Holi shitballs!

It’s 7.30am and I’ve just come back from the latrine… daily ablutions performed, teeth brushed, face washed… I feel fresh as a daisy! I’m on the Udaipur Express which left Bombay yesterday afternoon at 3.45pm and is due in the Lake City of Udaipur in about an hour’s time. My phone has just beeped with a ‘Welcome to Rajahsthan’ message from the operator. As usual, I’ve got myself an upper berth where I can remove myself from the floor-level madness, and it’s here that I’m now perched, typing this entry precariously onto my teetering laptop.

So I’ve finally been able to drag myself away from Bombay. Having previously booked my train for last Monday, my friends managed to persuade me that I should stay for Holi, so I rebooked for Friday. That, of course, was an amateur mistake. “Conor, what’s the point of leaving a major city before the weekend”, they prodded, “Surely you should stay for brunch on Saturday and some Saturday night antics?” So again, I cancelled and rebooked for Sunday. After two weeks in the city of dreams, I finally managed to escape.

‘Escape’…? Dunno if that fits the bill. The truth is that I could have stayed in Bombay indefinitely. Without a doubt, it’s my favourite city so far on this journey. I feel that I penetrated its chaotic haze and lived like a Mumbaiker for a short time, rather than just passing through. My experience there was sculpted by the people I met: Jerry, Vik, Mal, Dex, Son, Pooty, Vicky, Ivan, Sam, Saatu, Bushen, Anahata, Krishna, Karnika… the list goes on… I’ve never fallen into the life of a city like I did in Bom and it won’t be something that I forget too easily.

Holi was a pretty wild day. It’s the Indian festival of colours celebrating transformation and the changing of the season. We got up early and prepared ourselves with the prerequisites: Supersoaker… check… White clothes which you’re willing to fuck up… check… Gulal (or coloured powder)… check… Water balloons… check… A Ziploc bag to protect anything of value from the multi-coloured sludge… check… We marched down a jam-packed Juhu beach for around eleven o’clock and started throwing colours at each other. As a firangi (or foreigner) I seemed to attract the attention of kids who felt their myriad of colours contrasted nicely against my pale skin. I also lost all inhibitions concerning the sea. Any Bombay beach that I had previously sauntered down was always marred by the feeling that I would, under no circumstances, ever touch that water. But on Holi it was different… It seemed that half of Bombay was in the sea playing games, so I waded in and joined them.

The story of Holi is as follows: There was a king who thought he was all that and then some. He felt he was in touch with the gods and thought he was their deity on earth. All his subjects bowed down and submitted to him, with the notable exception of his son, who rejected his omnipotence… So the King asked his sister, the son’s aunty, who had been blessed by an inability to be burned, to take the son into a fire and kill him. As she brought the son into the fire, the gods transferred her incombustibility to the boy, who was saved while his aunty burned to death… To reinforce their support of the child and their rejection of his megalomaniac father, the gods came to earth in the form of a lion and tore the King apart, placing his son on the throne. Dunno how throwing colours got linked to that but that’s the story that the guy on the train told me… (PS: I looked it up, it's marginally true... see here for actual story).

The Injuns like their stories. The Hindu deities are animated in a plethora of different lores and legends which are recounted to children as they grow up. The legends seek to illustrate the characteristics of different deities and to reinforce the morals by which people should live.

The clothes that I had chosen to meet their maker on Holi included my lucky white cotton shirt. It had seen me through a lot: being soaked bloodred after my NYC car crash and an innumerable amount of mud, coffee, wine, beer and (I’m not afraid to say) puke stains. My mum had always managed to turn it around and rescue it. But recently, it’s been going downhill and didn’t really fit me so well anymore. I decided that ‘Death by Holi’ was a respectful and worthy final resting place for such a fateful garment.

So now I’m arriving into Udaipur. Excluding my brief time in Amritsar at the start of my Indian leg, it’s the first time I’m in the North. I can already see some tell-tale Rajastani trademarks… coloured turbans, twirled moustaches etc.

There’s one thing which I’ve been meaning to mention but keep on forgetting. It’s completely unrelated to anything else but is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life. Sometimes in big cities, you get fancy malls with western shops. These malls have escalators. You should see some Indian people getting on to these escalators… it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. They approach it slowly, trying to grab the handrail (which is of course moving)… They lift their feet and try to place them on the moving steps very carefully. Obviously, you can’t do this with an escalator and you just have to hop on, but they don’t seem to get this. (For those of you that know Father Ted, think of Mrs. Doyle trying to get off the window ledge). I’ve spent hours sitting at the bottom of escalators giggling to myself while watching their attempts. Eventually, they jump on holding onto the banisters for dear life.

Oh, in other news (and since I haven’t mentioned poo for a while), I broke through a new barrier recently which caused many of my friends wild hilarity: I… ehhhhhhh… ‘cleaned myself’ without toilet paper! Yes… that’s right, I just did it… I summoned up all my courage and did it. Toilet paper is something only used by firangi’s here (and Jerry), so I took the plunge and cleaned myself Indian style using hand (left hand) and water. Apparently though, I didn’t do it quite right. I made the mistake of telling my friend Vikram, that I had done it ‘from the front’. Being the loudmouth that he is, he then told the rest of Bombay, who rolled around the floor laughing at the prospect of cleaning yourself ‘from the front’. Anyway, it’s actually not half as bad as you might think. You definitely get yourself much cleaner ‘down there’; you just have to make sure that you give your hands a good post-defecation scrub.

That’s it for the moment… I was really terrible in Bombay with pictures… I’ve posted what I have below, but it’s only really party pics and stuff like that. (I feel too self conscious taking pics of people… I feel like I’m intruding)…

Signing off… ur man in Rajastan…