Throwing abīr

अबीर या होलि तं चया ला ल्यासे अबीरं छंगु ख्वा: हीसि देका बी

21 March 2019, is many holidays all rolled into one. It is Nawruz or Spring Equinox and Holi at the same time, which is amazing it itself. It’s a great day to celebrate life and love and growth and goodness. It is also the day on which Bhavana and I were married 16 years ago. Yet this year, this morning, I cannot be there to make her a cup of tea; to sneak up on her with a spray bottle full of red-tinted water; to find old t-shirts for the children and try desperately to keep the chaos outside so that we can all make a total mess out of each other and the house and collapse laughing without too much cleaning afterwards. We have thrown abīr on each other in a remarkable number of places around the world, but right now she is there in Aberdeen with the daffodils bursting out, and I am here in Chittagong with the coucals and the mangos. Like so many other things these days that feels stupid and wrong and unjust, and like so many other things these days I could attribute blame or causality to particular historical, economic and personal processes that landed us apart on a day when we should have been together. It is certainly not for lack of love or a desire to be together! But in South Asia we learn about viraha, how separation drives home the true force of love and longing. And like so many other stupid and wrong and unjust things, with viraha the only possible answer is to acknowledge the suffering, embrace it and transform it into life and love and growth and goodness.

Holi is about embarrassing people. It’s about play, and flirting, and love, and spring. For every Newar, the song that comes immediately to mind begins abīr yā holi tã chayā lā lyase, abīrã chãgu khwaḥ hīsi dekā bī which is all about embarrassment, beauty and love. (If you want to know exactly what it means, now would be a great moment to learn a little Newari — it is the most poetic language I have ever heard. Here’s a link to the song.) Abīr is the red powder one throws, maybe just at anyone, but especially at someone you really love. Because this happens in public, that might be embarrassing, and if someone who you know loves you very much throws abīr on you in public, you still have to be angry about it. We could dig into the gender politics of all this, and my most wonderful teacher, friend, research partner, co-parent and wife Bhāvanā does so—both by theoretically challenging the sexism of a song about men publicly embarrassing women and then claiming it is affection, and by emptying bucketloads of used laundry water onto men and making sure to teach our children how to think and do gender wisely.

She is also intensely private. She mistrusts the Internet with very good reason: it has been used as a tool to oppress and shame Indigenous women ever since its inception.

So let me make this completely clear. For sixteen years, I have been married to the wisest, funniest, toughest, kindest person anywhere. I know other people think the same about their partners, and you’re right too, but I’m throwing the abīr right now so stand back a moment. She has told me off and held me up. She has been through truly appalling difficulties in her life, both before me and with me, and never once has she lost her fundamental courage or generosity. Right now she is raising our children without me physically there, and because she is canny and stubborn, they are thriving and she has found ways to make sure I can still be their father. She has demanded explanations that I didn’t realise were necessary, cut through bullshit I couldn’t see, and cooked food for housefuls of intellectuals and activists. She writes all over those books that I brought to our library, and I read through her margin notes and go wake her up from a much needed nap to ask what she meant. She leaves me alone when I really want to do the cooking, or go for a walk—but somehow she taught me to cook together with her and how to walk together as a family. More than once she has called me back to relationships within my own family that I thought were lost forever. She is frightened of spiders, but she still make absolutely sure the children see it when she carefully captures one in a jar and releases it outside. She is thrilled when we come back from the beach with the children carrying a dead bird, several seashells, photographs of dolphins and a cold. She speaks more languages than the sea.

And she will be furious with me for posting this, but how else can I throw abīr today?