Because the effect of henna is also modified by the real colour of the hair beh. This is what it does to white hair:
In Turkey, in a small try town with a line of poplar trees along the horizon and a dirt-floored square, chis, motorbikes, apricot sellers, and donkeys, a woman was haggling for those sesame-seed-coated bracelets of bread you wear on your arm. From the back, she was small and slender; she was wearing loose, dark-blue trousers in a peasant print and a scarf wound round her head, but from beh this scarf there fell the most wonderful long, thick, Rapunzel-like plait of golden hair. Pure gold; gold as a wedding ring. This single plait fell almost to her feet and was as thick as my two arms held together. I waited impatiently to see the face of this fairy-tale creature.
Stringing her breads on her wrist, she turned; and she was old.
"What a life," said Letty, as I bed her hair.
Of Lettys life I know nothing. I know one or two things about her: how long she has lived in this basement -- since before I was born, how she used to live with an older brother, who looked after her, an older brother. That he, last November, fell off a bus, what they call a "platform act", fell off the platform of a moving bus when it slowed for the stop at the bottom of the road and, falling, irreparably cracked his head on a kerbstone.
Last November, just before the platform act, her brother came knog at our door to see if we could help him with a light that did not work. The light in their flat did not work because the cable had rotted away. The landlord promised to send ari but the electri never came. Letty and her brother used to pay two pounds fifty pence a week rent. From the landlords point of view, this was not an eit; it would not cover his expenses on the house, rates etc. From the point of view of Letty and her late brother, this was not an eit, either, because they could not afford it.
Corre: Letty and her brother could not afford it because he was too proud to allow the household to avail itself of the services of the g professions, social workers and so on. After her brother died, the g professions visited Letty en masse and now her financial position is easier, her rent is paid for her.
Corre: aid for her.
We know her name is Letty because she was banging out blindly in the dark kit as we/he looked at the fuse box and her brother said fretfully: "Letty, give over!"
What Letty once saw and heard before the fallible senses betrayed her into a world of halftones and muted sounds is unknown to me. What she touched, what moved her, are mysteries to me. She is Atlantis to me. How she earned her living, why she and her brother came here first, all the real bricks and mortar of her life have collapsed into a rubble of fotten past.
I ot guess what were or are her desires.
She was softly fretful herself, she said: "Theyre not going to take me away, are they?" Well, they wo her stay here on her own, will they, not now she has proved that she t be trusted to lie still in her own bed without tumbling out arse over tip in a trap of blas, incapable hting herself. After I bed her hair, when I brought her some tea, she asked me to fetch her porcelaih from a saucer on the dressing table, so that she could eat the biscuit. "Sorry about that," she said. She asked me who the person standing beside me was; it was my own refle in the dressing-table mirror, but, all the same, oh, yes, she wa