I hate my hands.
I think they're really ugly - stubby fingers, darkened knucles and joints, broad and tall palm and bitten off nails [who wants to keep those pretty when the rest is so pathetic? It'll just draw more attention.]. They're also very uninviting - fat and warm and rough. I hate to use moisturisers because it just makes everything slippery and sticky.
But if there is ever a time that I believe my hands look beautiful, it is when I have mehendi [henna] on them.
I love mehendi. It cools, soothes and looks beautiful and - at least in my case - stays for 10 days till it wears off. As a child, I used to love to have my whole hands [sometimes right up to the elbow, like a bride] tattooed with this herb paste, even though I was too impatient and would want to have the dried mass off of my skin as soon as possible, to reveal the warm colour beneath. Regardless of how short the duration for which I had the mehendi on, my hands would still colour the darkest of all around me. Someone would say it's because of a loving husband or a doting mother-in-law that I will have in the future, and others would cynically deduce that it was because I had a warm body temperature. I agreed either way, because my hands would blush bright beneath the richness of the mehendi.
Over the years, the love hasn't even faded, even if the mehendi fades with time. My hands still colour the darkest, and despite my growing and constant critique of my hands, I loved them dearly when they were tinted with mehendi. The designs became smaller at one time, and stayed that tiny, because I finally began to see that all the empty space around the designs looked fairer, brighter, lovable and unlike any quality I ever ascribed to it.
And funnily, I'm not the only one in adoration for my hands. My family would constantly kiss my gorgeously coloured palms, and feed me and help me around when the mehendi would still be fresh - disabling me from even lifting a finger for fear of spoiling it. My friends would look at my palms with admiration and envy. My hands drew attention, questions and compliments. With the mehendi on them, my hands took on a life of their own and became a thing of beauty that is always looked at with joy.
This taught me something really important. If I highlighted what I considered my worst features and turned them into assets, they would make heads turn. The beauty that I don't see in myself would be visible to the world. And this gives me a hope and confidence each day that I look at my henna hands. It makes me believe that a fat, average height, average brained and slightly talented girl could have her way in the world once in a while. And if not that, at least I'll have the beauty of my henna hands to get me through.
