I admire my handiwork for a second as Priti digs around, searching for her phone. It’s one of my original designs—and for once I don’t want to criticize it. I worked hard to perfect this design and clearly it’s paid off. I spent so long applying it to Priti’s hand though that most of the henna has already dried off.
It’s a more intricate design than the one I attempted for the wedding. It starts with the basic mandala—a circle with flower patterns extending out of it. But then I filled in the main circle with another and another, each getting smaller and smaller. Outside of the flower petals I drew the leaves, weaving and wrapping around Priti’s fingers, surrounded by dots, getting bigger and smaller and bigger and smaller.
Everything is as it should be. There are no smudges, no inconsistencies like before.
“You have to put it up on your Instagram,” I say to Priti when she’s finally retrieved her phone and is aiming the camera at her hand.
She lowers the phone to look at me with a frown.
“On my Instagram?” she asks. “It’s your business.”
“Yes, but you know what my Instagram is like.” By that, I mean small and unpopular. I only have fifty followers and I think half of them are random guys who try to chat up random girls and actually have no interest in what I post.
“Because you never post on it!” I don’t want to tell her that it won’t matter if I post on it or not. She’s the likable sister. The pretty, perky one. The smart one. The sociable one. Everyone loves Priti. Unlike her, I don’t exude natural likeability. I might be the older sister but Priti always shines brighter than me. If the photos go up on her Insta, more people will like them. More people will care. And Flávia and Chyna can steal it again, a voice whispers in my head. But I brush it off. Once I’m officially competing, they wouldn’t dare.
Instead of all that, I say, “You already have a lot of followers. We can capitalize on that.”
She presses her lips together and says, “No.”
I frown. “Seriously? I’m asking you for help with this one thing.”
“One thing?” Her voice rises slightly in a way that I don’t hear very often. “Hello?” She waves her hennaed hand in front of my eyes. “Did you not ask me to abandon my studies so you could practice your henna designs? Did I not spend half the morning calming you down in the bathroom at school?”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“Well, I did it. Because that’s what sisters do. But you can’t just expect me to let you use my Instagram all willy-nilly because you don’t have any followers and I do.” She’s waving her hands around wildly as she speaks. I’m afraid that she’ll hit something and smudge the henna that I’ve carefully perfected over the last few hours. I grab her wrist just below where the henna stops.
“Careful.”
She rolls her eyes.
“This is important to me, you know.” My voice is quieter than I mean it to be. It fills the room’s silence in a way I didn’t expect it to. It softens Priti’s eyes.
“I know.” She picks up her phone again. I’m hopeful—even though we’ve just had an argument about it. “And my Instagram is important to me.”
I frown. I know that Priti has spent time cultivating her Instagram page. Her couple thousand followers are her weird pride and joy. I don’t understand it, really, but I’ve never had the natural charm Priti does. I’ve also never had that need to be liked.
“You can’t use my Instagram for this. But … I can help you out with yours. You could start a new one for this whole business you’re going to have. You could share it with Chaewon and Jess. That’ll be better. More professional,” Priti adds after a moment of silence.
It’s a compromise I’m willing to make, so I nod.
“You’ll have to come up with a name, though,” she says. She’s already typing away on her phone.
“Who are you texting?” I make a swipe for her phone. She extends it out of reach.
“Your business partners, Chaewon and Jess, of course,” she says like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“Of course? How do you even have their phone numbers?” Even though Chaewon, Jess, and I have been friends for the past few years, we aren’t exactly joined at the hips. It’s strange to think of my little sister having a texting relationship with them.
“We have a group chat. We need a way to vent about you,” Priti says, still holding her phone away from me.
“Priti!” I exclaim.
She faces her phone toward me. “You sent them a text through my phone that one time. I’m just asking them if it’s okay for me to set up an Instagram account for you guys. We don’t really talk about you.”
For a moment there, I really feared that they did.
“What did they say?” I ask, instead of admitting my own naiveté.
“Nothing, they’re not texting back. Maybe we should wait a while to set this up?”
I know waiting and asking them would be the right thing to do, but I also know that the sooner we can start getting publicity for this, the better.
“Let’s set up a preliminary name. Then we can change it, right?”
“Right,” Priti agrees. “Nishat’s Mehndi?”
I wrinkle up my nose. “That’s a little cheesy, isn’t it? And it’s not just mine.”
“But it’s a preliminary name. And it’s cute, if a little cheesy.”
I think about it for a second. It does say exactly what it is; who is applying the henna. So I say yes and Priti does her magic and sets up the account.
Afterwards, she turns on all the lights in her room and holds her henna-decked hand out for me.
“You’ve got to take the photo if we’re using my hand,” she says, nodding at her phone.
“But … I’m no good at taking photos,” I remind her. “Remember that time we ran into Niall Horan and all I managed to do was take a blurry photo where you can barely make him out?”
“Don’t remind me …” She held a grudge over that for ages. Anybody would have done the same. But that’s how bad I am at taking photos—even the thought of proving to everyone that we had randomly bumped into Niall Horan didn’t make me any better. Or maybe it made me worse.
I pick up the phone and click a few quick photos. When I show them to Priti, she frowns.
“I think you have like tone deafness but for photography,” she says. “Picture blindness.”
“Wouldn’t that just be blindness?”
“Picture askew-ness?”
“Okay, I have picture askew-ness.” I smile and thrust the phone out for her. “Your turn?”
She shakes her head. “You have to do it if we’re going to get a decent picture.” That feels like a total paradox. “Look, just hold it straight and … try not to move.”
It’s easier said than done. I try to take a few more pictures. They don’t come out perfect, but Priti smiles when she sees them this time.
“I can work with this.” She clicks out of the camera and into the Instagram app. A few minutes later, she shows me the finished product. She’s changed the lighting so it looks brighter. The design stands out against everything else, stark and intricate and … dare I say it, kind of beautiful.