Holi

For the first few minutes before I started typing, my time went trying to unearth a better title. Maybe it is because of Pamuk’s ‘Other Colours’ lying beside me on the table or what I cannot say but I wanted a title that gives the impression of some weighty literature or even the faint possibility that I would create some in future. I have been writing for many years now. From juvenile experiences to meaningless infatuations, from backlashes received after producing pitiable exam papers to endless striving through years of suffocating sadness, slowly I have developed a way with words which goes hand in hand with my continual endeavour to learn more about literature. Yet when it comes to writing something that would probably metamorphose my life or all the meanings I have added to it, giving it greater essence and purpose, I find the opportunity fleeing like quick sand. Scanning through the sooty memories of disparate glories scattered over twenty odd years I realised that greatness is still a long shot. Thus for a perfectly well-spent day of an otherwise banal life, let us start with the quotidian name which it has received. Today is the day I played Holi.

Memories related to this festival from the early years of my life are rather numbered. My father being a sailor man hardly stayed home during the time I was growing up. Somehow Holi seemed to be the most depressing day in the childhood of an ebullient girl. I remember spending the Holi morning at my grandmother’s place, sitting on her balcony playing with plastic toys while the twins and their cousins, who lived next door, would scream and splash colours at each other. I would not say I missed my father, or even having a sibling. At an extremely unripe age like that claiming to feel the absence of a person would be bit of long-drawn exaggeration. Incapable of realizing what I was feeling I approximated it as sinking down in nothingness which seemed to be a reasonable surmise. Now I know that I felt something close to segregation, of being left out from the childish banter which every child deserves. Finally as the vivacious air settled down at the end of the twin boys’ colourful mirth, my grandmother would come to take me in for lunch. As she put me down for the afternoon nap I would tell her in details about the colours the neighbourhood boys played with and how I always secretly prayed that the elder of the twin brothers would win in the game they devised of throwing water filled balloons at each other. At times I tested my grandmother’s wits by asking her uncomfortable questions about my so-called seclusion. But she always had a sanguine answer that would buoy me up from those void layers (of melancholy) I was swimming in.

In few years my days of despair were over as I moved to a new home and found new friends. Yet those few solitary days of Holi I spent in my initial childhood come back to me every year as the festival arrives; maybe because the wounds of our childhood leave indelible impressions or because the tender love of my grandparents has set its coolest shade on my life in those years or maybe because I was less used to the absence of a parent that has always left my life half full.

Today I played Holi with friends. One could sense in us the juvenile excitement since yesterday as we carefully fulfilled the important errands required for buying colours and water balloons and other accessories indispensable for this joyous event. Avin’s house has been the holy abode of all our dreams and games for the past three years. Ironic that I knew Avin’s house before I actually came to know Avin. We moistened each other’s face with blue, green, yellow and ran over the roof like ragged urchins. We painted the walls with coloured water which, I feel now, has washed away part of the disappointment I have been carrying with me due to my many failures in this year. In our jocund participation and raucous laughter we disrupted the silence which the afternoon sun casts everyday on the neighbourhood.

As the arduous gallivanting subdued with all its fervour the hour of reclining arrived. We sat there for a while, stuck in a state of silent torpor like a bunch of inactive birds exhausted after a flight through stormy rainfall. The water dripped down the wings we managed to develop in those few hours. Back then it felt that there was no hint of apprehension, that the expectation I have from me could be set aside like some secondary purpose, that my tryst with someone who I am not would finally meet its fatal end thereby liberating me to the world I so dearly long for.

The evening reflected itself on the glasses of alcohol which we all wanted to savour at the day’s end. I knew my departure for the day was called for and I set for home walking past the fluorescent street lights into which a swarm of insects were flying. Owing to habit I seldom pay notice to the people walking around me. However, today there seemed to be a lateral resuscitation within this apparent getting lost in myself. The evening appeared more hopeful. It seemed like an evening for the ones who have lost their way or for those who have planned to begin a journey from a wrong path. Riding my humble auto I headed home listening to The Rain Song on a day when there was no rain, only a shower of evening fragrance that brought to me a hint of July. Suddenly there was the wholesome feeling of being amidst green, amidst friendships that asked for little in return. Suddenly I felt less angry with myself, with my mistakes in the past which then seemed to be pardonable. Suddenly there was the feeling of being a part of those neighbourhood kids whose world I have been carrying in my pocket for all these years.