This story 'Holi Colour' was published in 2016 in an international anthology called Marked By Scorn edited by Dominica Malcolm. Solarwyrm Press. The anthology is a collection of short fiction and poetry on the theme of non-normative love. Poly- relationships, open relationships, interracial relationships, and of course, queer love. (LGBTQIA). Never put it up earlier. The anthology is available on Amazon for about 1000INR.
Holi Colour
Nobody exactly knows how the tradition
began, or how long it had been there, but evidently it was a tradition for the
hostellers, after the wild and raucous holi celebrations, to go to the staff
flats looking like a lot of rowdy youngsters and ask the teachers for sweets
and mithais. Holi in this hostel began two days before holi in the rest of the
world. Whether it was the hostel mess or whether it was Aarohi’s room, it did
not matter, the buckets of water came pouring down, cold cold water in the
middle of March, until the place was flooded. Just the previous year Madri had
come yelling and running down the corridor, dragging Aarohi out of her room and
drenching her with cold water for the sixth or seventh time. And Sweksha had
conveniently got the clever idea of throwing water from the balcony on all the
unsuspecting people such as Aarohi down below.
Well, so there was plenty of water and plenty of colour and yes there
was some bhang too. Little did the teachers know how Aarohi had handled two
wicked bhang-ed friends all alone, Neha and Noopur who insisted on gifting her
tiny scraps of paper, who got insulted when she threw away these scraps, Neha
and Noopur who said they needed water for riding bicycles and who named the two
fans as “kutta” and “kamina” and told Aarohi to put off both of them lest the
fans fall down on top of them. So, the water and the colours and the bhang and
the big music system. And food. The only holi essential missing in this
narrative is food. This junior-cum-friend, Poulomi had once begged Aarohi to
take her to ANY teacher’s house so that she could have mithai, where ultimately
it was Aarohi as usual who had ended up gorging on most of the kaju barfis.
So,
this particular holi they had all been getting annoyed by the water balloons
that the kids of one of the teachers kept pelting them with and finally decided
to make their way back, and Aarohi had just decided that she was not going to
her house this holi because she had already been the previous two years anyhow
and she was NOT going to go this time when… just as we turned back from the
water balloon pelting kids, they saw her and her husband coming towards them. Kopilee
ma’am, and her husband, Sudhir. Well, Aarohi had decided not to go but it began
to seem as if she couldn’t escape it. So there was this whole crowd of girls,
and Kopilee Hazarika, or KH as they called her, began putting holi colour on
them in her typical, graceful way. The very way she put colour suggested beauty.
Sudhir meanwhile, walked just a little ahead and waited for her to emerge from
the crowd of girls. Aarohi usually referred to him as Sudhir, having been told
by Kopilee ma’am a couple of years ago that that is how some of her ex-students
called him. Aarohi retreated to the edge of the path, looking on. It did not
occur to her to walk ahead on the other side. She stood there at the edge,
watching the pretty sight. Standing there, she remembered previous Holis. The
first year how Aarohi had insisted on going to her house all alone when she
realized that the others had already been and had somehow missed her out. That
was just a few days after their initial fall-out when Aarohi had been a first
year kid. Aarohi was crazily in love with her that time. Oh well, wasn’t she
still? So she hadn’t been able to restrain herself from going to her house when
she realized that all the others had already been. She thought festival time
was a time when you made peace. That was her problem, restrain, refrain.
Refrain itself had become her refrain but the problem was that she was not very
successful in this mission of refraining and restraining. And as she stood
there, her train of thoughts went to last year’s Holi- how KH had marched in
when they were all at Saroj ma’am’s house and proclaimed that in order to know
what “real” mithais are, they would have to come to her house. And then when
they went to her house, how she, Aarohi had been the first one to pick up a
mithai with her dirty fingers from the neat box. Aarohi was so used to being in
her house after all, she had been here last year more than anybody else. She
had sat here in the inner room of this house and had discussed everything from
every small little problem and worry to poetry to college to food and school
and problems at home to Kopilee ma’am’s family to the menstruation rituals in
Assam. When she spoke at all, that is. Aarohi, who had been quiet and shy most
of her school life, used to just sit, and sit there in Kopilee ma’am’s house without
saying anything. Then Kopilee ma’am would start telling her about how she had
stayed in a live-in relationship before she got married. Aarohi would still
keep sitting silently still after having received this piece of information.
Then Sudhir would exclaim, “Kopilee, you don’t know how to talk! What will the
poor girl say if you tell her such things?” Then Kopilee ma’am had turned to
Aarohi and had said that she did not know how to make conversation. Well,
neither for that matter, it appeared, did Aarohi. “You will keep sitting here
silently”, said Kopilee Hazarika, “and then later you will send me a text
message.” Aarohi, who had just been formulating a text message in her mind that
very minute, blushed a hot red. Kopilee ma’am definitely knew her through and
through by now. More than she knew herself, she used to think. Ah well, all
this had happened before Kopilee ma’am had decided that she had had enough of
all this falling in love. And hence the estrangement. Which she could never
keep up fully because she had this habit of not being able to restrain herself.
She had eaten aloo paranthas and popcorn and had been gifted chocolates and
chocolate cakes, she had kept silent even when she had made a mistake, and she
had been altogether so comfortable here in this house, that it came to her
naturally to be the first one to pick up a white mithai with her dirty
black-blue-green hands, whereas all the other girls hesitated just a little to
do so.
All
the girls painted red blue purple green and whatnot, and the way Kopilee ma’am
gave attention to each one of them and put colour in that very graceful way, it
made a pretty sight. Aarohi was watching it with an unconscious smile playing
on her lips which betrayed her. She thought KH would move on, Sudhir was
waiting for her, after all. Aarohi didn’t understand why she was so interested
in this crowd of hostellers. But she streaked them all, even the three or four
stragglers. I use the word streak because the English language has no equivalent
for this act of putting holi colour. As she streaked the stragglers, Aarohi
sighed. So she was to be the only person left out. Oh well. She continued to
stand there, the smile unconsciously playing around her face, expecting KH to
go ahead and join him after she finished streaking the girls. It did not strike
her that she could go ahead on the other side and join the others who were
going back to the hostel. Transfixed and rooted to the spot as she was, she
thought she would wait till she joined Sudhir, before joining the other
hostellers. But Kopilee Hazarika did not go ahead to join him. Instead, she
turned towards Aarohi first. Aarohi wondered if she had been conscious of her
on-the-edge presence all the while. Like she knew it in class if Aarohi was
there or not, where Aarohi would sit, even if Aarohi decided to stop responding
to the attendance call. Aarohi wondered how she could recognize her in this
condition, how she could recognize this open haired, red black blue green
yellow lanky creature in front of her, she wondered why she turned towards her.
If she couldn’t see her or hear her, if
she complained about her, why did she turn towards her now then, as she stood
there on the side of the path, transfixed to the spot with that smile on her
face which she did not realize? That is why Aarohi called her a stupid woman.
She came towards Aarohi with a “Yeah” which was brusque and curt but which was
very there all the same, and its presence can never be described in any story.
As she streaked Aarohi’s face in that graceful, very womanly way of hers, an
expression of delight and uncontrolled happiness had sprung to Aarohi’s face. The expression was
uncontrolled because she never expected her to do it. Had she known she was
going to, she would have done her best to make it easier for her by moderating
her facial expression, like she used to sit on the side in class so that she
need not look at her. Aarohi did not know what to say or do. Some vague
instinct prompted her to return the streak, the way everyone does to everyone
on Holi, though hers was oh! so much more awkward and clumsy than Kopilee
Hazarika’s beautiful touch. As she looked at the delight on Aarohi’s face, her
expression turned to one of fear. Aarohi could have sworn that she had never
seen such a stupid woman before. Eccentric, idiosyncratic woman. “She sees me
standing aside and deliberately excluding myself, then she comes to me, and
then does she expect me to be sad?” thought Aarohi. As her expression changed
to one of fear, it hit Aarohi like someone had just boxed her in her stomach.
She cursed herself for not having the presence of mind to control the delight
which had sprung up to her face. As she became scared, she scurried ahead to
join him. Suddenly, she found herself lingering there all alone. The others it
seemed had already gone back to the hostel in the meanwhile. She walked back
slowly, this tiny incident which had taken hold of her mind, stuck on repeat,
playing and replaying and replaying itself over in her head for years to come.
(I am working on a novel using the same characters. This may be seen as an excerpt or related short fiction.)
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