Holi. The Hindu colour throwing paint festival. Surely there's a more religious definition, but that's only a wikipedia click away.
My religious involvement does not extend beyond this picture with Shiva.
I was still in Nepal five days prior, and amidst a confounding mental discourse: Kathmandu...Varanasi...Kathmandu...Varanasi. We've talked of Nepal's more modest Hindu grace, and tis true that too many of my handful of Hindu holidays have been missed in the Buddhist town of McLeod.
But Varanasi; lying on the holy Ganga river; as liberal as it is ancient - seemed like the proper place to watch India go apeshit.
T'was true.
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I crossed the border on what I thought was Holi eve. I took a local bus to Gorakhpur, which despite being the frugal option, still offered a video-box. The next three hours were filled to the brim with b-grade Hindi music videos doused in Holi flavour: men squirting each other with ten cent China-made water pistols in hyperbolized comic fare. They wooed over ladies that shared a more gentle powdering, a representation which proved highly inaccurate once Holi was had - not that Bollywood is known for its realism.
In Gorakhpur I switched from wheels to rail, making the error of taking the "next available train" to Varanasi. This turned out to be a cunningly labeled "passenger" train; meaning that it stops at every municipality and farm plot en route. This amounts to a mighty number in northern Uttar Pradesh. I sat down on my lovely padded pew by the window at 1:30 pm, from where I didn't move for the duration of the trip, including the capturing of this photograph (5:17 pm):
I disembarked at 1:30 am at Varanasi Jn; the pertinent stop five minutes down from Varanasi City, where we sat stale for an hour. This proved to suck the energy even from the twenty-somethings throwing powder on each other and banging Bollywood beats into the compartments walls.
I deduced that the buzz of the train station upon my arrival was a sign of good measure, as well as my dormitory answering the telephone at two o'clock in the morning. Incentive enough to make the pilgrimage to ghatside. Sleeping at the station until dawn wasn't conducive to my previous conclusion that I would be in Varanasi, at the Vishnu, before I went to sleep that night. Once I was out of the rickshaw and on the ghats, the dogs barked away their pent-up daytime degradation on my trail, and so I swung my bags, stomped my feet, and whirled my water-bottle to that gate that greeted me with the nostalgia of, oh sweet, Varanasi.
काल होली है / tomorrow is holi
Turns out when I awoke five hours later, Holi was still a day away. This was graciously accepted if not only for allowing a leisurely breakfast in the orange garage that is The Shiva. It was a gradual ascension to the holiday, everyone was poised, the eagerness building as is during the best of eves.
Colour was sneakily deployed by coy children at trumping tourists. The balcony of the Vishnu became a fort to lodge water bombs, irritating some kite flying kids that proclaimed "not today, tomorrow!"
It was a sneak up and strike style approach. Paintball. Laser tag. But a more playful, sun-scorched, holiest city in India, type version.
All things considered, it was a battlefield where haircuts were still fair game.
Then Holi.
holi hai / होली है/ is Holi
Our guesthouse locked us in. They promptly stopped abiding to the guests repetitive demands for chai at 10:00 am; shortly after eight policemen stopped by for their complimentary share. Then they went for it. All of it.
It is commonplace that bhaang is consumed by many Hindus on holidays. Bhaang being a consumable cannabis derivative resembling a chocolate ball, combined with other indefinable things, oneof which I reckon is cow dung. But my own dabbles with such balls as obtained from the government emporium, were not reflective to my staff's energertic, rambunctious, fever. I think that everyone who worked at my hotel was instead, throwing back the country liquor.
Whatever it was, they let their sexuality ride. The enthusiastic and lascivious dancing apexed with one of the fellows lying on the ground and thrusting dead air space. The guests were not forgotten, as best defended through the staff's repeated attempts to derobe my Japanese dorm mate. He eventually derobed himself.
The scene was building: to homoerotic home runs.
I hit the ghats at around 11:30, latched on to a fellow for stength in multi-sexed numbers and began exploring. Men with silver faces seemed to kindly request to be sprayed with my arsenal (coloured water in a bottle), though my responses were deemed indifferent as they followed by surrounding me from all sides for a good rub and fondle - turn the tits! I established shortly after that this entire celebration; exclusive of a few female tourists; was being outwardly celebrated enitrely by men. I hope the women were at least having good red wine.
The main ghat was a Bollywood dance pit. I'm not sure who provided the concert sized speakers. The whole thing convulsed to the beats like a single organism, and one with a very high libido. The surrounding area was coloured water and torn clothing. Both the guys I was with lost their shirts, but managed to keep their pants.
Taking out the camera was very dicey, indeed. People would really go for you relentlessly. So all I have to attest the situation is what I looked life after:
By 2:00 the city was utterly lethargic.
There seemed to be a common understanding that the throwing of colour was finished. Women started popping out as I starred into the alleys from a restaurant, comotose, for an hour.
The aftermath.
You just can't get over the charm of all that colour hanging around:
This was long after the peoples everyday habits got going again.
I spent my next three weeks in Varanasi (an inescapable vortex), establishing the more subtle elements of the homosexual embrace inherent in so many Indian men. Though robustly paraded on holi, the everyday sociology of the situation was suddenly, unignorable.
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