The night before Andy’s wedding was her mehndi ceremony.
It was actually more like a party.
Andy and her cousins and friends, three dozen of them, sat around a suite in the hotel, laughing and talking, while three henna artists piped designs in thick henna clay on their palms, their feet, and up their arms. The artists squeezed the clay from paper cones, kind of like decorating a cake, and traced thin lines of the henna mud on their skin.
The henna artist had asked Andy if she wanted her name and Mahadavan’s intertwined in the elaborate design, or hearts and doves, or if there was any symbol that was special to their relationship. Andy had told her no, that she wanted only traditional designs because this was a traditional arranged marriage, but she had relented at the last minute. On the back of her right hand, the henna artist drew a Rod of Asclepius, one snake climbing a staff that is the symbol of the field of medicine. DNA double helices spiraled up the backs of her fingers. The rest of her hands and feet were decorated with paisleys, flowers, and trellises.
Her friend Raji was sitting cross-legged beside her, having flown in for the wedding from her new cardiac surgery residency in California. They’d had chai before the mehndi ceremony, catching up. Raji was seeing a white artist guy who worked for a start-up in Silicon Valley. She had not brought him to Andy’s wedding because she hadn’t told her parents about him and had no intention of doing so.
Raji had a nose piercing now, too, on the opposite side of her face from her lip piercing. This did not shock Andy. Both of Andy’s grandmothers had had nose piercings.
The new tattoo of the Chinese symbol for “energy” on the back of Raji’s hand had raised Andy’s eyebrows a little. The tattoo was pretty, but cardiac transplantation was a conservative field, much like liver transplantation and anything pediatric. People didn’t want to entrust their heart or their child to someone who looked like they might have been hopped up on ecstasy at a rave the night before.
Andy had her tablet propped up so that Emily could see the delicate whorls of red clay that the mehndi artist had piped onto her feet. Someday, Andy had promised, when Emily was well and discharged from the hospital, the mehndi artist would come and draw designs on her, staining her pale ivory skin with red-brown pigment.
Emily’s skin was indeed pale ivory now, not dark and yellow. Cadell’s liver was already healing her little body.
Andy held her palms up to the tablet and flipped her hands over, showing Emily that the red mud had been piped onto them.
Beside Andy, her sister-in-law, Latha, sniffed when she saw the video. “You shouldn’t be doing that. That little girl is not one of our family.”
Andy had lots of friends from high school and college in the room getting made up with henna who weren’t technically family, and they weren’t even all Indian. Several of her friends, women of other ethnicities, were sitting and chatting while henna was drawn on their skin of many different hues.
The real problem, Andy thought, was not that she was showing Emily the henna party, but that Cadell was curled around Emily in her hospital bed, looking like a smoking hot rock star with studs in his ears and real tattoos curling down his strong arms below the short sleeves of his tee shirt. His black curls stopped at his shoulders.
He smiled at Andy, and she smiled back at him.
She missed him so much that her chest hurt, but this was how she had chosen to live her life. Getting her out now would take a miracle.
He said, “Just call me.”
Andy didn’t dare nod.