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I spent the first twenty-eight years of my life believing I understood what celebration meant.
I had been to New Year’s Eve in Times Square, pressed against metal barricades, counting down with strangers whose breath formed frozen clouds in the cold. I had danced at weddings until my feet blistered, stood in stadiums of thousands cheering until my voice cracked, felt that particular electricity that comes when humans gather to mark something important.
I was wrong.
I didn’t understand celebration at all.
The Clock That Stopped at 7:47 AM
The powder hit my face at exactly 7:47 AM on March 14, 2025.
I know the exact time because I had just glanced at my watch—my grandfather’s steel Rolex, the one I wear when I travel to feel connected to something solid and predictable in unfamiliar places. I had been in Mathura for exactly fourteen hours, checked into a guesthouse that smelled of sandalwood and damp plaster, slept poorly on a mattress that crackled with plastic, and woken before dawn with the particular anxiety of someone who has no idea what they’ve gotten themselves into.
My Hindi consisted of three words: namaste, dhanyavaad, and the dangerously vague acchha. My understanding of Hindu mythology was roughly the size of a postage stamp—I’d skimmed a Wikipedia article on the train from Delhi about Holika and Prahlad, some story about good defeating evil that I hadn’t really absorbed. I had come because I’d seen photographs in National Geographic—those stunning images of people covered in pink and blue and yellow, laughing, arms raised toward a technicolor sky.
I had come for the photographs.
What I got was something else entirely.
I was standing near the entrance of a narrow lane, trying to orient myself with a map on my phone that refused to load, when the first handful of powder hit me. It was pink—so pink it seemed to glow—and it landed not just on my cheek but somehow inside my mouth too, coating my tongue with the chalky, vaguely perfumed taste of what I would later learn was gulal. Before I could react, a second handful—green this time, smelling distinctly of mint and something chemical—caught me from the other side. Then yellow from above, blue from behind.
A group of children had emerged from a side alley, their clothes already so saturated with color that you couldn’t tell what color they’d started with, and they had decided, in that way children decide things instantly and unanimously, that I was their project for the morning.
The smallest one, a girl with eyes the color of morning sky, said something I didn’t understand and then, seeing my confusion, simply demonstrated. She dipped her tiny hand into a plastic bag of purple powder, cupped it carefully, and with the gravitas of a priest performing a sacred rite, pressed it onto my forehead.
“Happy Holi,” she said, in English that sounded like it had been practiced especially for foreigners.
Within seconds, I was covered.
Within minutes, my white kurta—which I had naively thought would look “authentic” and photograph well—was a ruined canvas.
Within an hour, I was something I had never been before: completely, utterly, joyfully out of control.
On The Banks of Yamuna: Colors in the Water
After escaping the children, I found myself near the banks of the Yamuna River, where the real celebration was just beginning. The narrow lanes of Mathura’s old city had opened suddenly into a wide ghat, and what I saw stopped me mid-step.
Hundreds of people stood waist-deep in the sacred river, their bodies swaying to drums I couldn’t see but could feel in my chest. Old men with matted hair, young women in saris that clung to their wet bodies, children perched on their father’s shoulders—all of them covered in colors so vibrant they seemed to defy the early morning light. The water itself had turned pink in places, green in others, as if the river had decided to participate in the festival too.
I stood on the steps, clutching my camera under my arm, instinctively trying to protect it. A man in his seventies, his skin wrinkled like ancient parchment but his eyes bright as a child’s, noticed my hesitation. He climbed out of the water, streams of pink and yellow running off his body, and extended a hand covered in blue.
“You are afraid of getting wet?” he asked, water dripping from his beard.
“I’m trying to protect my camera,” I said, realizing how ridiculous this must sound in a place where everything was designed to be destroyed by color and water.
He laughed—a deep, resonant sound that seemed to come from his belly. “The camera will survive. The question is: will you?”
I didn’t understand what he meant until he grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the river. The water was shockingly cold, hitting me like a physical force, and before I could protest, three teenage boys appeared from nowhere and began splashing me with water that had been dyed bright orange. Someone pressed a handful of red powder into my palm, and instinctively, the way I’d seen others do it, I threw it into the air.
The colors caught the light coming through the ancient temples on the riverbank and for a moment—just a moment—I forgot about my camera, my carefully planned itinerary, my need to document and instead experienced.
The Wisdom of Children and the Language of Powder
Dripping wet and shivering despite the warm day, I climbed back to the riverbank where a group of women sat preparing colors. They worked with the methodical efficiency of master craftswomen, grinding dried flowers and herbs with stone pestles, mixing powders with practiced hands.
An older woman, her hair in a tight gray bun, motioned for me to sit. She didn’t speak English, but she spoke the language of gesture with fluency. She took my right hand, turned it palm-up, and began drawing patterns in it with different colored powders—a yellow dot in the center, circles of pink around it, a border of green.
“For prosperity,” said a voice behind me in English. I turned to see a girl of maybe sixteen, her phone in her hand, translating for her grandmother. “She says you are new to Holi.”
“This is my first one,” I admitted.
The grandmother smiled, her teeth stained pink from the powder, and said something that made the girl laugh before translating: “She says you wear your inexperience like a bright coat. Everyone can see it, but only a fool would think it’s a bad thing.”
For the next hour, they taught me what no guidebook had. How to mix the colors so they wouldn’t stain your skin too permanently (oil first, they insisted, slathering my arms with coconut oil). Which colors were traditional—saffron from marigolds, pink from roses, green from mehendi leaves. How to throw powder in a way that made it bloom like flowers in the air.
I learned the children’s chants—the “Holi hai!” they screamed as they attacked each other with colors. I learned that water balloons were called “pichkaris” and that teenagers filled them with not just water but sometimes perfume, sometimes syrup, sometimes things I didn’t want to think about.
What I learned most was that language doesn’t matter when you’re laughing together, when your hands are stained the same colors, when joy becomes the common tongue.
On the Roof: Water Wars and Hidden Stories
By noon, I had given up any pretense of being an observer. I met Vikram, a twenty-three-year-old engineering student who had taken it upon himself to be my cultural translator, dragging me up rusted ladders to rooftops where the real chaos happened.
From above, Mathura looked like a painting in progress. Every rooftop had its own celebration—families dancing, teenagers launching water balloons with surgical precision, old men sitting in chairs watching the mayhem below. Vikram explained that each neighborhood had its own traditions, that Holi here had been celebrated for thousands of years, that the city itself was said to be the birthplace of Lord Krishna.
“You’re not just celebrating spring,” he shouted over the sound of music blasting from speakers that looked older than both of us combined. “You’re celebrating love, the harvest, the triumph of good over evil, and the fact that winter is finally gone.”
“All at once?” I asked, ducking a red water balloon that exploded against the wall behind me.
“That’s the point!” he laughed, grabbing his own balloon launcher. “Life doesn’t happen one thing at a time. Why should celebration?”
On that rooftop, surrounded by strangers who had become allies in our water war, I learned something about Indian philosophy I had never understood from books. The acceptance of chaos. The trust that disorder could be sacred. The willingness to let life—and colored water—hit you in the face without flinching.
The Temple Steps: A Moment of Stillness
Around two in the afternoon, I found myself sitting on the steps of a small temple, exhausted. My phone was dead, my camera had been ziplocked into a plastic bag hours ago, and I had lost track of both time and my original purpose in being here.
My white kurta was a ruined canvas of every color in the spectrum. My hair was matted with powder and sweat. Every time I breathed, I inhaled pink dust. It coated my throat, my lungs, my sense of who I was.
A man named Ravi—he told me his name later—sat down beside me. He was perhaps sixty, his face weathered like a map of India’s history, his eyes kind. He had been watching me, I realized. Watching the way I had moved through the crowd—initially hesitant, then gradually releasing, letting myself be pulled into dances and color fights and spontaneous celebrations.
“First time?” he asked in English.
I nodded, too tired to speak.
“Where are you from?”
“America.”
He smiled. “Ah. Then this is very different for you.”
“Very,” I agreed, my voice hoarse from screaming joy.
He was quiet for a moment. We watched a group of teenagers chase each other through the narrow lane below, their laughter echoing off walls that had seen centuries of these celebrations.
“In your country,” he said slowly, his gaze fixed on a group of women in bright saris, “when do you touch strangers?”
The question caught me off guard. “I… we don’t, really. Not unless we have to.”
“And here?”
I thought about it. In the past six hours, I had been hugged by strangers, had my face painted by grandmothers, been pulled into dances by children, had powder pressed into my palms by men my father’s age. I had touched and been touched more than I had in the past year of my life at home.
“Here,” I said, “everyone touches everyone.”
“Yes.” He nodded. “This is what Holi does. For one day, we remember that we are all the same. All covered in the same colors. All equal in our joy.”
He paused, taking a sip from a clay cup of something that smelled of spices and sugar. “Your culture teaches you to protect yourself. To keep people at a distance. To stay clean.” He gestured at my ruined clothes, my powder-caked skin, my hair that had gone from neat to wild. “But you cannot experience life fully and stay clean. This is what we learn here. That getting dirty—surrendering control—is sometimes the only way to feel alive.”
The Sound of Drums: Between Earbuds and Eternity
Dusk began to settle over Mathura like fine powder. Someone had started drumming—a steady rhythm that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Soon the narrow lanes would transform again, this time into corridors of fire and ritual. The Holika Dahan—the bonfire that represents the burning of the demon Holika—would be lit in every neighborhood.
I walked toward the sound, lost in the maze of streets I still didn’t understand. Music poured from doorways that had been sealed during the day. The smell of cooking fires mixed with the lingering scent of colored powder, creating a perfume that belonged only to this day, this place.
A young mother stood in a doorway, a baby on her hip. She had barely a speck of color on her sari, as if she had saved herself from the chaos of the day, but her children—three of them, ranging from maybe four to twelve—were unrecognizable, walking rainbows.
“Happy Holi!” they shouted at me as I passed, and the youngest, the four-year-old, ran up and hugged my leg, leaving a handprint of green on my already technicolor trousers.
His mother smiled and said something in Hindi, then translated: “He says you’re his Hulk friend now. Because you’re green.”
I looked down at myself. I was indeed green. Also blue, yellow, pink, orange, and purple. I had become a walking kaleidoscope, a human canvas, something that would have horrified me twelve hours ago but now felt like an accomplishment.
Dhani’s Kitchen: Where the Real Magic Happened
Around seven, as the bonfires began to light up the night sky, I found myself in a small courtyard behind what seemed like an ordinary house. The sign above the door said “Dhani’s Kitchen,” and the smell—oh, the smell—had drawn me in like a magnet.
Dhani herself was a grandmother who claimed to be seventy but moved with the energy of someone half that age. She had taken one look at my stained clothes, my half-starved expression, and my general state of festive disarray and pointed to a low stool in her kitchen.
“Sit,” she commanded in English. “Eat.”
For the first time all day, I was given a wet cloth that actually cleaned something. For the first time all day, I sat still. And for the first time all day, I tasted Holi food.
There was gujiya—a fried pastry filled with sweetened khoya and nuts, still warm from the oil. There was thandai, a milk-based drink laced with almonds, fennel, and something she told me later was bhang—cannabis, legal for Holi and responsible for the pleasant mellowness that began to spread through my exhausted body. There were puran polis—sweet flatbreads that melted in my mouth, and papri chaat that made my tongue dance with its combination of sweet, sour, spicy, and crunchy.
“You fight all day,” Dhani explained, feeding me as if I were one of her own grandchildren, “so you must eat. The body needs to recover the energy.”
Around her kitchen table sat her family—sons who had returned from Delhi for the festival, daughters-in-law who laughed about whose children had been the messiest, grandchildren who were now clean but whose eyes still held the wild joy of the day. They spoke in Hindi, occasionally translating for me, but mostly just letting me sit in their circle, accepted without question.
One of her sons, a man named Rohit who worked in IT and spoke perfect English, explained the philosophy behind the festival: “Holi is about breaking down the walls we build during the rest of the year. The walls between people, yes, but also the walls we build inside ourselves. Who are you without your neat clothes, your schedule, your control?”
I looked down at myself—my stained kurta, my blistered feet, my exhaustion—and realized I barely recognized the person I had become. And that was exactly the point.
The Spiritual Lesson I Didn’t Expect
I had come to Holi as a tourist. I left as something else entirely.
In the days that followed—as I scrubbed powder from my ears, found pink in my hairline a week later, caught myself smiling at the memory of strangers’ laughter—I realized that Holi had taught me something my own culture never had.
It taught me that joy is not a spectator sport.
It taught me that the most profound experiences come not when you document them, but when you dissolve into them.
It taught me that sometimes, the spiritual work is not in meditation or prayer or ritual, but in allowing yourself to be covered in color by strangers who, for one day, become family.
It taught me about the beauty of temporary chaos, the wisdom of surrender, and the profound truth that we are all, underneath our carefully controlled exteriors, walking palettes waiting to be painted by experience.
What I Carry: Colors in Unexpected Places
I flew back home with powder still under my fingernails.
For weeks, I kept finding traces of it—in the cuff of my jeans, in the zipper of my camera bag, in the lining of my jacket, in the creases of my passport. Each time, I would stop whatever I was doing and remember. The sky turning pink. The stranger who pulled me into the river. The grandmother who fed me sweets. The children who made me their project.
My culture still values control. I still plan and schedule and try to stay clean.
But now I know what’s on the other side of that surrender.
Now I know what it feels like to have pink in my lungs and joy in my bones.
Now I know what it means to be so completely lost in an experience that you forget who you were when you started.
And I know, with certainty, that I will go back. Not for the photographs, but for the permission to be messy, to be childlike, to be part of something that celebrates not perfection, but presence.
Not for the colors themselves, but for the way they taught me to see.
This was my first Holi ever. If you’ve experienced Holi—or if you’re planning to—I’d love to hear your story. What surprised you? What stayed with you? What colors are you still finding, months later, in the most unexpected places?
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