I SUSPECT every woman in India has had mehendi designs meticulously traced on their hands at least once. I had it done several times last year while I was living in Delhi; my friend always got me home without completely ruining the work.
So I must have been completely out of my mind the other day to accept an invitation to have mehendi painted on my hand on a crowded train headed to Borivali.
And by crowded, I mean women-hanging-outside-the-doors crowded. Still, there’s never been a missed opportunity to buy anything in the ladies car: Soap, moth balls, candy, hair pins, coloring books. I’m waiting for the day I’ll be able to buy tampons. But mehendi?
It turned out, the 19-year-old college student didn’t want money. I was sitting next to her as the fourth person hanging off the side of the bench and I had just thumbed through about 50 second-hand books, finally settling on The Last Farmer about the rural crisis in America.
When I handed over a 10-rupee note, I started to think how strange life is: Here I was—having grown up on a farm in America, having just bought a book published in 1988 about the very thing our family had experienced for years—on an urban train in 21st-century Mumbai.
It could not have gotten any stranger until the girl said she liked my hand. It was my left hand, the hand I was using to navigate the first few pages of my book.
‘‘Can I do your mehendi just like that?’’ she asked.
‘‘Just like what?’’ I replied, truly bewildered. I began looking around for what she was referring to, and then it dawned on me what she meant: ‘‘Just for fun.’’
I thought for a split second that this was not the smartest thing to do. I would soon be in need of both hands to start taking notes in Borivali. Then I thought if I were to ever move to New York City, I would never get an offer like this on the metro.
So there I sat, offering my left hand to this girl for the duration of my trip, as the women around us looked on. She finished just a few minutes before my stop, simply instructing me not to wash my hand all day. I tried in vain to protect her work as I shoved myself off the train.
I saved most of it, and it has actually turned into a respectable shade of burgundy despite my inability to have taken proper care that day .
But somewhere that evening was a woman wondering why she had a strangely out-of-place henna-coloured stain all over her salwar kameez.