Wedded Ink

The day before Ami's wedding, we attended a morning ceremony and reception hosted by her uncle. During the ceremony, he presented gifts to Ami. There was also lunch, music, and of course, dancing. (Theo's dancing in particular became the talk of the wedding.) There were also women there who painted designs in henna on all the women's hands, called mehndi. This is the part of Indian weddings I most remember from movies and one of the things I was most looking forward to. We watched Ami have her mehendi done the day before, along with her mom and sister. They all had more complicated designs that took hours to put on, and Ami had a specific bridal pattern on her hands, arms, and feet (shown to the left). The rest of up just had simple designs done on both sides of our hands, which took only about 5 minutes. The henna comes out of a small tube in a paste that feels a little like mud and takes over an hour to dry. If you remove it beforehand, of course, the color won't stay. It was incredibly hard not to use my hands for all that time. Theo even had to help me eat! Once it does dry, the color will continue to get darker over the next 24 hours. The warmer your body temperature the darker the henna. All of Ami's friends told me that they use Vicks VapoRub on the mehndi at night; it heats up your hands and helps to make the henna darker. There are also a number of folk sayings involving mehndi as well. The darker your mehndi is, several women told me, the more your husband/boyfriend loves you. My mehndi lasted for about two weeks and faded shortly after we returned to the States. But I was able to take some pretty great pictures with my engagement ring before that happened.