This festival season, I had some beautiful mehendi (otherwise known as henna) applied to my arms and legs. What a treat! I really didn’t like (hated) my mehendi at our wedding, it looked completely awful, so I did everything I could to get the stuff of as soon as possible (this involved scrubbing it with salt and washing my skin almost immediately). However, this time I wanted my mehendi to be as dark and long lasting as possible. After sitting for almost three hours getting it done, I was going to look after this mehendi! There are many superstitions about mehendi, the most popular being ‘the darker the mehendi, the more your husband will love you’. Obviously you shouldn’t sit watching your mehendi stain with great anticipation and expect to see how much your husband will love you. I am guessing that this superstition developed as a way for girls who have an arranged marriage to get an indication of how much this boy will love her. Of course it’s just a superstition, even when we know that the color of our mehendi doesn’t have any relation to anything except the way we took care of it, like with all superstitions there is still a small part of us can’t help but take [...]
