27. Holi Moses

What a wuss I am.  

I've been waiting for Holi for 3 weeks. I'd stalked out various vantage points, and asked everyone where the best place would be, and spent ages deciding about the merits of a waterproof camera housing. Should I go to Patan or Bhaktapur or Kathmandu? How would I get there?   And, with my current experience, back again?

I woke, I namaste'd the mountain, I had a big simple breakfast.   

Holi is wild, Holi is wet, Holi is loud and noisy and crazy.  Holi is the day of madness across India and Nepal, where offerings are given to the gods, and gifts to each other, and fires of cow poop are lit, and bits of string bring good luck from the gods, and everyone has a totally amazing time dressing up and being silly and being insane and being mad and having fun and being abundant with love and ensuring good luck for the coming year. And all of that time is spent throwing coloured water on anyone and everyone, in between smearing every exposed cell with coloured powders.  Being hurt and stung and bruised is part of the rite of passage.

The last (and first) Holi I participated in was with D in Pushkar, India, many years before.  It was a euphoric, kaleidoscopic, acid trip of a day that I will remember my whole life. Last time I almost lost my cameras in the frenzy. D lost his shoes, last seen hanging from electrical wires ten metres in the air.   Last time my hair was stained orange and blue for months, and our clothes were destroyed, thrown onto a pyre because they were stained, torn and unwearable. Everything was worth every second. 

This time, I was prepared to be prepared.  I tied my hair in a knot and covered it with a showercap. I wrapped the showercap in a turban. I put on my oldest blackest clothes because last time I did the wet t-shirt look for the whole of Pushkar, but transparent was not how I wanted to be at the moment.  I wrapped my camera up in two layers of plastic.  I put the two layers of plastic in a black carry bag;  I removed all my important papers and most of my money from my bumbag. I told everyone at the New Horizon Hotel where I was going.  I was ready to take Holi by its horns.

Then I did a terribly stupid thing, dear readers.  I have a Nepali prepaid sim card with an 11 digit number that nobody has been able to reply text me on.  So I sent the departed D the first communication I have had with him since I saw his stupid David Bowie T Shirt and his stupid Frank Sinatra hat disappearing into the Vestal Virgins Departure lounge in Sydney, after the Big Thirst Episode.   This Time Four Years Ago We Were At Holi Together, I wrote.  Then I inserted a swearword beginning with F and ending with er.  I believed absolutely that I could abuse him from afar and he couldn't respond.  I'm still hurting deeply, like burns.  It just won't go away, although I pretend it is.

Stupidly, I pressed Send.  

Then I walked out into the potholed, dusty lane where the stray dogs were shivering and squealing with their tails between their legs, because some Holi morons were throwing bags of coloured water from a rooftop five stories up that landed like rocks on these miserable critters.  One hit me on the shoulder, dousing my shirt. That hurt.  Another glanced my ear and burst at my feet. That hurt too.  I thought of stitches and broken collar bones and more injury to my poor nose and love you long time purple hair and getting my boobs fondled while being blinded and then another splotch of dirty Bogmati water, pitched from above, landed hard on my head.  My tear ducts prickled.  

Then my phone buzzed.  D had replied: "As if I could forget that Day."  Had I had enjoyed Holi without him, he wanted to know?  He wrote about grief and sorrow and pain and how much he wanted to see me and where was I and why did I run away and and and and and.    I was so shocked and upset that a) he had replied b) he was mirroring my feelings, that I froze.   My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. My legs turned to jelly.  My heart was pounding so hard I had trouble breathing.  My hands were shaking so much that had they been branches the leaves would have fallen off.

Suddenly, all my bravado, my strength, my courage, my confidence to take on the world vanished.  I had been waiting for this festival day for weeks, but now I could not head out into Holi alone.   I wanted D there.  More than I have wanted anything for a long time.  That quick, sad, painful communication between us started my blood flowing again, and he was under my fingernails. My hit, my fix, the End of Me. Again. Love, is the drug.

That Pushkar time, those years ago, was the travelling highlight in decades of travel adventures. We were crazy mad for each other: we were travelling India and Nepal for months. We were coloured and basted and drenched and pasted and fondled: our clothes were crowd surfed, we trance danced with the testosterone addled youths and laughed and were almost blinded by the powders; we saw pink cows and green dogs and yellow and red steps, and faces like that looked like Night of the Living Dead and Mad Max.  My hair was orange blue and pink, my skin looked like Rocky Road candy, D looked like a mad purple monkey. We were part of a living throng of insanity and borderless boundaries, amidst fire and smoke and music.  Laughing crowds stripped off his shirt which was crowd surfed to the wires above us. Bonfires raged.  People fell upon each other, shrieking with laughter. We were drunk with love.  

We staggered back to the hotel in a river of rainbow coloured people, covered in powder and paint. The Nepalese woman who'd done our laundry the day followed us to our room and asked if D wanted a massage. I watched while she mixed all the lurid colours on his skin into a slip of homogenous indigo-cement tones, but declined her offer to do me.  She took her handful of rupees and left.  We tore off what was left of our ruined clothing, and had transcendental psychedelic sex at noon while outside our windows peacocks cackled, hysterical monkeys licked their turquoise balls, drums beat a cacophony, whistles shrieked and coloured missiles were lobbed at the dazed and delirious who had unsuspectingly entered the fray. We ruined the sheets with the dyes on our skin and hair, we stained the carpet with our wet, stinky clothes, while just beyond our flimsy wooden door, the world continued to be quite mad.

I couldn't go out into Holi today.  I was a pile of broken rubble.

I limped back to the hotel and sat in the garden on a broken plastic chair.  I peeled off my protective clothing.  I cried.  With grief.  I cried.  With rage at myself.  I cried. At lost opportunities and stupidity.  I wiped my nose on my sleeve and left a trail of pink and green powder. Some kids came back covered in colours, grinning with Holi joy.  I took a few lacklustre photos.

I cried. About being alone.  About loving stupid people for stupid reasons.  I cried about being so weak that this stumble had cost me a photographic opportunity and more positive memories I could have made.

I started talking to a woman who lives in Udaipur, another city we'd had the most wonderful time in, where we considered running a hotel, one day.   I've kept my pain private while I've been away, but my tears just gushed out, fresh, clean, the lid of my misery open and they overflowed and splashed on my waterproofed clothing.

I was so distraught and embarrassed I had to go back to my room.   There was another text from D.   Sharing pain.   I cried some more.

Later, when the melee had subsided, both mine and Holi, when I knew there was a chance I wouldn't be molested in the streets, I went by rickshaw to Durbar with the woman from Udaipur.  I was angry with myself for feeling so vulnerable. I was disappointed that I didn't get the photos I so wanted.  I was horrified that I still feel so much for D.  Wondering what it is and why it won't go away.  My daughter said beautifully that I should see this as a line of prayer flags, flapping in the wind ... and let each one fly free.  I am trying, I really am.   I've tried to cold turkey and I've been left feeling empty and emotionless.   One link to him and I feel as if I'm breathing again.  Or drowning in grief.

Dear reader:  there is so Much Stuff there.  To leave behind.  And too much go back to.

The narrow lanes of Kathmandu were dense with people returning from A Good Time. The tourists were the most tainted, painted and wearing their colours like battle badges. 

They looked like the cast of horror films and anything to do with Mel Gibson. Apocalypto on acid.   Gutters were deep with empty plastic packets that had contained powdered colours.   Dogs had pink stripes down their backs and orange faces. Motor bikes were splashed with green and pink.  The gutters ran with red as if there had been a massacre.  Durbar Square was thick with Nepali women in glittering red saris who carried offerings to messy idols.  Music blared, intoxicated youths with striped faces and splashed shirts sat on the steps of the  temples shouting insults.  The sadhus with their fancy painted faces looked quite pedestrian and put out, blending incognito into the insane crowds.

I don't know how I would have fared physically or photographically, because when we got to Durbar just after sunset, there were a lot of photographers milling about, apparently intact. But it doesn't really matter, because emotionally I was trashed.

There is no point kicking myself. I just couldn't do it.  I just couldn't.