As quickly as the terror had set in upon my arrival in India, it subsided after my a three-hour nap. By 11:00 AM I was on the streets of New Delhi looking for adventure. The little I'd read in advance of arriving told me that today was Holi, an annual Hindu festival essentially to celebrate the end of winter.
When the guides say Holi is a colorful holiday, they're being quite literal. The tradition on the morning of Holi is to liberally apply colored paints to yourself and everyone around. The paints are politely offered to a tourist like me or applied any other number of ways, including drive-by splashings. The guidebook advised staying indoors until afternoon if you want to avoid getting doused with color. Of course I was on the streets as early in the morning as I could get there.
My face and neck had already been adorned in thick reds and greens by a couple jovial Hindus by the time I heard an enticing drum beat down a shabby alley. With a brief survey of the alley--and the realization that the whole city so far (and this was the business center of New Delhi) qualified as "shabby" from my pampered American perspective--I followed the beat of the drum.
I lingered briefly as I passed the group dancing to the drummer's beat, long enough for one of them to walk over and invite me to join in the dancing. Do you think I could say no? I joined a kid in the center of the circle of revelers and we got down. We boogied. There were some mannerisms in their dance that I couldn't decipher, but could mimic: they were kind of like the elaborate hand-gesture storytelling of hula. I'd see these same mannerisms again all over Hindi music videos on the TV in my room each morning.
After a long while, the crowd around us dancers had to tell me it was OK if I wanted to take a break from dancing. I wiped the sweat from my brow and watched, grinning, for a while. Eventually the drummer was ready to move on, so I followed his lead, thanked my new friends and strolled along.
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