grow long and not yield to the vanity of slick haircuts. Since then my trips to the salon have been infrequent, only to have my hair trimmed by an inch. In my dream, I feared my father’s reaction to the now abrupt length. His eagerness for me to let it hang long is probably the sole superficial request he has ever made of me. I imagined my mother’s disappointment, too. In allowing my tresses to flourish I knew I was trying to embody a fraction of my mother’s enormous beauty, especially when she was the age I am now, when she was still unmarried.