Of all the Hindu festivals celebrated throughout South Asia, Holi is by far the most well-known globally. Every March, children and elderly alike gather in the streets to toss colored powders and celebrate the turning of the seasons. The result is visually striking—smiling communities and sacred sites drenched in every hue of the rainbow. When I traveled to India in the Spring of 2019, I knew that the Festival of Colors would be an event to remember, but I had absolutely no idea what to expect.
I lived in Hyderabad, Telangana during my time in India. As the fifth largest city in the subcontinent, Hyderabad was well connected to other major cities via airways and railroads, and my study abroad group did a fair bit of interstate travel using these methods. However, much of India remains rural and largely disparate from urban centers. According to a census conducted in 2020, more than 65% of India’s population still lives in rural areas. These areas are not so easily accessible by the convenient, direct forms of transportation that I am used to.
One such area is Vrindavan, Uttar Pradesh in North India. Mentioned in many Hindu texts as the childhood home of the God Krishna, this city has rich mythological significance. Krishna is the 8th avatar of Vishnu, the preserver deity in the Hindu holy trinity (trimurti). He is the god of love, protection, compassion, and he features prominently in the Bhagavad Gita. This text is excerpted from the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, and serves as a foundation for devotional Yoga practices. It is standard reading for Yogis, just as the Holy Bible is for Christians and the Qur’an is for Muslims. The festival Holi celebrates Krishna’s divine love for his devotees, his kingdom, and especially his consort, Radha. The pair (commonly abbreviated to, simply, Krishna Radha) represent the union of masculine and feminine energies, the cosmic combination of spirit and material, of reality and illusion, the complete constitution of the universe. After puja, or worship, of the two deities, devotees celebrate their union by smearing themselves with color. Nowhere is this practice more vibrant than Vrindavan, the historical setting of Krishna’s notorious romances.
Naturally, I thought, what better place to experience Holi for the first time than in the district where it all began? Georgia, my roommate from Ohio University, was studying in Thailand at the time, so she planned to meet me in Vrindavan. We each recruited some friends to join us, and we booked our plane tickets. The gang coming from Hyderabad consisted of my friends Jonny, Allison, Kelly, Hunter, and myself. The Bangkok crew included Georgia, JJ, Ejayah, and Celine. Little did we know that the travel to and from the festival would amount to a religious experience in and of itself!
The first leg of our journey was an Uber. We routinely ordered Ubers to our hostel on the Hyderabad Central University campus. Admittedly, we also routinely encountered issues with Indian Uber, but it was our main mode of transport out of campus. We had a 7 am flight to catch, so I ordered an Uber ahead of time to arrive at 4 am. In the dark of the early morning, we gathered soundlessly in the lobby with our strategically packed backpacks. We waited. And we waited. No Ubers arrived, and we began to panic. No one was awake; no one would accept our last-minute request.
Just as we had accepted the inevitability of missing our flight, a silver SUV pulled up in front of the hostel gates. We piled in without asking too many questions. This tardiness should have been the first indicator of divine influence in our travels. Later, an inspection of my Uber reservation would reveal that our vehicle had been cancelled due to lack of availability. Somewhat miraculously, our chauffeur had been hired to transport an entirely different group to the airport. He had mistakenly arrived a day early and was lucky to find us waiting for him.
We made it to the Hyderabad airport just in the nick of time to have our bags x-rayed and our boarding passes approved. We rode an airport bus onto the tarmac to board a plane destined for Delhi, the nearest major city to Vrindavan. Our flight was rather uneventful, but Georgia’s group was not so fortunate—they had booked a Thailand-based budget airline called NokScoot, which resulted in a series of strange events that they recounted to us later. First, they nearly missed their flight due to an unannounced departure change. Somehow, a NokScoot employee located them in the airport to alert them that their plane was about to leave. Then, after boarding the plane, they were surprised to find that all the other passengers seemed to know one another, and none of them seemed to want to stay in their assigned seats.
After witnessing a takeoff game of musical chairs, Georgia and JJ tried to escape the unyielding attention of a man who kept hopping seats until he ended up in the same row as them. Halfway through the flight, a persistent “ding-dong” sound began to emanate from the plane. Upon asking a flight attendant, they learned that a passenger had fallen asleep on his call button, and the attendants either could not or would not wake him to silence the noise. NokScoot Airlines has since been liquidated, leaving us to wonder about this odd flight experience for all of eternity.
The Hyderabad gang landed in Delhi at 10 am, but our voyage was far from over. We hopped an underground rail that connected the farthest terminals of the massive Delhi airport to one another. Whether we even needed to ride this train, we’re still not sure. That said, we ended up in the wrong part of the airport—rail maps were relentlessly confusing, and the staff seemed to have no idea how to direct us. Panic began to set in again as we realized we had less than an hour to catch our bus. We made the collective decision to abandon the Delhi Metro and instead flagged down a rickshaw driver just outside the airport.
Negotiating rates with rickshaw drivers was generally challenging given our…ahem… aggressively white appearance. I struggled to communicate prices with my beginner Hindi, and this task was made no less difficult by the incredible vagueness of Indian addresses. Our bus tickets instructed us to meet at “Sec 37 Indian Oil Petrol Pump.” I had hoped that this location might become evident as we approached the cross-streets, but to no avail. Annoyed with our indecisiveness, the rickshaw driver dumped us in a plaza lined with rusty buses. He shrugged helplessly at us as he drove away.
With less than 20 minutes until our bus departure time, we frantically compared our tickets to each bus’s sign. Several drivers stopped us along the way, insistent that we were looking for their bus, and there was truly no way of knowing which one we had purchased tickets for. They all seemed to be going the same route, or at least, that’s what the drivers told us. At one point, Jonny completely gave up the chase and asked a stranger to light his bidi, a type of Indian cigarette. We stood around in a huddle and puffed for a bit. It seemed like the only thing we knew how to do in that moment.
Indian bus drivers continued to hound us until we made the arbitrary decision to follow a man and his young child onto a bus. This one seemed as random as any of the others, but the driver accepted our tickets and allowed us to sit, so we did so. At first, we each had our own seat along the back row. At each stop, however, more and more people piled on. About an hour in, we were shoulder-to-shoulder, sitting eight people in a row designed for five.
The bus was unbearably muggy and warm, owing in no small part to the ever-growing crowd in the aisles. I tried to focus on breathing in fresh air through the 1 inch opening in the window. As we drove farther away from the city, however, the roads became increasingly rough, and dust soon began to infiltrate my airways, catalyzing a full-on asthma attack. I wheezed, crushed against the side of the bus, being tossed up and down by the poor suspension. After what felt like forever, I drifted into a restless sleep, my skull bouncing against the dirty window glass.
I can’t have been asleep long because our ride was only meant to be three hours. I awoke suddenly to a concerned Indian man speaking to me in Hindi. My friends stared at me helplessly. Looking distinctly more native than the rest of my American group, I often found myself acting as an ambassador in a language I had only just begun to study. I knew right away that something was wrong—otherwise, I would not be fielding this stranger’s concerns.
“Aapko kahaa ja ruhe hain?” (“where are you going?”) the man asked.
“Vrindavan ko,” I mumbled, still disoriented from my reduced capacity to breathe. His eyes grew wide.
“Vrindavan? Nahee.”
After some back and forth, I deciphered the problem: we had missed our stop. The stranger alerted the bus driver, who pulled off to the side of the road rather hastily and allowed us to unload. I had no idea how all four of my travel buddies had missed the memo, even if the announcement had been in Hindi. Nor did I know how this strange man knew our mistake before we did. Nevertheless, we owed it to the stranger. Without his help, we would have ended up very lost in rural Uttar Pradesh.
“Dhanyavaad!” I thanked him as the bus pulled away. Then, I realized another problem. Even with the stranger’s help, we were very lost in rural Uttar Pradesh. The bus had dropped us on the side of a quiet highway overpass, and none of us had cell service. There didn’t seem to be any towns or cities for miles.
This time, we didn’t have a chance to panic, as our second guardian angel appeared out of thin air. He was a young man with piercing eyes and perfect English, which was even more miraculous than his inexplicable arrival. He helped us down a rocky hillside with our luggage, then hailed another rickshaw and sent us on our way. This rickshaw, our SEVENTH vehicle of the day, was a full-on party tuk-tuk, equipped with lavish décor, multi-colored string lights, and a bumping subwoofer. For the first time during our travels in India, the driver passed us the aux. We played our tunes obnoxiously loud as we careened down the bumpy rural roads, waving at amused pedestrians and trying our hardest to enjoy the thirteenth hour of our journey. Keep in mind that I was still holding a crippling asthma attack at bay.
Around six pm, we rolled into the city of Vrindavan, where festivities for the eve of Holi were in full swing. Many residents had already brought out their colored powders and were enthusiastic to get the Americans in on the action. In our open-sided rickshaw, we were subject to rowdy hands reaching for our clothes and body parts. At one point, we came to a full stop in traffic and a man stepped out of his driver’s seat to take a picture of us. I tried to tell him no, in both English and Hindi, and he ignored me, coming closer and closer with each snapshot. Frankly, I was fed up. I slapped the phone out of his hand as we drove off. Not my proudest moment, but I was just beginning to learn how to establish physical boundaries with persistent Indian men.
Shortly thereafter, the rickshaw driver pulled off to the side of the road and nodded to us to get out. We did, obediently, before realizing that we still had no idea where we were. Much like the bus stop, the address to our AirBnB was vague, accompanied by an equally vague photo of a townhome complex that seemed to match every building in the neighborhood. The rickshaw driver sped off as soon as he had cash in his hand, leaving us to wander the nondescript streets with our bulky luggage in tow.
I’m not sure how long we wandered. All I know is that we eventually made it to our destination. Using the AirBnB listing, we located the neighboring complex, where was ran into our host, Parul. Parul kindly led us to our rental home, brought us tiffins of curry, and left us alone to rest and recover from the treacherous trek. Surprisingly, Georgia’s group had also made it to the AirBnB, and we were relieved to find them napping when we arrived. We hugged, introduced the two groups to one another, and swapped stories about our equally absurd adventures.
Despite our difficulties, we came to realize that the long road to Vrindavan was half of the Holi experience. Pilgrimage plays a large role in many Hindu traditions; devotees travel long distances and endure the accompanying hardships to prove that their god’s grace is worth traversing the world for. Especially in a country like India, it requires great dedication to take time off work, travel to religious sites, and practice rites in a foreign community. The expedition itself is meant to bring the individual closer to god by challenging the convenience of the individual’s mode of worship.
Indeed, we were awe-inspired by the perseverance required to reach Krishna’s childhood home, and even more grateful for the experience because we knew how fortunate we were to have made it. We felt that Krishna himself had sent avatars to guide us on our journey, for there was no way we could have succeeded without the help of the mysterious NokScoot employee, the strange man on the bus, or the kind English speaker on the highway overpass. To this day, I suspect divine influence when I think about the number of obstacles we overcame on the way.
On the day of Holi, we played with a fervor akin to lifelong devotees of Krishna. We rode around in a caravan of rickshaws and gleefully threw colors in the air, all the while trying to avoid the dreaded buckets of street water which raucous boys aimed at our faces. We visited the major temples in the city, including Katyayani Shakti Peeth, a mythologically significant site that is rumored to house ringlets of hair from the Hindu Goddess herself. We drank bhaang (a sacramental yogurt drink made from cannabis leaves), ate chaat, and were merry.
One part enjoyment, another part pure terror, Holi was the most fun we would never want to have again. I can’t say I would ever go back to Vrindavan for the infamous festival, but I would still recommend it to other travelers who are comfortable traveling long distances on a wide variety of vehicles. It was an unforgettable experience, one that undoubtedly strengthened my Yogic resolve. Personally, I am not a Krishna worshipper, but I experienced the cosmic love and connection during my Holi pilgrimage 
