Holi 2022

Though I grew up in a pretty devout Hindu household (from my vantage point at Mom’s kitchen table, I see no less than four images of Krishna), we never played Holi growing up.

For the uninitiated, Holi is a Hindu spring festival which celebrates the triumph of good over evil, the divine love between Radha and Krishna and the hope of a healthy spring harvest.

It is celebrated with bonfires where you can roast corn, eating all sorts of deliciousness like shaakar para (fried little sweet crackery things), kachori (fried dumplings filled with spiced lentils or smashed up peas and coconut), thandai (milk sweetened with saffron, almonds, cardamom and fennel) and bhang (weed. Like, the shit Willie smokes. Seriously) and “playing Holi” - a free-for-all where everyone throws paint (powdered or diluted with water), makes a mess and has a great time.

However, this wasn’t something we did growing up. Likely because springtime in England is way too cold to be drenching one another with water and also because Mom was not about to bring our paint-covered mess into her clean house.

As a mom who is raising her kid in a much more tropical climate, I want to make sure that Holi is as much a part of Will’s family traditions as Thanksgiving, Christmas and July 4 where John purchases enough Chinese fireworks to make Illuminations at EPCOT look like rookie shit.

So, we found a local celebration, threw on old clothes and went to play.

One of the best parts of the day was when John was explaining the festival to his family - the story of how as a teenager, dark-skinned Krishna worried about whether his fair-skinned crush, the milkmaid Radha would find him attractive (y’all know colorism is a serious problem when a god is stressed about it).

Finally, Krishna’s mother Yashoda got sick and tired of his complaining and told Radha, “Look, paint each other any color you want. Just do it outside because I just cleaned the floor.”

(That might not be verbatim but sounds 100% like something an Indian mom - myself included - would say).

The young couple fell in love and now, we celebrate.

I love that my husband did the research on his own so he could better understand the festival and my cultural background. Dude brings the color into my world and never fails to surprise me.

Raising Will to celebrate his cultural heritage is really important to me. He’s half Indian, an eighth Italian and various parts Scottish, German, Danish and English and 100% American with family history in England, Uganda and St. Thomas.

And my plan is to raise him to experience and celebrate all of that.

Even if it means I’m never gonna get this green powder out of my scalp…