Ravi Speaks:
Today my thought goes back to the seventies when I was studying in a school in Jammu and was around 15 years of age. We had a group of few schoolmates who were very close to each other and especially on occasions like Holi, Shivratri and so on we used to meet and celebrate together. Especially on the occasion of Holi-I remember for sure that we used to start very early in the morning after taking our breakfast from our home and go on adding our friends one by one after reaching their respective homes and getting them from there. By around 2.00 PM all of us say around ten to eleven people would gather and go to “Tawi”-river after the full celebrations of Holi in the afternoon.
I would relate one such Holi incidence-which I would remember for a long. In the morning my friend Sunil came to my place -wherefrom we took the colours and even the balloons etc and went to our other friend. Likewise, by around noon we all gathered together and started celebrating Holi by sprinkling the dry colour and even liquid colours on each other. During our visit to the friends’ places-we reached one of our friends’ places in “Rehari”-namely Anil and we saw that Anil was not ready to accompany us and had not celebrated the Holi till that time. We went to meet his father and requested him to send Anil with us. He point-blankly refused and asked us a few questions. The first question asked was what we understood from the word ”Culture”. I simply replied by saying in Hindi-“Sabhyatta”.He said affirmatively to me that if I knew the meaning of the word-how come I was drenched in liquid colours and celebrating the Holi like that. He further said that according to our culture we did not celebrate Holi like that. Rather we did not go together on the roadside to disturb others by throwing colours on them much as they would not like that to happen to them. He asked for some fruit from Anil’s mother and presented the same to us and refused for Anil to go out with us. So after sometime-when, we realised that Anil would not be coming we left him and went to get our other colleague from that area only.
So after around a couple of hours more while walking down the main roads of “Amphala” and the city areas we went to “Peerkho-area” which was on the way towards the river-“Tawi”. By around three in the afternoon, we reached the river and there we had a narrow escape. Since one of our colleagues had a small quarrel with the boy from the other group who too had come down to Tawi river. All the people after completing their Holi celebrations would gather at “Tawi” and take a dip there to wash off the colours and get fresh after the bath. The small quarrel developed into a bigger fight in no time and that guy started throwing stones at us and took out the small folding knife from his trousers and started aiming at our colleague with whom he had exchanged the bad and objectionable words. Our colleague first showed some patience and did not say anything to him for some time and he kept on provoking him and finally threw that knife more forcefully towards our colleague. The knife hit him in the left arm on the upper portion towards the shoulder side and immediately he started bleeding very profusely from that side. We all collectively attacked that boy and he ran away by crossing the river and went across to the other side which we used to call the Gujjar side-bank of the river. His people although were there near us only but nobody did any untoward activity once they saw our colleague bleeding very badly.
Meanwhile, we removed his shirt and after washing that portion we bandaged the same portion very tightly and we could feel that the profuse bleeding had stopped to some extent. The knife was kept with our people and we decided to reach his parents once we go back and show as to how their son had attacked our colleague and some of our people had even decided to attack him wherever he would meet next. In Jammu, those days using a knife or a small sword was very common and most of the self-style Heroes would keep this as their status symbol. Finally, once we came back to the city from riverside-we parted away to our respective homes and with our colleague one more person was sent to drop him at his place. By that time his condition was normal and there was no bleeding after the bandage was put tightly on his arm. Later we came to know that there was no dangerous and deep cut since we thought that he might have to get one or two stitches for that injury.
So, this episode made us remember our special Holi for the rest of the years so far whenever Holi comes and we cherish those memories with joy and also with the remainder of that unpleasant happening to one of our colleagues. Till I was in the tenth standard we used to celebrate Holi like this only where we all close friends would gather and celebrate it with very high spirits and immediately once we went to our colleges-things also changed and could not continue celebrating the same Holi in the same manner. Some of our friends had already gone out of Jammu for their respective training courses and others too had gone into other streams and we could not maintain that connection as well which used to be very firm during our school times.
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