Holi one and only
White is the colour of peace; of new beginnings and fresh starts, some even consider it to be the colour of perfection. Cricket players wear white. It is a game with a gentile history and white helps keep you cool in the sun.
If you followed the trail of white-clad people to the pit of Cape Town’s stomach on Saturday you would have found your way to the Rainbow Nation’s first festival of colour. The Holi One Festival began at midday on the Grand Parade, the city’s oldest public square; the city’s very own stage.
The city centre bakes in the heat of the day and there is very little shade. Tented bars flanked the Grand Parade where normally market stalls might be, but their insides offered little relief from the high temperatures, and they ran out of bottled water well before the peak of the afternoon.
The Grand Parade is lined with tall palm trees, whose thin trunks barely cast their outline on the concrete. The strength of the sunlight also seemed to bleach the colours as they flew around the crowd in clouds as danced in front of the DJs on the stage. For a daylight celebration of colour and love, the music hit midnight far too early – heavy base and fast beats that were too hard to move to in the harsh light of day.
On the hour, every hour those who had peeled off to the shadows and the bars were called back to the dance floor to throw their colours in unison. A countdown from 59 minutes to 10 seconds and then suddenly the air was full of coloured powders that rose up and faded to a mottled brown in the air.
Security guards dressed in black patrolled the perimeters, but even their clothes soon were soon splashed with colour. The rubbish pickers too had their yellow vests dusted green and their tear ducts laced with pink moved quietly among us collecting cans and empty powder bags, blinking the colour out their eyes.
For a while I sat with my back against the railings. On the other side there was a small boy waiting for his mother to pack up a stall of cheap handbags and t-shirts. Inside the fence the crowd was younger than at some of the grassy outdoor parties I had been to (grade 12 kids who didn’t need cars to get to the party had made it here today), but his was the youngest face I’d seen. I took a handful of pink and threw it down in front of him. He shrieked and stamped his foot on it and when he looked up he had pink freckles.
It wasn’t quite a full rainbow. Some of the colours were missing. And as the layers of powder thickened on our famous we became a homogenous crowd of dusty brown people, flecked only with the freshest of the colours that had hit us.
Only when the sun sunk behind the clock tower of the City Hall, and the Grand Parade became dusky that the colours really came to life. Without the sun to dull them, the powders became luminous.
As it got darker the wind picked up, and powder rippled off people’s shoulders like sand off desert dunes towards the railway tracks. Mysterious clues for Monday morning’s commuters who weren’t there, who didn’t see. Who hadn’t heard it was happening.
In India and Nepal, where the Holi festival originates, it is a celebration that welcomes spring and all its vibrancy. But the same winds that blew the coloured powder into the eyes of the revellers has started to shake the leaves from their branches and invite a chill into the shade. In India people run through the streets throwing colour and water at each other. In Cape Town we threw colours behind a fence.
Even now, days after the delirium of the party is over there are flashes of green powder on the pavements, and I’m sure I’m still finding yellow in my eyelashes.