Long before the muhurtham, before the kalyana mandapam fills with guests, there is the mehendi — an afternoon of cousins sitting cross-legged on a mat, aunties comparing patterns, and a bride holding impossibly still while an artist draws her family's history onto her palms. Most of the weddings Team Aju Photography shoots are South Indian, and here the mehendi tends to be a gentler, more intimate affair than its film-set reputation suggests — closer to a family afternoon than a performance. For the North Indian weddings the team also shoots, the scale is often bigger and louder, but the instinct behind the camera stays exactly the same.

The approach here is deliberately unhurried. Soft daylight through a window, the texture of wet henna catching the light, the particular concentration on a mehendi artist's face — these are details that reward patience, not direction. The team's instinct is to shoot from the edges of the room rather than the centre of it, letting laughter, teasing, and the occasional dramatic sneeze happen exactly as they would without a camera present.

Colour is protected carefully through this stage. Mehendi afternoons are often awash in turmeric yellow, jasmine white, and henna green — the ochre of a woman's cotton saree next to the deep green of the paste itself. The team shoots to preserve those tones exactly as they appeared in the room, no artificial warmth added, no colour pulled out to flatter a trend. What ends up in the gallery afterwards is what the afternoon actually looked like.

The mehendi is the one ceremony where nobody is performing for the camera yet — which is exactly why it deserves one.

Small ritual objects get their own attention too — a plate of turmeric and betel leaves, a string of jasmine passed from hand to hand, a kolam half-drawn by the doorway. These are the details a family will forget they even had until they see them again in a photograph years later. By the end of a mehendi shoot, the team has usually collected far more candid frames than posed ones — a grandmother laughing at her own joke, a flower girl asleep on a bolster, a bride examining her hands for the first time.