Holi Festival

Holi is one of the most important holidays in India. It is the festival of colour, light and love and signals the beginning of Spring. It celebrates Krishna and Rahdna and some victory or other. I found the story a bit confusing, but you can read more about it on Wikipedia here. It also falls on a particular full moon.

For a couple of days leading up to the festival, the shops start to sell colourful fried snacks and coloured powders. Then, the festival starts the night before by lighting a bunch of bonfires which consist mostly of cow poop.

The guy at the restaurant where we ate dinner told us that they would light the fires around 8 pm. So, at 8, we all went up to the homestay roof deck where we could view the local fire (pictured above). While we were waiting, we listened to some Indian music and R. gave us a poi show and everyone had a go.

Our homestay host then told us that they weren’t going to light the fires until 11 pm. We were all tired so we decided to skip it and go to bed.

The next morning, the family woke up very early (apparently the festival goes all night and people don’t sleep) and by the time I got out of bed around 7:30, the party was in full swing.

Down in the entry room off the street, they had a table with snacks and powders set out and had a few neighbours over. Apparently, the tradition is for men to go around to their friends’ houses and smear the powder on each other. So, we had various neighbours smear the powder on us.

They then asked the kids to move up to the roof deck and I followed. There, even more fun began. This consisted of covering each other with even more powder, then spraying each other with water guns and the hose, then more powder, then more water, etc. I couldn’t help but think that I really would have loved this holiday as a kid!

All this while eating and drinking beautiful snacks cooked by the host and where I discovered an amazing drink called Thandai which I’ll definitely be making when I get back home!!

Around 1 pm, the whole thing ends and everyone goes to wash up. This was somewhat difficult since we didn’t have a shower (only taps and buckets) and no washing machine… It took forever to try to get the pink and purple powders to wash off and it took 3 days for the pink dye to finally fade from the kids’ hands.

We’re so grateful that we were able to share and celebrate this day with such a lovely Indian family.