Holi: Festival of Colors

I ride though the city to meet Sona and her friends. The day is Holi, the Festival of Colors. Blue, green, yellow, purple, and bright pink all decorate the city streets and people's bodies. I ride in Goldy's van with the window up to avoid being sprayed with a permanent dye. Little kids with a pink tint wander around with carefree expressions on their faces. Four lanky boys coated in various colors squeezed tight on a motorcycle fly passed the car, one holding a cricket bat in his hand. Three stops later I find myself sitting around in a circle of established female architects and interior designers. All of us are colored with powdered dyes and eating delicious food.

Sona turns to me in her pink sparkly salwar kurta with her face splotched with thick pink and purple powder. "Now Casey", she begins in her most proper Indian manner, "we tend to get a little intoxicated on Holi," she says as she passes me a delicious milky drink flavored with almonds and Saffron. "Alright", I thought, "I'll have the Indian equivalent of a glass of wine".

Next thing I know, I'm laying down on the floor, surrounded by the women sitting upright in their chairs, my body is covered in colors and I'm watching the fan blades circulating trying to keep them separate in their quick motion, and I'm going on and on about the weird sensation in my eye balls and how they feel like they are fish bait bobbing in an infinite sea of human consciousness, and about how I wish I could play my teeth like a piano. Then I'm suddenly thinking about how to write this experience before coming to this explosive realization of what writing really is and what it truly means and why it is so necessary, and then I am overcome with the urge to read everything I've ever read all over again, starting with those stapled paper books in Mrs. Nutt's first grade class. Oh! What a truly great understanding I've come to! I wanted to share.

Unable to speak I decided that I would telepathically communicate my new found understanding of the ancient practice of writing that we so mindlessly take for granted to the woman sitting across from me. After some time of my "communicating" an endless list of psychedelic thoughts, the woman catches me sitting "indian style", my body covered in colors, and staring at her wide eyed with intense concentration. She didn't understand my motives to say the least.

All the women gathered around the table to eat ourselves into a deeper trance. Too tired to use words we all invented a language of grunts. We ate and ate and ate. The suddenly, I was in a Wes Anderson film with all these established Hyderabadi professionals, and a whole other world of observations presented themselves. By the end of the afternoon we were all laden with exhaustion, practically drooling on ourselves in our slumber before realizing that we had to get up at that very moment or else we would melt into the cushions of the couch where our colorful particles would remain for all of eternity.

I went home to wash away my colors and sleep. Late into the evening I came down stairs and watched a Hindi soap operah with Sweety, so moved by a scene where a woman gives a man a glass of water, I cried into the thick night air. I then listened to Antony and the Johnson's "Fistful of Love", and teary eyed, sang "yeah, man! yeah. sing it, brother!" at the soulful tune, before reading some philosophy books and going to bed.