Continuing on with the days preceding my sister’s wedding, we find ourselves at “two days before” the big event…
In our Indian world within the world of Canadiana, “two days before” means an evening of wildly intricate mehndi designs. But before we could begin with this activity requiring more patience than I’ve ever possessed, we had to get our manicures!
That’s where most of my story begins and ends today…in the waiting room area of the nail salon.
For the entire time that I sat in the waiting chair, I found myself shocked and appalled by the Indian girls sitting next to me. These girls were already through with their appointment, but their presence in itself was the core of my frustration:
-why did a six-year-old girl and an eight-year-old girl have a nail appointment?
Your feathers may not be ruffled yet, and yes I understand the joy of your mother painting your nails just for fun if you’ve been very good, but this was NOT a mother-daughter bonding event. These were two little girls with fancy manicures AND pedicures, already stripped of their childhoods.
Six-year-old: “Yours looks better than mine!” She finished with a pout.
Eight-year-old: “No look, she gave you a nicer design on your feet!”
Wait…DESIGNS?
Oh right. It’s this recent phenomenon of complicated designs to augment the average manicure. I myself have not been able to try out the designs for myself, as I’m a simple girl of “french manicure” or “solid colour” persuasion (if and when I should even get a manicure). But to witness six and eight-year-olds applying the latest trends?
No!
It feels wrong to me. It might not feel wrong to the world at large, since the world is okay with six-year olds oiling up their thighs for juvenile beauty contests, so fine…I accept that truth.
But you know what? Oily thighs on a child don’t work for me (it feels wrong to even type it), nor am I in favour of making little girls grow accustomed to cosmetic life. Imagine these girls going home and playing in the sandbox: “No! Don’t push me! I don’t want to scratch my manicure!”
A child is SUPPOSED to get all grimy and scratched. Screw getting your nails done, those girls should be cutting up worms just for the heck of it!
At least that’s what I did when I was a kid, and look how wonderfully I turned out.
I just start to wonder when the day will come that I’ll see a little girl with acrylic air-brushed porn star nails.
Should I just close my eyes now? Because I feel like it’s on the brink…
…Now where was I? Oh yeah, after our manicures, we got to dress our hands in mehndi! I suppose that’s the rest of the story, but my annoyance precluded me from mentioning it ’till now. Needless to say, getting your hands done is a whole lotta fun, but the hard part becomes the hours and hours you’re supposed to keep the mehndi in tact. It all depends on how dark you’d like the final product to be. If you wash your hands too early, the mendhi ends up looking like a faded light orange, even when its darkened from the first day or two of exposure.
But this was my sister’s wedding. We wanted the GOOD stuff, so we allowed the mehndi artist to mist our hands in sticky lemon spray once she was done, and then…we didn’t touch a thing. Don’t ask me how I went to the bathroom, but once bedtime arrived, I had to wrap my wrists in that white stretchy bandage material, the kind which resembles the mummy-wrap that burn-victims wear.
It was a less than comfortable sleep, but the end result was a strong amount of colour that lasted for a couple of weeks. And on a final note, while I went for the elegant and flowery designs on the inside, I wanted something different for the outside of my hands. So I picked a more unique design for that. It almost resembled pointy daggers shooting across my hands. I thought it was pretty bad-ass.
And now all I want is a fire-breathing dragon made of mehndi on my back.
Bad-ass…
No comments:
Post a Comment