1The hands do not belong to me.Lying on the hotel bed in the sun-drenched light of a late-September morning, I hold them up for study, turning them in slow circles. Brown and slender, long arms stretch above their parallel shadows on the white sheet. Tapered fingers, imprinted in darkening script, bend and extend, as if casting a spell. From the fingertips to the forearms, each arm is sheathed in rich henna. The wrists, palms, and knuckles are embroidered with a hand-drawn world of diamonds and delicate curlicues. On my left palm, a man’s name has been inscribed so subtly, I have to look closely to see it at all.
Along the routes of these two palms exist hundreds of lifelines that were, at some point, mine. The hands I examine are suddenly unfamiliar, separate from the knowledge and memories that have lived in me for over forty years.
What have these hands done? What have they made? What have they ruined? Who loves them?
The hotel room, a corner suite with two tall shimmering windows, comes into view. It’s the kind of light that makes me feel that something is going to happen.
My hands resemble my mother’s, but I never saw my mother with hennaed hands or feet. The familiar image of our hands and feet cannot merge as easily as they often do in me. A woman sees both more and less of her mother as time passes, as she begins to comprehend her own body, her own story.
My mother has been dead nearly ten years, but the memory of her fills my days and mirrors. When I want to speak to her, I only need to face a mirror. I still hear her distinct voice and can remember the shape of her lips when she formed them to pronounce the name she gave me at birth.
For the past two years, my hands have been living a story which my mother can neither judge nor advise. She favored heart-sense, an austere blend of common sense and courage, above all things.
My mother worked hard, too hard, using her hands each day to cut, slice, chop, fold, and knead the world into a reality that did not demand her defeat. Idle hands disgusted her. Filthy hands belonged to Satan. My mother spoke about the right hand of God the Father, where Jesus sat. She never mentioned the left.
Since her death, I’ve often looked at my own hands, searching for their inheritance. My hands work hard too, but not in the ways that would have gained my mother’s approval.
I have no children. I do not do my own laundry. I do not braid or cornrow my own hair. I do not open the hoods of cars or change tires like women who know such things. I rarely set the table properly. I let my nails grow too long. Though I keep trying with piano, I play no instruments with natural ease. I do not fish (allergies and the horror of hooks). I do not hunt. I do not use a knife to carve wood or to chop onions.
I have no green thumb though the natural world fills me with special pleasure. In that kindred wilderness, I touch leaves, bark, stones, snails, skulls, insects, flowers, bones, and rushing cold water.
I write. I hold a camera. I draw and paint. I’ve turned the pages of thousands of books. I’ve pulled a suitcase across hundreds of cities. I’ve shaken hands with countless strangers, hoping their hands are clean enough. I’ve made spectacular ice cream cones and sundaes for my nephew and niece, saddened that my mother will never meet them. I’ve petted no less than one thousand and one dogs’ ears.
Today, my inked hands would’ve made my mother roll her eyes. I imagine her pencil-thin brows lifting incredulously at the sight of the fragrant ink looping my wrists with dark color. Her voice quips:
Are you doing this again? She is asking about love.
Despite and beyond death, some mothers and daughters go back and forth this way. The elder tosses out a question that is less question than judgment. It may be posed as a question only to indicate that the daughter should have anticipated the mother’s response. In this instance, the daughter—me—sometimes still needs her mother’s posthumous opinion even as she—I—protests that she is old enough to write and to live her own stories.
Are you doing this again?Yes! I am in love—again!The hotel suite thrums with my pasts.
I am an artist. I am a child. I am a daughter. I am the eldest of four children. I am a big sister. I am a teacher and a student. A beginning—I am a shiny, cellular fleck spun in 1978, December, half past midnight.
I am a tree and the ocean. I am a mountain, a glacier. I am a sage and a fool.
The first time I married was next to the Caribbean Sea. It was a safe love. Comfortable, age-appropriate, a formal settling-in after many years of living together, I had been inside of a love that did not require me to live beyond the shallows. My depths I kept concealed and reserved for myself. I hid in the safety of codependency, even as I lived inside a lucid inner life.
The models of marriage around me mostly reflected the things that made me fearful—losing or sacrificing myself and my dreams for someone else. I never had any intention of allowing anyone to ever really know me. Perhaps I knew the theoretical definition of marriage, and then there were the married couples I’d observed in real life, but the reality of marriage never touched
me. I didn’t even really know
him, which seemed fair, since I couldn’t let him know
me. Being wed to each other was something we were just supposed to do, because of time passing. There was real love between us, but neither of us could ever admit, until it was finished, that we were incompatible and immature.
I hadn’t comprehended that my own lack of self-love was the primary culprit in the marriage’s end.
But today I’m marrying again. I’m a forty-two-year-old bride. By noon, I’ll be a wife again. How many miles exist between those two words,
bride and
wife? Or
groom and
husband? An event happens. A wedding. Two beings, ordinary as hands on the face of a clock, orbit love, and love orbits them. Wherever they converge, those mismatched arrows clinging to each other, is both predictable and unpredictable. Often those hands share time without ever touching. In the ways that love changes time itself, those hands change from minute to hour to year.
Pushing away the duvet, I perch on the edge of the bed. My fingers grip the luxury sheet. I encounter every texture as a sharp sensation that brings tears to my eyes. I remember the black silk negligee dress I wore to the darkened, candle-lit restaurant where Salman first told me he loved me. We were sitting in a crescent-shaped booth with deep red upholstery beneath a mural of mostly dead writers, painted as caricatures. A nude, swooning Anaïs Nin reclined just above us. I remember the air rushing across the blades of my exposed shoulders as the words were whispered against my collarbone. And how I slid the silk away from my skin later that night, wanting to be exposed and immersed in the name of a love that was as marvelous as the love of words and life itself we both shared.
I want to grasp the life that has led me to this, the morning of my second wedding. There won’t be another one. I want to think about who I have been, to the best of my knowledge. I’ll never have this morning’s happiness in the exact same way again.
Two days ago, a laughing Indian woman used a tightly packed tube of henna, rolling it precisely between her fingertips, to etch an imagined cosmology onto my body. When she finished, she gave me careful instructions about applying her lemon-sugar poultice to make sure the henna soaked into the deepest layer of my skin. This mixture, she assured me, would help extend the length of time my skin would hold the design.
When the woman discovered who my fiancé was, through an unrelenting series of not-so-innocent questions about the Indian wedding she realized we weren’t having, she immediately texted her parents in New Jersey to disclose that I was going to be the
fifth wife of Sir Salman Rushdie.
“Is he here at home with you now?”
“Yes, probably watching
Law & Order in the other room.”
“Could I please have a photo with him? For my parents, of course, to see that I am telling the truth. They say it is not possible.”
I called for Salman to come to the kitchen where I sat, holding my hands and arms out like a scarecrow. My feet were raised and hung over a small stool. Introducing the henna artist to him, I asked whether he was willing to take a photo. After inspecting the henna and inquiring where the young woman’s family originated in India, he said, “Of course.”
Hours later, I’d walked around in my robe, watching bits of dried henna flake from my hands and feet. It stained my towels and anything I used to prevent the design from smearing. Avoiding the oatmeal-colored furniture of the house we were staying in, I called out to Salman for help. He’d been surprised when I announced I was getting traditional wedding henna for our ceremony, but his eyes sparkled as he gazed at my feet and palms.
“God, I love you,” he said as he helped me wrap my feet in cling wrap. “It’s very good, the real kind.”
Copyright © 2026 by Rachel Eliza Griffiths. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
