Jesse Ellison and Emma Goldman, Holi-ed in Vrindavan. (Erik Wander)

It is day seven of our marathon journey through northern India and after a 3 a.m. wake-up call, a seven-hour train from Amritsar to Delhi immediately followed by a four-hour bus ride, and some very questionable “cheese” sandwiches, we were all fairly well convinced that our intrepid leaders were actually planning to sacrifice us to the country’s many gods, in the guise of helping us “submit to Mother India.”

We had finally disembarked from the bus (air conditioning options: tropical or frigid) and were approaching the ashram at the Jiva Institute of Vedic Studies in Vindravan, 150 kilometers south of Delhi. It was our destination for the day, and we approached by foot, as the bus could only go so far down the narrow streets. Monkeys ran alongside us; and as we grew nearer the drums got louder and louder.

We hear the chanting of “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna. Hare Rama, Hare Rama.” And we see a group of men and women dancing bhangra in the street outside the ashram. Then, out of nowhere, someone smacks me in the forehead with a handful of hot pink powder, gulal, and within minutes, our entire group, and theirs, is covered head to toe with pink, green and yellow powder. Our faces and clothes are suddenly tie-dyed, and everyone is dancing.

It is a fury of color as the drumming grows louder and louder. Shira is waving her hands wildly in the air, bouncing her shoulders up and down. Greg takes off his shower cap and shakes his hips with Mannika and the yogis from the ashram. Amanda, her face covered in pink powder, looks at me, “Are we having fun yet?”

According to Hindu mythology, an ancient atheist king decided he wanted to be worshipped as a God but his own son was the lone holdout, insisting on worshipping the Hindu god Vishnu. The king’s sister, Hollika, was said to be able to withstand fire, so he told her to take her nephew into a fire and sit him on her lap so that the boy would burn. But the king’s son survived and Hollika burned to death.

This story is the origin of the Holi festival and although it is not entirely clear why, today the Holi festival of color is considered a celebration of good over evil and an exuberant welcome of spring. Every March in northern India, Hindus and non-Hindus alike douse each other in powdered color and water, drink marijuana-laced bhang, and in some areas, women beat men playfully with sticks.

Even though today is only choti Holi, the smaller celebration, to be followed by the larger, even more exuberant one the next day, from the bus on the way down, we saw hundreds of men and women covered head to toe in the colorful powders. Watching people smack each other with handfuls of powder, play-fight, and get drunk on bhang, it’s easy to see how it could get dangerous—especially with a big group of foreigners. Our version of Holi takes place safely within the confines of the ashram; still, it was a welcomed moment of release for our weary group.

From the surrounding rooftops families of women and children watch our frolicking in the streets the whole time. I can only imagine they must be baffled. In the preceding days, we have visited so many temples and sites, and spoken with too many people for me to try to count now. This is the first time, as Aili pointed out later, that something has been staged entirely for our benefit. “It’s the first time I really felt like a tourist,” she says. “But then again, I don’t want to get groped.”

Later, after lunch with our hosts at the ashram, the head teacher there, Dr. Satya Narayana Dasa, affectionately known as Babaji, tells us how he gave up his comfortable life as an IIT-educated M-Tech engineer in the United States and moved back to his native India to study the holy scriptures of Hinduism. “Science and technology has made a lot of advancements towards making life easier materially, but there is also something lacking,” he says. “This is what I felt when I was in America. It is the first world power, but people also aren’t happy. I realized that what people need is something India can give: spiritual knowledge.” A few minutes later, the power goes out.

For a few moments outside the ashram, with our group dancing wildly to the drums and chants of “Holi Hai!” no one noticing the dogs chasing the monkeys up and over the walls, and even later, sitting together on the floor of the pitch-black basement, it feels as if maybe we have all finally submitted to this deeply foreign and mysterious place. But after this we will get back aboard our bus and go, of all places, to the Best Western Radha Ashok, where we will hide out until it is safe to carry on to Agra. This, I think, reminds everyone that no matter how much we submit during this short sojourn, we are only scratching the surface.