Notes from a dusty city: Holi, Holi

Sunday, 29 June 2008

Holi, Holi

Yesterday was the Hindu festival of Holi and for the last few weeks specially converted shops and roadside stalls have been selling a variety of powdered paint colours, water pistols and water bomb balloons across Ahmedabad. Holi is a goddess and for some reason her demise by fire is marked with water fights and people throwing paint at each other. This only seems to happen on the Saturday morning nearest to the special day, when I managed to avoid seeing any actual action. The evidence was visible though, with paint splashed people standing around chatting on Vejalpur road and multi-coloured splotches appearing here and there on pavements. Fires are also lit on the Friday night before Holi and there was a large bonfire outside our block of flats, around which women in saris walked and sprinkled ghee or water in offering.

I was in Vejalpur until 11:00 and then did little else during the rest of the day. In the evening we were invited to a colleague’s parent’s house for dinner along with the rest of the Pratham-ISE crew. Dinner was delicious; potato fried with mustard seeds, raita with beetroot, a thin and liquidy dal, fresh and crispy papad and a sweet pickle. After dinner all eight of us played Pictionary and, briefly, Taboo. It was a really fun evening.

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Introduction

When the Moghul Emperor Jehangir, son of Akbar the Great, first saw Ahmedabad, he renamed it Gardabad: the city of dust. This remains an apt moniker 400 years later. Before the blistering heat of the summer months and after the sodden period of the monsoon, the surfaces of the city acquire a gritty texture and a red-brown sheen of dust covers everything that doesn't move. Jehangir was perhaps in the city to view his domain: fifty years previously it had been taken by force from the descendent of Ahmed Shah, the first pre-Mughal Sultan of the area. I am regularly asked by complete strangers why I am here and the answer can be straightforwardly that I was offered a job. But actually my reason for being in India is more complicated than that and starts before my year at the LSE, when I was made the job offer.

Something draws me to India, although I am not sure exactly what. I admit that there is an element of mystique in my attraction to the country. Somewhere in the back of my mind are mixed images conjured up by an audio tape of Kipling’s Jungle Book that I listened to with complete absorbtion as a child. With little effort I can recall the outlines of thatched huts in the night, lit by cooking fires in a clearing; the striped and powerful shoulders of Kipling’s fiercesome jungle-prowling tiger; the darkly gleaming hood of the patient cobra, curled up in the gloom of a weed-choked and forgotten temple complex deep in the bush. These images have been with me for a while and certainly stoke up wonderlust. But that is not modern India; at least not ninety percent of it.

A large part of the reason is that I have been here before, almost ten years ago. I am not chasing my younger self, but there is a satisfaction to returning to a place after such a long time and finding (also, expecting) yourself to be wiser, more knowledgeable and better able to understand the surroundings. The month I spent in India in the summer of 1999 was not an easy one for me. I carried a lot of introspective neurosis, low confidence and angst into the Himalayas with me that time, fueled by the bitter tail end of my teenaged first relationship. It is pleasing to return and feel that I can more than make up for what I missed last time, when I was looking inwards so much I missed the details of the outside world.

But it turns out I have an even earlier connection to the subcontinent and to Ahmedabad in particular. This connection was drawn out of me recently by a fellow Briton with whom I shared a compartment on a train journey from Delhi. He asked if I was in India because of a family connection and in jest referred to Curzon. I raised my eyebrows to that suggestion, but admitted that I did have a familial link to India. My Grandfather, Dr. J.S. Logan, was posted to India during the Second World War and served in mechanized field hospitals based in the Punjab. He learnt to speak Urdu, with a Punjabi accent. I knew all this before I came to India earlier this year, but I only recently discovered that my Grandfather had also been in Ahmedabad. He was here in 1944 to attend a course on mechanical transport and combustion engineering (in case the field ambulances broke down presumably) although he is a gastroenterologist. He tells me he had great fun roaring around the back-roads on an Army motorbike and on one occasion passed an Haveli belonging to the Aga Khan, where Gandhi was being held under house arrest by the British Indian Government. I have no romantic illusions about the Raj; I only mention this snippet of family history because it is fascinating to think that I am following in my Grandfather’s footsteps. I arrived in Ahmedabad sixty-four years after he did.

Of course, when asked a question you don’t have an immediate answer to the best response can often be to ask a question in reply. So when someone asks me, “Why India?” I do sometimes answer with, “Why not?”

Notes from a dusty city

Sunday, 29 June 2008

Holi, Holi

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