Put Your Hands On Me, with Full Consent
On Phagwa, physical intimacy, and the borders between permission and touch
A riot of colour is still a riot.
I remember that precise border between my enjoyment and disenchantment with Phagwa, the Hindu holy festival of spring, colour, and love. Like Divali, Phagwa (or Holi) is often symbolized by a broad triumph of good over evil: the origin story I grew up with centred virtuous Prahlad, his wicked Asura father, and his wickeder aunt Holika, who wanted nothing more than to see her sweet nephew burn.
But as anyone who’s heard the tale knows, it was Holika who burned instead. Light over darkness, served with a side of roasted demoness. Isn’t that so often how these heroic fables go? Holika, the Medusa, Ursula the Sea Witch. Some woman craving greatness — or desiring that most ignominious of things, to be left alone — gets sacrificed by a six-packed swordwielder, or angel-smited by a roseate Ganymede.
I remember the first time a man touched me in a way I didn’t like at Phagwa, on the temple grounds. The grass was kaleidoscoped in fuschia, vermillion, cerulean, heliotrope, chartreuse, each colour dialled up in the sunlight. A hand, wet and sweaty, on my teenage waist. Another, yanking me back by my long braid, to rub powder in my face. When I was thirteen, I didn’t fully understand the difference between euphoria and panic. Now I know which one, more than the other, curled in my spine.
Yes, it’s true. This is not uncommon for Phagwa celebrations in Trinidad, in Suriname, on the subcontinent, wherever abeer is flung into faces, pelted six feet high in the air, fluted out of pressure-pumps into squealing crowds while chowtal music echoes brassy and pungent from big speakers or live troupes, each singing face smeared wide with joy. Or what resembles it. It’s hard to distinguish grimace from grin sometimes, under all that abandonment of pigment, that festive hue (and cry).
In the painting above, can you guess who I’d be? I’m that woman off to the side, a silver pichkari in my hand, and maybe tears in my eyes. First, see if you can find her. Second, see if she feels like you, too. I’m not saying I want you to feel that way. I’m saying I understand if you do.
If you, like me, like women the world over, have to negotiate between joy and the danger of being proximal to men who often steal it: a grope with abeer-stained hands, a laugh and a shrug saying it’s normal, what’s wrong with you that you don’t like it?
I love Phagwa. I hate how I was touched. It’s taken me years to accept that the two can exist, unharmoniously but equally tinged with truth. It may take you less time, or longer, to balance what you love with how it was damaged, but the journey belongs to no one at all except yourself. If you’ve ever needed someone to tell you that, then here I am. Imagining I’m standing in a field of grass in front of a temple, dressed in white, and only hands I chose to accept are touching my body, making it joyously bright.