Yesterday was Holi. Everyone had the day off from work and school, so it was a real holiday. The night before we'd done a puja to celebrate the full moon. (This makes the ritual sound a little odd, but a lot of religious festivals that are marked on the lunar calendar depend on the phase of the moon. Holi is no exception.)
In the morning I put on a set of clothes I could afford to stain - gym clothes. My 10-year-old cousin and I rubbed oil in our hair and all over our bare arms and legs. Then we went down to the garden. We got there around 11 in the morning and there were already children running around spraying each other with jets of colored water.
Holi is a game as well as a festival. In the garden, hired workers manned a picnic table where they'd set metal trays of neon-colored powder. (I later learned that the powders got their vivid hue from lead, selenium and other toxins, like the paints of the medieval period) A DJ spun popular film music in the background. Under the trees, a man with a hose pumped water into three empty plastic trash cans.
People went up to the picnic table and gathered double handfuls of the colored powder, staining their fingers and hands. They mixed the powder in water and filled squirt guns with liquid color. When I came in, the children doused me in red, then green, then blue. Clumps of dry orange and turqouise powder, tossed by others, clung to the wet stains on my shirt and pants. One girl rubbed a streak of fuschia mud over my neck, someone else emptied a squirt gun of bright red onto my shorts.
I retaliated by rubbing powder in their faces (avoiding the eyes, of course). The garden turned into a marsh. Pools of purple water collected in the grass. The workers opened another round of burlap sacks full of totally different colors. At one point, my cousin and her friends collected mud, water and color in a patch of sludge and then rolled in it.
I broke my flip-flop running after one guy who'd doused my cousin with a pail of mud. The garden became a free-for-all, with clouds of colored powder hanging in the air and jets of water flying in all directions. The man with the hose, having filled the trash cans to the brim, began spraying down the players.
Around noon the adults came down, and the game got really dirty. Some people played with permanent colors. A few picked up their friend and dumped him bodily into one of the trash cans of water.
After a few hours my cousin and I came back. I showered for at least an hour, shampooing my hair three times and scrubbing down my legs. Even after that, one arm kept a sickly greenish tinge, the other glowed faintly orange, like I'd been in some nuclear disaster. I soaked my clothes in hot water and shampoo for two days, in the vain hope that the water would eventually run clear. I even scrubbed the clothes out by hand, like I'd learned to do long ago in Costa Rica. (Talk about an unexpected life skill.)
I asked my grandmother what the origin of the Holi festival was. She said it was to create friendships, that people who didn't know or like each other would forget their troubles after playing a game together. Wouldn't it be nice if this were true?
trust your grandma to give you a philosophical answer! Holi is a Spring festival, the colors signifying the blossoms of Spring. of the Holi bonfire, Wikipedia says, 'The bonfires are lit in memory of the miraculous escape that young Prahlad had when Demoness Holika, sister of Hiranyakashipu, carried him into the fire. Holika was burnt but Prahlad, a staunch devotee of god Vishnu, escaped without any injuries due to his unshakable devotion. Holika Dahan is referred to as Kama Dahanam in Andhra Pradesh.
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