Holi Guacamole

Summary: My first Holi was an incredible experience, and involved irreparable clothing, stained skin, and a pink monster.

Holi is one of the two biggest festivals across India (the other is Diwali). If Diwali is the festival of lights, then Holi is the festival of colors. Offices are shut down not only for religious reasons, but also practical ones (i.e., to avoid trashing the office). People run around the streets throwing dry colored powder at each other (or, more nicely, patting it on your face), and the more devious ones mix the colors in water, which creates a paint that stains your clothes, and your body, for quite some time.

We and our new friends bought ourselves some Holi powder and threw it at each other. We ran away from kids with water guns filled with paint, and ended up with some Prerna girls at the neighborhood temple. There was music, dancing, and buckets of paint. The brother of one of these girls was more rowdy and daring than most, and chased me down with a bucket of colored water, pulled out the back of my shirt, and poured the entire bucket down my back. It was lovely.

Coming home, we found one of our friends completely pink from the neck up. Her entire face, including her mouth and eyes (there was no white in her eyes!) was bright pink. This poor girl was sitting outside a temple, waiting in a cycle rickshaw, when some folks came up from behind her and wiped his grimey pink hands all over her face and in her eyes. The poor girl turned into a pink monster.

(Anna tried on her contacts a few days later. They were noticeably clearer but still pink.)

When we decided to get everyone cleaned up, we quickly learned that there was no water available in our apartment, as it wasn’t getting pumped up. We thus had to bring our buckets downstairs, and fill them up one by one. The entire process must have taken over 2 hours, and none of us came out “clean.”

Now this is a festival we should be celebrating in the U.S.