These are quite important words around this time of the year. The first one refers to the upcoming festival (of colour) ‘Holi’, in which people (mostly sisters) tie threads called ‘Moli’ around other people’s (mostly brothers) wrists, and mix red powder called ‘Roli’ with water to put on foreheads as Tika. There is also the other aspect of Holi, where people play with water and colours and colours mixed in water by drenching and colouring each other. Others, who like to keep some distance from this mess, fill bucket full of balloons with water (with or without colours) and throw them at others from a safe distance. As a kid, I was such a person. The routine for a couple of years during this time of the year was: wake up early in the morning, prepare a bucket full of water balloons (NO colour), go to the roof, and hurl them towards ‘victims’ walking on the roads. As one may expect, the devil is in the details. The (un)fortunate detail was that this house we lived in was basically surrounded by a vast field on three sides, and a wasteland on the other. The roads from where repercussions could not find a way to our house were beyond this field, and those were, obviously, the preferred roads for a kid to assault hapless pedestrians. But it also meant, that kid could never make the balloons land on the roads beyond the field, let alone on pedestrians! So that was how the ‘fun’ aspect of Holi played out for a few years in my childhood. And I feel my daughter is missing out on that. But that’s how it is… times change, people change, circumstances change, priorities change.
Even then, what does not change is the abundance of sweets on this occasion. And I am making sure that at least she experiences that aspect as much or as well as I did. In addition, she did get a toy water-pistol shaped like a dog from her mother yesterday. And she was enjoying it today morning with her menagerie of plastic toy animals. Now, I had never played with a water pistol in my childhood so I thought of joining her too. And she gladly handed the toy-pistol to me. Just after three presses of the trigger by me, the dog-shaped-water-pistol stopped working. If you foreshadowed this happening two sentences ago, kudos to you. I had not and neither had my daughter. But she turned out to be more mature in this situation than I expected. She did ask something like “did it break?”, but without using the pronoun ‘you’. And when I confirmed her assertion, she did not make a big deal out of it. She asked me to fill up the toy with a little more water and continued to tinker with it for a while as I briskly made a beeline towards the kitchen for my breakfast. I am assuming her mother will take care of the rest, or has already taken care of it. Who knows? The moral of the story: times may change, people may change, circumstances may change, priorities may change; but grown-ups screwing up childhoods never changes. And on that note,
