Barsana Holi

 

Those were the days when I still felt young enough to experiment with life. Barsana Holi is very popular as we all know. A friend arrived with his car and proposed a visit to enjoy the famed Holi at Radha Rani’s village. I agreed to the plan. Free offers are a big weakness with we Indians. The Holi was nice and colorful as can be expected. The revelers were dancing in the pillared open-air pavilion of Radha Rani temple standing on a rocky hill overlooking the sleepy village doused in a riot of colors.

A couple of trans-genders, elegantly decked up in a damsel’s sixteen-shringaar (maybe they tried to look like apsaras and seemed to succeed about one quarter in the mission), were dancing with lots of verve around their slim hips. They locked their fingers into ours and had a nice swirl dance. Then they sweetly proposed that we should stay overnight. We said a firm NO which they accepted gracefully. But then a middle-aged well-fed roundly built Pandit smartly filled the vacuum. He nicely coupled with one of them and danced a sensuous, colorful dance of celebration and desires. After the moves as their heads came near I heard him muttering the phrases of copulating proposal which his dancing partner happily accepted.

You feel you have a right to take bhang on Holi. Totally new to the experience, I gulped down a full ball of bhang. My mischievous friend fed me sweet sugar-drenched halwa after that. They say that the bhang’s effect gets multiplied after taking sweets. Soon I find myself in a dreamy, jerking world. I start explaining to him the difference between the languorous liquor nasha and the one resulting from bhang.

‘Liquor gives you a slowly rising and ebbing high. A kind of gentle wave builds up that takes you in its pleasant undulations. You feel slow undulations, an evenly slowed time, a kind of even and leveled forgetfulness, a type of gentle plateau. Its graphical presentation would be evenly poised wavy patterns that go onto flatten, their crests coming down and reach the horizontal line as you pass out,’ I tell him. ‘Bhang on the other hand gives it in jerks. Not waves but pointed ups and downs like on an ECG graph. You will have a straight line and then it will suddenly fluctuate to accelerate out of proportion. Suppose you are sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle plying on the road and you see a car coming from the front. One time you will see it small and drawn back almost a kilometer and then suddenly it would flash big right in front. In a flashy jerk,’ I elaborated.

I was convinced of the validity of my philosophical analysis of the difference. I was intellectualizing and laughing. Then the ill-famed effects of bhang surfaced. I felt my heart pounding in my chest. I heard hammers striking and tonking in my head. I was sure that it was just moments away from exploding. I was scared that the heart would come out bursting through the chest. All celebratory color went off my face. A pre-death feeling, I was sure!

‘I’m going to die! And I mean it!’ I declared to my friend. He was out of his wits. ‘Should I take you to a hospital?’ he said, his body shaking with fear. But I didn’t want to die as a bhang-drunk man on a hospital bed. ‘Take me to my place. I’ll die in my room. Let them think I died in sleep,’ I was bothered about my clean-boy image and thought of leaving with a clean reputation, not that of a substance-abused soul.

Poor guy, totally out of wits, he sped at top speed, completely sweat-laden with anxiety and panic. All along the way I kept reminding him that I won’t survive and death was certain. It was crazily scary and death seemed so near. Thankfully I didn’t cry otherwise it would have robbed me of reputation in his eyes for being a death-scared sissy. The clocks of death were tickling and thumping in my brain and the chest. The head felt like it will blast and scatter into hundred pieces. I would count the experience as staring at death from very close quarters.

We reached my place in the wee hours. My head was exploding with pain. I devised a nice mechanism of standing near a wall and slowly bump my head to rattle the tight claws of pain in the skull. The poor guy nearly fainted thinking that he was witnessing my death pangs. Then I vomited. The bitterest and the vulgar most thing I have ever puked in my life. I think I threw out death itself from my portals. Slowly the dark angels of death departed empty handed. I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was the most beautiful of a sunny day. The birds, the fresh air, the trees, and most importantly my breathing, my life! What else you need?! Why the hell we complain as long as we are breathing?! It felt the biggest blessing to be just alive on a lovely spring day. It felt like I will never have any grudges anymore in life.