KARACHI: Saving the best for last, henna application is a last-minute chand raat essential indulgence for girls and women.

The more you delay this the better and darker the reddish stain would be on your skin on Eid day, as it would still be fresh though some say that applying mustard oil, sugar water or lime juice over the drying henna also helps the colour last for longer. As pretty as the dark stain looks, the fading stains of henna are the ugliest marks on your hands making you want to wash them over and over to make them go away sooner.

With the knowledge that Eid, in all probability would be falling on Wednesday, henna was on everyone’s mind soon after iftar. Just like making hay until the sun shines, some enterprising people apply henna until the chand raat lasts. Females, among them those who applied henna and those who wanted it on their hands and feet, all collected on the footpaths of various shopping centres.

There were rows of chairs at Teen Talwar, outside the Gulf Shopping Centre, where all kind of styles were being created by nimble fingers at different rates. Boys, who have often been spotted selling flowers or tissues at the roundabout, were selling Rs100 each cone henna instead.

Keeping the slightest of pressures constant around the nib of the cone henna pen to ensure a smooth flow, Marzia Fatima was busy drawing pretty flowers on the back of a customer’s hand. “I can do all styles from Arabian, Sudani and Rajasthani Indian, which is the most difficult of mehndi styles,” she boasted hoping the customers would hear.

“I feel like charging more but no one here seems willing to pay me more than Rs100 or Rs150,” said Marzia, adding that she had recently relocated from Dubai, where she used to decorate the hands of all her friends and acquaintances for years.

“My neighbour here also does good designs and she asked me to accompany her here today. But everyone here seems so miserly. Still, we would be here till Fajr, so I hope I would be able to make a decent sum,” she said and sighed.

But a couple of rows behind her sat 17-year-old college student Tripta Kaur, who was charging Rs600 per hand, both front and back included. “Learning pretty henna designs has always been a hobby of mine. And Rajasthani designs are my speciality,” she said as she diligently went about her work with women lining up for her after having a chance to seeing her work.

Up ahead, outside Uzma Centre, more women and girls were gathered for the same reason. In absence of chairs, everyone made themselves comfortable on the little stools and footpath floors. Tooba Yawar, a class-nine student, said she was no expert but her older sister was as she had done a henna application course from a well-known beauty parlour. “But chand raat brings up a good opportunity to make some extra pocket money. Earlier, I made my brother run to Karimabad to get me mehndi cones from there,” she said.

Meanwhile, in an apartment building in Saddar, two teenage sisters, Hazeela and Hurmela Tahir, were offering to do henna designs for free. “Many in our neighbourhood who know us also know that we are good at doing intricate henna designs,” said Hazeela. “Besides, it would feel awkward accepting money from our neighbours,” she said. “There is also a beauty parlour inside our building compound but getting it done there means paying for their services. So they’d rather come to us. They always seem pleased with our designs. And seeing them happy makes us happy.”

Published in Dawn, July 6th, 2016