Holi

My plan for Friday, March 18 had me traveling down to Gurgaon to meet Shubha Chaudhuri, my academic supervisor here in India, and getting familiar with the archival holdings at the ARCE. That didn't happen. When Shubha proposed the date some ten days earlier, she clearly hadn't looked at the calendar. Had she done so, she would have seen that Holi--described to me as a "complete holiday for all of India"--fell on the 18th. Rather than wallow in disappointment, I embraced the festivities.

Each year Indians celebrate countless festivals, but Holi and Diwali reign supreme in terms of scale and widespread acceptance. Holi marks the arrival of spring, which honestly feels more like its departure. Other than copious eating, drinking, and general merriment the distinguishing feature of Holi is the jubilant throwing of colored powder. The festival celebrates the divine love of Radha and Krishna, and the colored powder references a playful Krishna throwing colored water on the unassuming gopis (milkmaids). The national consensus in 2022 seemed to be that after two consecutive Holis lost to the pandemic India wanted to party.  I had no concrete plans to partake, having only recently learned I wouldn't be spending the day in the archives.

Late Thursday, the night before Holi, I reached out to Suman Puria, a Delhiite and longtime friend of my aunt Charlotte, who I'd been meaning to connect with since settling into Hauz Khas last month. We had a short WhatsApp exchange Friday morning (she was impressed with my ability to read and write Hindi) and by 10 am she had invited me to come spend the holiday with her family. Within the hour, Suman and her husband Sanjeev (pictured) had scooped me at the Hauz Khas metro station and driven the five minutes back to their house in nearby Munirka. 

The three of us sat and sipped chai, speaking in a mixed Hindi and English, while the kids played in the courtyard of their compound. Sanjeev--already covered in red powder--and I slipped out back to join them once Suman turned her attention to lunch prep. The courtyard scene soon splintered into a group of dads chatting about neighborhood affairs while their kids bounced around spraying each other with water guns. Mostly observing, I chatted a bit with the dads and also took my share of water blasts from the kids--a welcome relief from the intense sun. Each time new members joined the party, we paused to trade smears of colored powder, generally applied to some part of the face. Somehow I also ended up the recipient of the silly hat featured in the photo above. What no one ever tells you about those colored powders is that they smell great. I'm sure there are synthetic varietals out there, and lord knows people throw all kinds of other weird shit on Holi, but the quality powders are naturally derived from flowers. Or so I'm told.

After we cleaned up, the adults sat down for lunch. Suman and Sanjeev have two daughters, one in her earlier teens and one a little younger, but they were off doing their own thing. I had trouble saying no to anything offered to me, and the combination of multiple pakoras, vada sambar, and chole bhature (all delicious) filled me to the limit. Following lunch we relaxed with chai again, chatting about everything from Ukraine to Zakir Hussain, and then Sanjeev beckoned to the elder daughter to bring out her tabla. She is very shy, part of the reason I didn't catch her name, but she obliged. In addition to being an aspiring kathak dancer, she learned a bit of tabla at some point--by no means unusual given the centrality of tabla to that particular dance form (i.e., my Fulbright research). Her practice had trailed off during the pandemic and the drums needed some love. I sat in the living room tuning tabla, playing a bit while also trying to keep the cheaper, lighter drums from sliding across the smooth marble floor. When she quietly told her mom she wanted to show me what she had learned, I gladly handed them over. From there, she also showed me a piece of her kathak repertoire, for which I reclaimed the tabla in order to learn the composition as she danced it. The younger daughter, who also knew the piece, recited as we played.

Having missed my usual afternoon siesta, I started to fade by late afternoon and Suman and Sanjeev drove me back to Hauz Khas. I offered my profuse thanks and we parted with "jaldi hi milenge" (we'll see each other soon). Given the possibilities for language tutoring with Suman, who is a Hindi teacher, and offering my tabla services to the daughters to support their practice, it appears we have much left to do. Beyond all that, we're friends now. In the true spirit of Holi, it was a day of new beginnings.