Happy Holi

Celebrating the Festival of Colours in the Braj region of India is like doing St. Patty's in Ireland, it is the place to experience the merry madness that is Holi. Being Lord Krishna's childhood playground, The smallish villages and towns in Braj are some of the most dedicated and authentic places to experience the festive holiday.

According to legend, the young Lord Krishna spent his mischievous childhood years playing with the village girls and chasing them through town throwing coloured powder. Every year, to celebrate the coming of spring and a new season of harvest, this tale is reenacted across the country on the last full moon day of the lunar month. In the Braj region however, the festival is celebrated for an entire week before the big day. I arriving for the finale in the town of Mathura three days before Holi day.

After two months of anticipation, the supposed birthplace of Krishna, was a bit of a disappointment. The small town was foggy with dust, blaring with traffic and almost completely commercialized. We made it our mission to stock up on colour dust and water guns before the madness began. The task of collecting Holi ammunition was easily accomplished since specialized vendors were littered all over the busy streets. Balloons for making colour grenades, water-activated colour powders, coloured foam sprays, and even home-made new-years-eve-esque hats were available for purchase all over the place.

I spotted a couple of young men who were already stained from head to toe with pink and purple. Their stained faces made the whites of their eyes and grinning teeth pop in a way that was almost inhuman. I got a little nervous as recollections of Internet articles about Holi's unholy business rolled into mind. I had read testimonies ranging from random inappropriate groping of foreign women, to full-out violent attacks in the massive crowds. I tried not to think too much about these extreme cases and thanked my lucky stars to have hooked up with a travel partner on IndiaMike for the trip.

The mayhem doesn't seem to have started yet in the town of Mathura, but we were cautious of potential spontaneous colour play on the streets. As advised by several experienced Holi veterans, we prepared by changing into our least favourite clothes and cracked open some 100% pure coconut oil to lather over our skin. I thought perhaps we might have been over-preparing for a battle that probably won't even take place, but I really didn't know what to expect.

After setting out, we cautiously wandered around town, nervously looking behind our backs for hidden danger. Having walked through the downtown area completely unscathed, I began to relax. By the time we came to the Yamona River and shuffled across the simple steel railway bridge bringing us to the park-like landscape opposite the city, I completely forgot about Holi.

From across the narrow body of water, the line of messily arranged temples made Mathura looked like a mini Varanasi. Except the water was clean enough to contemplate a handwash and the boatmen were lazy enough to leave you alone. The kids were adorable and JC had Polaroids for them to keep. We walked all the way up the shore, which was dotted with loudspeakers on stilts, blaring nazzally religious songs for the whole city to hear. We didn't know at the time, but that was going to be the most peaceful hour of the rest of our trip.

On the way back to the city, the iron bridge deck had become congested with locals, who were fighting for some camera love. The path was just wide enough for a one to comfortably walk, or two to awkwardly squeeze past, involving some inevitable body contact. This made the usual polite getaway strategy impossible to implement, and we ended up clogging the narrow passage with no choice but to fulfill every request for attention that came our way.

By the time we made it back across the river, our tour of Mathura was nearing its end. Since there was no vacancy in the whole city because of Holi, we went for a quick walk through the small market area, along the temple-lined shore and ended our 6-hour visit. I was not expecting such a serene kickoff to my wild Holi weekend and was eager to go straight to Vrindavan, where I was told the biggest celebration in Braj, and supposedly all of India, was set to start the next day.

So we set off for Vrindavan behind the driving wheel of quite an adventurous rickshaw driver. This man was a lot more ballsy than your average reckless lane-changing brother, he decided to take some interesting shortcuts through rocky dirt roads and across shallow streams (or maybe flowing sewage?). We had to hop off and help push the car a few times to unwedge its tiny wheels from the rugged landscape. After a draining 30 minutes on the bumpy road, we finally entered the city in a half-conscious daze.

Suddenly, the sound of children laughing woke me from my sleepy state and before I realized these kids were actually chasing our rickshaw, I was shot in the face with a freezing blast of blue water. The gritty colour-infused water tasted kind of like the ocean. As I was busy rubbing colour out of my eyes out the side of the car, JC was getting powdered left and right. All we could do was hold our hands up in surrender and wait til the army of kids ran out of ammunition. I opened my eyes a little and laughed at the absolute saturated state of our clothes and bags; looking down I found a huge pile of Barbie pink powder on my lap! Our rickshaw driver, who also got a few good shots, looked back at us and just laughed while cheering “Happy Holi!” JC and I cheered back. We spent the rest of the ride looking left, right and behind for potential attacks, with loaded handfuls of our previously purchased coloured powder, not quite ready for battle. Obviously, we would have to buy a lot more to last the next two days.

It seemed like forever before we neared the city centre, which was under heavy road construction, forcing us to continue by foot. I asked around for the Vrinda Kunja, an ashram referred by a CouchSurfing friend Gopal, who had been learning and living in India for several years. Eventually, we reached the gates of the ashram which was discretely tucked in the labyrinthian old city. An elderly couple dressed in simple cotton sari and dhoti was waiting for us at the door and cheered “Happy Holi” when they saw us approach in full colour from head to toe. We were warmly welcomed into the courtyard garden where Gopal and a group of smiling friends were sitting on the temple porch. They were from all over the place and of different ages, some had been studying the Krishna Consciousness for years and others who were just passing through; all of them were already stained with Holi.

After we cleaned ourselves up a bit and had some lunch on the marble floor of the temple, we joined the rest of the Kunja gang out on the porch. The courtyard was home to a couple families of monkeys; they had a freakishly human-like demeanor and a suspicious gaze that seemed to put me on edge. In fact, these guys were trained professionals at snatching plastic bags right out of you grasp and ripping your glasses right off your nose. One of the big guys had his eye on JC's glasses that day, before anyone even noticed, he sprinted over and lept onto his back to get it. I think it was my shriek that startled the vicious thieve and ended up saving JC's Gucci's.

After that short episode, Gopal took us to Shri Banke Bihari Mandir. We rode there on some old bikes through the busy winding streets and came to the giant white temple a few minutes after it opened for the evening mass/Holi party. The steps up to the temple podium were cluttered with flattened garlands and dusty sandals. The marble floor was glazed with the homogenized reddish brown paste of fallen coloured powder. There were hundreds of people flooding into the temple doors, cheering and tossing handfuls of colour into the air. Bright orange and red rained down on our heads and shoulders.

A stout old lady in the crowd held both her hands out towards me and wiped two handfuls of colour on me from the apples of my cheeks to my chin, rubbing it in as if she was applying exfoliant on my face . After that, she tightly embraced me with her round little body and said “Happy Holi” in my ear. With that, she smiled and waddled on laughing with her family.

I stood and watched all the happy faces around me: fathers and mothers carrying their babies, groups of young boys, singing elderly men and women and loads of kids slicing through. I slowly moved along with the mass towards the open temple doors where I could hear roaring cheers coming from within. Just as I was about to step in, a firm hand clasped my arm and yanked me out of the mob. I looked up at the purple face of a middle-aged man, who angrily reminded me to take off my shoes before entering. I smiled apologetically and shuffled to the shoe check where I found Gopal and JC waiting for me. We looked at eachother's rainbow coloured faces and burst into laughter.

Meanwhile, a gang of young men dressed in matching white pajamas and caps took notice of us and discretely tossed about 7 bags full of colour on us! While we were all shedding, spitting, and snotting green, our offenders chuckled their way into the temple. When I finally got out senses back, I charged in after the boys in white ready for revenge. But before we could even take two steps, we were halted at the gates by a grinning guard and his buddies. He was holding a super soaker. I reacted quickly and held up my my hands in mercy, “no, no, no! Camera!” I showed it to them naively hoping we'd escape unscathed. Instead, one of the men took my camera and pointed it back at our faces, while the rest of them had their way with us.

After finally making it to the edge of the main temple space, we were confronted with a completely different world. Below us, thunderous waves of chanting and singing filled the voluminous double-storey space. Standing at the threshold, I was immediately taken by the colour and energy inside, but also a little frightened by the visceral state of what felt like a giant raging moshpit in front of the alter. Sprays and hits of water and powder were coming from all directions as I descended the wooden steps. Gopal dived in before us with his taped-up monster of a camera while I cautiously stepped down onto the slippery marble floor of the pit.

At first, I watched with fascination from the periphery. The throbbing crowd of men, looked like zombies, with their hooded eyes and outstretched arms, definitely high or drunk or both, and cheering in perfect unison: “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna!”. A smoky cloud of colour hovered over them like steam billowing over a pot of hot water. The air was so thick that I could hardly breathe at first. The room was filled with the sandy fog of colour, roaring songs of devotion, and the heat and sweat of hundreds of raving bodies.

Being the only obvious foreigners in the room, JC and I were quickly dragged into the heart of the crowd. After that, my senses were completely overwhelmed. As if Tommy Lee had just tossed his drum sticks into the audience at an 80's concert, the crowd boiled abruptly around me when a few men on stage began to toss offerings into the pit of possessed worshipers. An older woman, with her sari soaked in pink and purple, slowly inched her way into the mass and pushed the boys around her aside until there was enough space to descend to her knees, and lay her forehead on the floor. Miraculously, she stayed in this position for what seemed like an eternity to me, completely unaffected by her surroundings. I let my body relax too and gave into the mass.

When we went to leave the temple ten minutes, an hour, or three hours later, the sky was getting dark. Thinking the night had come to an end, we lept out of the main doors to find Holi still raging in every corner of the city! The singing, the dancing, the hugging, the laughing and of course, the constant unexpected colouring was going on outside of the temple, in the congested streets, and followed us all the way back to the Ashram.

During all of this, we had failed to find the alley in which we locked our bikes, failed to find our friend Gopal, and failed to get a fair price for a bicycle rickshaw. Fortunately, we were just in time for dinner when we got back. Our buddy came back as we finished washing and drying the plates, in even worse shape than we were, and told us this was just the beginning.