Holi

Yesterday was Holi, the Hindu festival of colours. Our first warning was the night before when a lot of food places were closed due to Holi. Our next taste was as soon as we left our place in the morning, there were two boys in the neighbouring place covered in coloured dyes, bottles in hand ready to help others get similarly coloured up.

As we walked down the road, groups of kids were squirting each other with liquid colour, or throwing coloured powder at each other. One of the kids warned Gopal: ‘uncle, don’t go there, those guys will throw colour on you’. They didn’t intentionally, but we did catch some splatter when they got some of the other kids. As we walked further down the road, a guy leapt out from behind a wall and dumped a bucket of water over a passing scooter – perfectly timed. The kids were very respectful though – although they were squirting each other with dye, they weren’t squirting anyone else unless they were already covered. We just had to be careful to stay out of range.

A little further on we came to a group of guys taking a rest from playing Holi:

One of the men came up to us and gave us our own Holi colours:

Later, when we went and got some breakfast, there were groups of kids outside dousing each other with buckets of colour. One kid was even refilling his bottle by scooping up the blackish brown water in the puddles in the street. They were threatening to douse many passers by, but again, they were well behaved and only got people who were already covered in dye.

Later on, when we were walking through the market, someone painted Gopal with a silver stripe, and shook his hand to get him covered in silver. Unlike the other colours which wash out easily in water, the silver stuff is oil based and hard to remove once dry so it had to come off straight away.

When we got back to our place, the boys there had been playing Holi too: