This Holi, save water, read a book

I was walking along the road the other day, minding my business like I always do, when I heard a thump and a water balloon burst a foot from me. The kid who threw it from the safety of his grilled first-floor window was lucky. Had that balloon hit me, I would have stormed up to his or her house and given the parents a piece of my mind. I’m all for people celebrating anything they'd like to, as long as they don't hurt, harm or inconvenience other people while they do.

I've never been a fan of Holi though I love the season it falls in. In Delhi, Holi comes at a time when the winter chill just about clings to the early morning air. This brief season is a bridge between the harsh winter and the wrath of summer.

One of my earliest memories of Holi is of leaning over the rear boundary wall of our home in Bikaner to throw water on the local boys playing Holi in the empty ground there. It was a game in which I had an advantage since I would duck behind the wall when they tried to get back at me. However, the boys got even when they lay in wait for me to pop up once again, caught me when I did, and rubbed my face with what seemed like tar or black paint.

I can't say for sure if that incident put me off Holi forever but in subsequent years, I remember that I wished I could stay home with my mother (who hates playing Holi) while my sisters, brothers and dad went out for a thorough colouring at the army mess in whichever cantonment dad was posted in at the time. But I didn't. I instead tagged along and joined forces with a gang of common friends at the mess and took the liberty of liberally colouring officers and their wives we were too shy to talk to.

Things changed when we moved to Noida. For many North Indian men, Holi celebrations are an excuse to grope women. So I usually saw women restrict themselves to playing Holi with large groups of friends in their homes or gardens (yes Mumbai, some people in Delhi have gardens) while groups of raucous and drunken men patrolled the streets on bikes and scooters looking for easy prey.

I've never had large groups of friends nor did I particularly like getting plastered with colour, so during my late teenage years, on Holi, you would catch me at home reading a book while my siblings went out with friends and returned unrecognisable.

Purple and silver paint were the colours in vogue and my neighbours looked like people from outer space for days on end.
I may be wrong, but Mumbai celebrates Holi differently. There is less noise, less colour, less drunkenness. There are, of course, pockets of manic celebration and I gate-crashed a Bollywood bhang party in Versova one Holi. But as a friend pointed out, this crazy celebration exists in pockets and is not as widespread as it is in Delhi. Maybe because Mumbai has a cosmopolitan mix of different communities living together and not everyone celebrates Holi, or maybe, like me, the people of Mumbai have better things to do with their time.