Rakhi first. Then Teej. Then the wedding cards start arriving in October, and by November somebody in your family is getting married.
Which means cones.
Somebody's cousin who is good at this sits cross-legged on a drawing room floor in Kankarbagh with a steel plate of cones beside her. Four women wait their turn. The good dupatta is lying on the floor because there is nowhere else to put it. Nobody is watching the cone.
Henna is a dye
Mehendi leaf carries a molecule called lawsone. It is a dye. It hunts for keratin, the protein in your skin and nails and hair, and it locks on. That is the whole reason mehendi holds on a palm for two weeks and disappears off your forearm in three days.
Cotton has no keratin, so lawsone grips it less tightly. Don't get comfortable. A cone is not pure lawsone. It is crushed leaf, sugar, lemon juice and oil ground into a paste engineered to sit on a surface and keep releasing colour for six hours. That is a stain that arrives with an instruction manual.
Silk and wool are protein. Same family as your skin. A drop of mehendi on a silk dupatta behaves like a dye job in miniature.
The Patna sun finishes the job
Two mistakes turn a small mark into a permanent one.
The first is the wet cloth. Someone spots the drip, grabs the nearest gamcha, wets it, and rubs. That takes a dot sitting on top of the weave and drives it into the fibres.
The second is the terrace. Lawsone darkens with warmth, air and light. That is exactly why the aunties tell the bride to sit near the kitchen and keep her hands warm. Hang that kurta on a line in Boring Road at eleven in the morning and you are doing the stain the same favour.
The first ten minutes
Leave the paste alone until it dries. Wet paste spreads. Dry paste flakes.
Scrape it off with the back of a spoon or the edge of an old visiting card. Lift the crust. Never drag it sideways.
Carry the cloth outside and shake it. Not over your own lap.
Now cold water. Turn the fabric inside out and run the tap through the back of the mark, so the colour leaves the way it came in. Give it a full ten minutes. Hot water is off the table. Heat sets this.
Then a drop of dishwashing liquid on the spot, worked in with one fingertip, fifteen minutes. The oil in the cone is a second stain hiding under the first, and it comes back brown three weeks later if you skip this step.
Wash cold with your usual detergent. Check the mark while the cloth is still wet, because a wet stain always looks fainter than it is. If a shadow is left, dry it in shade and repeat. Sun is the last thing that piece of cloth needs right now.
On a white cotton kurta, oxygen bleach powder in cool water for an hour will pull most of what remains. Not chlorine bleach. Chlorine can flip a henna mark orange, and it thins the cotton on the way.
The bed nobody thinks about
The dot on the dupatta is the one you notice. The bigger load comes later that night.
Hands get scraped clean around midnight, then oiled, then wrapped in polythene, and then everyone sleeps. Twelve hours of oil and loose dye go into the pillow cover, the bedsheet, and whatever towel was used to wipe hands. In an August room with the fan on and the air already damp, that stays wet and starts to smell by Tuesday.
Strip the bed the next morning. Not next Sunday.
The black cone is a different animal
The cone that turns black in twenty minutes is not henna. It is PPD, the chemical that goes into dark hair dye. On some people it blisters the skin. On cloth it is a proper synthetic dye built to be permanent, and none of the steps above will fully shift it.
Keep black cones away from anything good. If one drips on a Banarasi, treat that mark as part of the saree now.
When to stop trying
Plain cotton kurta, caught the same evening: handle it yourself. The steps above are enough.
Silk, chikankari, zari work, a lehenga you actually paid money for: don't run experiments on it. Get it to someone who does this for a living, the same day, and say the word mehendi out loud. A mark gets treated one way when it is assumed to be food, and a completely different way when someone knows it is a dye sitting on protein fibre.
That is our job at DoorWash. You leave it outside your door anywhere in Patna, we pick it up, and the mark gets looked at while it is still young. A mehendi drop on day one and the same drop after a week folded inside a polythene bag are two different problems, and only one of them is fixable.
Wear the good clothes this season. Just keep the cone on the other side of the room.