Maahey's got it right - celebrated it in Bombay, boy and (youngish) man.

(Sidebar - the lathi charge can be a vicious thing. And the things the police can do with them to captors in police lock-ups... let's not lower the tone, Holi is supposed to be fun!)

In any case, the key to Holi is the colour, and the idea of everybody throwing colour on everybody else. In our neck of the woods the majority of the revelry would be over by about lunchtime. All the grown-ups would retire to their homes, wash and change, and spend the rest of the day drinking and eating - and often playing cards in reflection of the great card nights over Dussehra and Diwali.

For the kids, Holi was a loosening of the bonds of discipline. For weeks on the lead-up to the day, we would be throwing water-balloons (not filled with coloured water) at passersby on the roads below. School was havoc, since most of us had 'fountain-pens', which are perfect for showering putative opponents with. One well-judged air-swipe with an open pen, at a range of about a metre or so, and you would leave an artistic trail of ink on the fellers pristine shirt. We would have long drawn out ink fights or battles through the ocrridors of the school every break, to the despair of our parents who had to cope with the laundry. Wisely, the school decreed that we were only allowed to use water-soluble blue ink in our pens, which mitigated the damage somewhat.

In later years, the bhang Maahey spoke of came into play. It is, as some of you may know, a drink concocted from cannabis, and though slower-acting than smoking the blessed stuff, it's longer-lasting. A friend once, on a bhang high on Holi, spent some 12 hours on the edge of a rooftop, playing the dholak. He eventually came down only when the high wore off. His friends, who were with him at the time, were themselves so stoned that they saw nothing strange in his actions.

My most extreme bhang trip was one year when, with three other friends, managed to grab the family car (parents were too sleepy or merry to demur) and drove out of town couple of hundred kilometres to a place on the beach called Devka, where some other friends were hiding out from the Holi festivities ("this childish, barbaric nonsense. I want no part of it!"), and ambushed them with balloons and colour, causing high dudgeon and great consternation. Not depressed by the hail of abuse we. satisfied with our expedition, turned around and drove all the way home again.

The thing about bhang (as is the thing with Holi) is that it is akin to the 'fool's day' or 'twelfth night' idea - where inhibitions are supposed to be abandoned. So bhang is drunk pretty much by all, and even though cannabis consumption is supposedly illegal, no policemen are going to say a thing about anyone drinking bhang on Holi.

The festival has its darker side, of course, with numerous (innumerable?) accounts of sexual harrassment and rape emerging every year after its passing. Pity - but the repressed young men persumably lose much sense of right and wrong at a time like this and mistake freedom for licence.

For what it's worth, the story I was told about Holi was that it was a celebration to mark the killing of Prahlad's father, Hiranykashyapa, by Narasimha, the 4th avatar of Vishnu.

cheer

the sunshine warrior