The Holi state of mind

Geetanjali Krishna writes about a person she knew who celebrated Holi with all its attendant customs

The other day, when a friend commented that it was great that Holi was falling on a long weekend this year, I remembered how differently people celebrate the festival in Mirzapur. Holi wasn’t celebrated on one single day there — instead, it was observed for most of the Hindu month of Phagun. When I lived in Mirzapur, what seems now like a lifetime ago, wearing gulal-stained clothes to work used to be de rigueur in this season. You couldn’t go past a field without spotting a cow splashed with pink, or drive down GT Road without seeing psychedelic cars. And the one person I knew who celebrated Holi with all its attendant customs, was our reluctant gardener Lalji.

Lalji was a powerfully built man, well in his fifties in those days. Other than the fact that we never agreed on the scope of his duties — he felt that his job was to over-water the lawn after he’d had a good long snooze on it, while I believed otherwise — we got along well. In the run up to Holi, his less-than-stellar work ethic took a sharp nosedive. For instance, he once reported for duty with red alta-painted feet and a suspiciously high-pitched giggle. It transpired that he had gone to drop his wife to her parents’ home over the weekend. “In my community,” he said, cackling insanely, “around Holi, sons-in-law are considered fair game for all sorts of pranks!” So apparently, he’d been given milk laced with bhang, cannabis, and after he was high as a kite, his younger sisters-in-law had painted his feet red like those of a bride. He slept off the effects of cannabis in a nice shady nook in my garden, much to my irritation.

The prevalent local belief about bhang used to be that it was the only intoxicant not proscribed by Hinduism. Locals tended to have, therefore, a rather tolerant view of it. Cannabis shoots spring up everywhere around this time of the year, especially on the banks of the Ganges. Thanks to a loophole in the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985, which bans the consumption of cannabis buds and resin (hashish and hash oil) but not leaves of ‘wild’ cannabis plants, bhang is a legitimate — and legal — part of Holi celebrations in Mirzapur and around.

While I believed people had the right to eat/drink whatever they like, I was loath to let Lalji do it on my dime. When I said as much, Lalji would tell me long, meandering stories about the significance of bhang in Hinduism, like it was his sacred duty or something, to consume it. One morning, he told me that apparently, when the cosmic ocean was churned by the gods and demons to obtain amrit (the elixir of immortality), marijuana plants grew wherever its droplets fell on earth. Another time, he said that when Shiva drank the poison from the churned ocean, his throat turned blue and he was in agony. His consort Parvati quickly rustled up some bhang, mentioned by the Vedas as being a divine panacea, which relieved his pain. But of course, for people like him, bhang consumption was unabashedly non-medicinal. “In the month of Phagun, bhang plants grow wild on the banks of the holy mother Ganges and the fields are bursting with new growth,” said he. “They remind us to celebrate the month of Holi.”

Those days are long gone, and Holi is just one day in my life today. But it seems like yesterday that the pretty star-like leaves of the bhang plant would brighten Lalji’s day — and make me fume. Funnily enough, I miss them.