Holi – 3/6/15

                My first taste of Holi was at school on March 4 when all of the teachers and students played Holi together in the field (which perhaps should not be called the field when there actually isn’t any grass there). The first half of the day I spent giving a 3-hour-long science exam to my 9^th graders, but after lunch was all fun and games. Grades 1 through 8 did poetry recitations and dances about Holi, and even though I heard the same poem about Holi recited by most of the grade levels, it was still cute to see them all give presentations with splashes of color across their faces. After the poetry/dances, it was all out war.

                Before I go too much into describing Holi, however, I should probably go over some of the vernacular and back story. The colorful powders (some chemically colored and others herbal) that you throw/smear on other people are simply called “colors.” Powdered colors that you mix with water to shoot out of water guns and launch with water balloons are called “liquid colors.” Powdered colors are considered cleaner since you can wash them out while liquid colors stain. Getting yourself and others covered with colors is called “playing Holi” and if you don’t really want to play Holi but still want some color on your face you can ask for “bus tika” (bus meaning “only” or “stop” and a tika is a mark placed between the eyebrows and is normally applied using either the thumb or ring finger). Here’s a quick and dirty overview of the story behind Holi (it’s actually a cool story if you want to look it up in more depth). Basically, there was this evil demon king who had a son who he hated. He tried many times to kill his son, but each time the son was saved by Lord Vishnu. The evil demon king was practically invincible – he could be killed neither inside nor outside, neither by a man nor beast, neither during the day nor the night, etc. One day he thought of an ingenious way to kill his son – he would burn his son in a fire. The reason why this was so ingenious was that the demon king had a sister named Holika who possessed a magical blanket that allowed her to touch fire and not be burned. The demon king planned that Holika would sit in a fire with her blanket and the baby son and the son would die while she would survive. When Holika sat on the fire with the boy, however, Lord Vishnu summoned a great wind that swept both the baby and the blanket away. Holika was left to burn and the baby was saved! Sometime later, Lord Vishnu killed the evil demon king in a doorway (avoiding the inside/outside problem) while in the form of a half-man/half-beast creature (avoiding the man nor beast problem), and at precisely a time when it was neither day nor night (I can’t remember if it was dusk or dawn, but in any event he avoided the day/night problem).

                That’s the story of why Holi is celebrated, but the backstory behind all of color business is slightly different. The story goes that Krishna, who was dark skinned, had fallen in love with a fair-skinned girl and thought that the only reason she didn’t like him was because he was black. When he told his mother this, she told him to go and put color on her so that she wouldn’t be fair-skinned anymore. He did so and thus sprouted the tradition of playing Holi.

There are four main Hindu holidays that used to be for the four main varnas (castes). Holi was originally for the Shudra caste (the lowest caste that included untouchables) and on the day of Holi everyone is said to be on equal ground, regardless of caste. The way our Hindi guru-ji talked about Holi made it sound like a real-life purge (if you’re confused, I’m referencing a movie that came out sorta recently). On Holi it’s permissible to act like demons, so people (namely young men) will drink lots of alcohol, consume lots of weed in various forms, eat meat (or meaty vegetables), swear like sailors, and generally be unruly. For this reason, girls are not allowed out on the streets before 2 PM on the day of Holi (at 1 PM there is a ceasefire for all crazy activity).

                Anyway, back to playing Holi at school. Most teachers decided to go bus tika, but Ben P, Mallory (a previous Dragons student who came back to India to volunteer at Nirman), and I wanted to get in on all of the fun. Some students were really sweet and would practically caress my cheeks when they smeared color on my face, following that with a tika and touching my feet to show respect. Other students, however, would come up from behind and violently rub my entire head with color before darting off to find another victim. It was an exhausting 20 to 30 minutes of play, but it was also SO FUN. After the kids went home, all of the teachers went to the performance room and had a dance party. It took quite a bit of scrubbing to get all of the colors off when I got home (I basically had to take 2 consecutive baths), but it was still nothing compared to the amount of bathing I had to do after real Holi.

                The day after Holi at school was the day when Holika is burned in effigy on huge bonfires throughout the city. Since a month or so people have been adding wood, garbage, etc. to the piles and some of them in the streets got so large that they obstructed traffic (much to my consternation). Lots of Hindu religious festivals also have some sort of cleaning aspect to them. On Diwali you’re supposed to clean your house or else Lakshmi (the god of wealth) will not come in and bless your family. On Holi, you scrub your body (namely arms, hands, feet, and legs) with a mustard oil scrub and clean off all of the dead skin that you can. Later, you collect the scrub/dead skin leftovers and throw them in the bonfires.

                The first bonfire that we went to that night was a real happening place to be. There was music blasting and a huge crowd of people waiting for all of the festivities to start. Once the fire was lit and the statue of the boy saved from the flames, everyone processed around the bonfire and people started throwing dry color. I wasn’t expecting to play Holi that night and was not wearing old clothes, but hopefully the color will come out when the dhobis wash it. The second fire that we visited, the one on Assi Ghat, was considerably tamer. There wasn’t any loud music playing and people weren’t throwing color like at the other one. When we got back to Dolly-ji’s house we pigged out on Bourboun cookies (amazing fudge cookies), peanut butter, and Nutella before washing up and going to bed.

                The next day we woke up late, had peanut butter sandwiches and bananas for breakfast, and then prepared for wet Holi. All of the girls donned white saris with the exception of Chase who just wore a white salwar kameez and the boys put on their white kurta pyjamas/dhotis. We actually started with just throwing dry color which was fun and considerably less painful, especially since we all had bought herbal colors which don’t taste so bad when they get in your mouth (at South Point’s Holi I had a mouthful of the most disgusting tasting colors ever). Inevitably, though, we started spraying liquid color. We had water balloons, water guns, and buckets as our weapons and more than just each other as targets. We launched water balloons at a nearby roof and were on the lookout for any unsuspecting passersby on the road below to soak with colored water.  We stayed at this stage of Holi for a little while, taking occasional breaks to eat namkeen (salty snacks) and just take a breather in general. We were all pretty much dyed blue, purple, or red at that point, and at least I thought we were going to be finished soon, but instead we were each initiated into what we decided to call Holi hazing. Holi hazing involves one person sitting on the floor while everyone else gets a chance to rub him/her furiously with color. This is probably what made us stay dyed for so long after Holi was finished. The color coating was so intense and so complete that even our teeth were dyed colors. Even though it was fun to be “hazed,” it was also kind of painful and pretty much everyone was finished with Holi after that. We took turns crudely showering off under the cascade of water from a pipe coming off Dolly-ji’s upper roof to her lower one, and gradually people started leaving to take proper showers in their rooms.

                I probably showered three consecutive times and brushed my teeth twice and still had a bluish tint. After bathing as best we could, we changed into newly bought clothes, as is traditional on Holi, and went downstairs to enjoy puri and chola (fry bread and chickpea stew). It was interesting to see how well each person had managed to clean up. Some people were significantly more colorful than others (perhaps a sign of who has effective bathing practices and who doesn’t?) and people with blonde hair basically had their hair accidentally dyed – Caleb’s hair is still a strawberry pink and it’s been a few weeks since Holi.

                Finally, we all grabbed boxes of sweets and went our separate ways home. The streets reminded me of what roads look like at 8 am on Christmas morning. All of the stores were closed and only a couple of people were out (in fact, the only people I saw were three men chatting at a paan (chewing tobacco) shop). When I got home, everyone was asleep. Playing Holi is exhausting and it’s customary to take a nap during the time that’s after the 1 pm cease-fire but before going out at night and visiting friends and family with mithai (sweets) and namkeen (salty snacks). Following my family’s example, I passed out for about an hour before Deep woke me up because, as he matter-of-factly said, “The painting lady is here.” Married Indian women have there feet painted with beet juice for all sorts of special events like weddings, holidays, parties, etc. and Holi is an especially auspicious day to get it done. I am neither married nor Indian, but my host mom invited me to also get my feet painted with her. It was a really cool experience and both my host mom and the woman making the designs on my feet thought it was hilarious how ticklish I am.  I was squirming the entire time and tying my best not to suddenly jerk my feet and upset the bowl of beet juice that was situated alarmingly close to me. After my feet were finished and covered in beautiful bright red lace-like designs, I went upstairs to wash my face again (to try to get more purple off still) and look presentable for going out that evening.

                I generally dislike Indian mithai and find them overly sweet, so, as you can imagine, I was ecstatic that on Holi people mostly serve salty, crunchy namkeen to express their hospitality. Madhu and I went out visiting neighboring families with a bag of dry color (the evening of Holi everyone goes bus tika) and we ate various chips, rice crackers, and papad (spicy potato wafer thing). We got home and had puri subji (fry bread and stewed vegetables) for dinner and by then I was so tired I couldn’t even bring myself to bathe one more time before going to bed.