kolam

Pretty much everywhere I went in Tamil Nadu, I’d see these abstract, symmetrical patterns in rice flour (called kolam in Tamil) on the floor near thresholds of one sort or another. In the picture below, Vidya, the sister of the bride Gayatri, created a new one in the stair well between her family’s apartment and the one Krishnan and I were staying in. (Ganapati, Gayatri and Vidya’s father, had rented a spare apartment for all the relatives coming in from out of town for the wedding.) A kolam doesn’t last very long, but they are a beautiful bit of folk art. They are called rangoli in North India.

henna body art

One custom that’s popular at Indian marriages is the decoration of hands (and sometimes feet) with henna (aka mehndi). Below is a snap of Gayatri’s hands. The feet at the bottom of the picture belong to Krishnan. Judging by the floor and its place in the sequence of photos, we are at the groom’s family’s house. Krishnan, Sandhya, and I delivered the bride to her new home in Madhurai. She had already stored the phone number on her mobile weeks before labeled “my home”.

As a bonus, here I am being given a dhoti in exchange for the bride and the wedding night mattress which we transported from Trichy on top of our car. The groom’s brother-in-law is on the left.