Though Priti’s hand still trembles as I work away, I manage to finish her palm without any more incidents. I come away with a small smile on my face as Priti examines her hennaed hand, holding it up in front of her with some admiration.
“You know what?” she says. “You’ve definitely gotten better at this.”
“I know.” My smile widens. Priti nudges me with her non-hennaed hand.
“Don’t get too cocky now.”
“Okay, well. The other hand.” I hold out my hand with the henna tube, waiting for her to stretch her other palm out to me.
She groans. “Can we take a break? I need to stretch my legs.” She’s taking a million photos of her outstretched hand, no doubt to put up on her Instagram. That gives me a slight jolt of happiness—that my handiwork has been deemed Instagrammable by my little sister, aka my second worst critic—but it doesn’t distract me from my work.
“Priti, the wedding is in a few days. If I don’t get it done now, the color won’t set properly. You know that.”
“Fine, fine, fine,” she huffs. “But don’t get mad if I can’t sit still.”
I will get mad. She knows that and so do I. But we begin on her right hand anyway.
The wedding hall is gorgeous. It’s the first wedding I’ve been to outside of Bangladesh, and I didn’t know what to expect. Summer weddings in Bangladesh are one of two things—beautiful, expensive and luxurious to the point where you don’t even realize you’re in a country where it’s 104 degrees out, or so hot that the thought of dressing up in your nice clothes and putting on a full face of makeup makes you want to commit some serious atrocities.
And they’re abundant. During one summer visit to Nanu’s house, we had to go to fifteen different weddings. Half the time we didn’t even know the names of the people getting married, much less how they were related to us.
Stepping into this wedding hall feels a little like stepping into those Bangladeshi summers. There are big, circular tables filling the entire hall, each with a small vase of red and white flowers laced together. Fairy lights twinkle everywhere, winking on and off every few seconds.
“Hani Khala and Raza Khalu went all out,” Priti whispers as we step inside the hall. I have to agree. It makes sense; there’s no way they would have their sole daughter’s wedding on a budget.
I only have a moment to wonder where everybody is before Priti and I are ushered into a back room by a woman in a black and white salwar kameez who looks like she means business.
“Sunny Apu!” Priti cries as we step inside. Because there she is, made up all beautiful like a bride in a traditional red lahenga with a pattern of gold gilded on the edges. I feel a prick of something bubbling up inside of me, some kind of anxiety that I hadn’t expected, and I bite my lip to keep it at bay.
“You two look so lovely!” Khala says from behind Sunny Apu. “Absolutely stunning, don’t they?”
Sunny Apu smiles nervously, nodding at the two of us, but she doesn’t say anything. She looks nervous—scared, even. Priti casts a glance over at me, as if to check if I’ve noticed Sunny Apu’s nervousness too.
“All the bridesmaids are gathering up in the other room.” Hani Khala nods at the door past the dressing table. “They’re almost ready to go, I think.”
Priti and I hurry toward it, giving a fleeting smile to Sunny Apu before slipping inside.
I recognize almost nobody in this room, though they’re all dressed like Priti and me. It takes me a moment to snap out of the dissonance of entering a room where everybody is dressed the same and to politely murmur a hello.
“They must be Sunny Apu’s friends, right?” Priti asks. “And her cousins?”
I nod, my eyes roaming over the lot of them as subtly as possible. There are two girls huddled in one corner of the room who are both white and, I’m pretty sure, Irish. The pink and gold salwar kameez that Hani Khala sent over to all of us looks oddly out of place on them.
“It washes them out,” Priti says, as if reading my thoughts. I shoot her a glare to shut up. The room is small enough that they can hear her, even if she whispers.
In the other corner, there’s a group of four girls. Two of them share features with Sunny Apu, but the other two don’t look Bangladeshi at all.
“I think I recognize her,” I whisper to Priti as low as I can. “The tall girl with the curly—don’t look so obviously!” I have to cut myself off because Priti has abandoned any notion of subtlety and is staring directly at the group of girls. It’s a good thing they’re too deeply involved in their conversation to pay attention to us.
“She’s pretty,” Priti says. “I don’t think I’ve seen her before though.”
I’m trying to place her. From school? No, she looks far older than me. She must be at least the same age as Sunny Apu. Maybe I saw her at a Desi party? But she’s not Desi, or at least she doesn’t look it.
“I know I’ve seen her somewhere,” I whisper to Priti, trying to stare at the girl as subtly as possible to find something that will give away how I recognize her. “But I can’t remember where.”
We have no more time to mull it over because a moment later, the door to the room is flung open again and the woman in black and white is giving us instructions about how to properly enter the wedding hall.
“Is that all we do as bridesmaids?” Priti whispers to me as she’s handed a small bunch of red and white flowers. “Walk?”
