Holy Holi

Holi celebrates Rama’s victory over… somebody, but it was a symbolic victory of good over evil, light over dark. And it’s celebrated now by smearing colorful powders on the faces of the people you meet. If this is a warm, consentual celebration, it’s a finger or three dipped in a bag of colored powder, a nice smear across the forehead and cheeks, a hug, and a “Happy Holi.” The good in the world triumphs again in the form of color, light and friendship.

But like Halloween and its evolution from whatever All Hallow’s Day signified to a night of costume-wearing and candy-hunting, Holi is kind of just about the paint. And the kids and young men, who have taken up this holiday with relish, have embellished that painted embrace with water balloons, squirt guns loaded with paint, even just jars of watered down paint. But good luck getting any of them to be good enough to stop spraying you now that you’re fully soaked and fully covered in paint.

I’d hoped to be safe at least getting to my yoga class at 8am—who would be playing with paint so early in the day? But the man who makes my morning chai was already bedecked in colors, and as I sat there sipping, other people would pass by and smear his face and hug him, wishing him a happy Holi.

“Will you play Holi?” he asked me. “Play” is exactly the right verb.

I made it nearly all the way to class before stumbling up on a group of kids, mid-paint war, their hands and faces covered in pink. They opened fire with hot pink, and I had to run, laughing, to get away, but was too late. David, one of my classmates, sent me back to the bathroom to scrub my neck again before laying down on a yoga mat, and I still dripped a bit of pink on it.

Through class, we could hear children shouting and screaming as they “played” Holi on the streets, running through the maze of tight corridors and narrow spaces between tall walls in that section of Ram Jhula, then out into the open fields and orchards. Music played. Even on the fourth floor of a building above and away, it was like you could feel the joviality of the day, and get infected by them and their happy play. Kamal, the yoga teacher, lost track of the limbs we were on more often than usual, and people tumbled out of asanas laughing.

At the end of class, when we were seated and had just finished our final oms, Kamal said, “OK, now everybody, laugh as loud as you can for two minutes.”

We’d just spent two hours doing what he said, so all right. We laughed. And then laughed at the way we were laughing, and then laughed because we were laughing, and then laughed some more.

It was just a warm-up to get us in a good mood. Sunil, who’s teaching a teacher training class with Kamal at the moment, was waiting outside with a tray of colors, and he smeared everyone’s faces as they left class, and the favor was promptly returned. Face smear. Hug. Ear smear. Hug. Hair dusting. Hug.

On neighboring rooftops, families were having their own celebrations, dumping buckets of paint one another. Boys were teaming up to make water balloons with a bucket of colored water and a straw—I’m still not sure how the physics works there.

After our private paint fight, I was marked and men would stop their motorbikes just to cover my face in another dose of paint and say, “Happy Holi.” Packs of men and boys roamed the streets, so I stayed beside David and John from my class, who could do little to deflect the attention drawn by a white woman in the streets on Holi. Just in the half hour it took for us to cross Ram Jhula, searching for a place to have breakfast (the restaurants and shops were, wisely, closed), my face disappeared under green, purple and blue powder.

By the time we did find that meal, at last, at the thali ashram, I could tip my head forward and watch powder fly out of my hair. Even wrinkling my forehead made for a snow of color.

In this condition, I sat down to eat. Indians would look at me and say “Happy Holi…” like, “Oh, my, did you get Holi’d…”

We headed to the Ganges to rinse some of it away, which, it turns out, is the thing to do on Holi. David and John stripped down and submerged themselves, David straightaway, in a slow-motion chatturanga—a reverse push-up—and John in this gradual easing, drifting routine into the cold water. Wading in up to my knees, I cupped my hands and set to scrubbing my face. Every splash of water came away brownish-purple, the muddle of all those colors. My hands filled with that stain, then rinsed clean.

An Indian mother came down with a flock of kids in tow, a young one whose hands stayed pink every after an hour of scrubbing and playing in the water, and a group of girls, mostly in their early teens. When the mother waded into the river, the water ran pink and purple around her. She washed her body and her hair, and rinsed her sari, then peeled its hopelessly stained pieces off, one by one throwing them into the Ganges, covering herself as she did with a peach sarong. Then the sarong was replaced with an orange sari, which was assembled over and around it right there on the riverbank.

The flock of girls chattered around her, washing their faces, hair and arms with a bar of soap and checking their progress with a mirror they had brought. I’d had no such help, and so had turned to David again, who had shaken his head and sent me back to work on my hairline and behind my ears.

The girls bent forward, dipping their hair into the water and dripping pink into the river, they rinsed and soaped and rinsed again, wrung their hair out like a skirt and then wrapped it into a bun at the front of their heads. Occasionally, one or two of them would float into the current, which will pick you up and sweep you away, then clamber out downstream and come rushing back, not hardly looking at the boys taking turns floating down that same stretch of river. The girls went between that play and the seriousness of studying their faces in the mirror for hours.


We sat watching them, dipping ourselves, and waiting for the afternoon hours to pass on. The paint war of Holi is supposed to end at 2pm, but I gave it until closer to 4pm before I braved the bazaar, which had been a squeeze of people earlier in the day, and the walk all the way back to my guest house.

My clothes, of course, were wrecked, and so was the bag I was carrying. Washing and soaking them overnight only lightened the stains without fully removing them. My shoulders and chest had run to that brown shade, making my skin look filthy. Green and purple had seeped into the built-in bra in my tank top, so I was stained even on skin that never saw the light of day. Over my back, what looked like a sunburn washed off. One ear was dark blue and the other pink, and my hair had green in the back and pink up front.

The streets were splattered with pink the morning after Holi. In yoga class, the girls who had light brown or blonde hair still have patches of pink, green, and purple in their hair. One of them leaned over just to let me know there was still a bit of pink in one ear.