After I get a haircut, one of two things always happens. People stare at me. Or people ignore me.

If they ignore me, I feel cheated. Some people have told me the perfect haircut is one that nobody notices. I like it when they take notice.

My wife never notices. I could get my head shaved and she wouldn’t notice. I like to think that she looks beyond the superficiality of my hair and deals in matters of the heart, but, in truth, she just doesn’t notice.

If they do stare, I like to think it is because I had a great haircut. But I allow the possibility that it was a terrible one.

Ninety eight percent of the time, people don’t stare, which means I feel cheated 98 percent of the time. Of the two percent of the times people gawk, I don’t know the good/bad haircut ratio. But I fantasize the ‘good’ wins by a healthy margin.

But this is a story about people staring at me—lots and lots of people gawking, everyone who passed me–after I got a haircut from an Indian barber.

The barber shop was in Malaysia, in the area of the Cameron Highlands, a stunningly beautiful area of mountains and tea plantations. My family and I had gone there on a winter-break vacation. At the time we lived in Singapore. We drove there.

In Singapore, a local friend told me that Indian barbers, at the conclusion of a haircut, gave you a neck adjustment similar to a chiropractor. This always intrigued me. I figured that these barbers became highly practiced over the years, cracking tens of thousands of necks. If they broke a neck or paralyzed someone, then it would likely end their career as a barber. So, I reasoned, those barbers still cutting hair were the best of the best neck crackers.

In the Cameron Highlights I passed an Indian barber shop. To wait for me, my wife and two daughters went to a park which had a slide and other stuff for kids. I got my haircut and then as an added bonus I opted for a shave. The barber gave me a shave with an old time long straight edge razor. The strange part of this story is that I can’t remember if he cracked my neck.

What I do remember is that when I was walking down the street, back to the park, people gawked. In Asia, it is not common for people to stare. Men, women, kids, the old and young alike, they all looked at me with wide eyes. Count one-one thousand, two one-thousand and they were still locked on. It started to make me nervous and I no longer cared if I got a good or bad haircut.

When I reached the park, my wife said, “What happened to you!” Unfortunately, she was not noticing my haircut for the first time. When I looked at myself in the car’s rearview mirror, I saw my face was bleeding from a hundred and one razor nicks. It looked like a chicken with sharp claws had danced on my face.