Two worshipers leaving Lord Krishna's birthplace, in Mathura. (Amanda Millner-Fairbanks)

“India’s about as remote as you can get,” mused Emma Goldman, as she sat in the restaurant inside the Radha Ashok Hotel in Mathura, deep in the “Hindi Heartland” of Utter Pradesh. “But I watched ‘Almost Famous’ this morning and now I’m eating fried eggs and ketchup.”

Her father, Professor Ari Goldman, sat next to her in a gray hooded sweatshirt splattered in bright pink and green from yesterday’s Holi festivities.

The group entered the eighth day of its journey through India hunkered down inside the hotel, waiting out the marauding bands that stood just outside the gated compound, paint balloons in hand.

It was the second day of Holi, or “Big Holi,” when Hindus and non-Hindus alike celebrate the triumph of good over evil with bhang—mashed marijuana leaves boiled with milk—and brightly colored powder and water mixtures known as gulal.

Mathura is a famous Hindu pilgrimage site as the birthplace of Lord Krishna, the blue-skinned god of the Bhagavat Gita. Hindus believe that Krishna particularly enjoyed the holiday, as he relished flirting with girls and playing with friends, so Holi takes on even greater significance in this region. The celebrating begins as early as 7 a.m., but by early afternoon, “it becomes calm down,” as Punit Upadhyay at the Radha Ashok front desk described. Most of the class waited inside, but three brave souls stepped out for a walk into town.

Before 11 a.m., that team returned, bewildered, their faces and clothing covered in even deeper shades of pink and green than the day before. “After they hit you, they hug you three times,” said Goldman, as the trio explained they had been hit by Holi revelers even before they made it into town. Bruce Wallace was offered a “cigarette” by a boy who appeared no older than 10.

Finally the group filed onto the bus and headed out after 4 p.m., driving through streets that had taken on a languorous, post-Mardi Gras-esque air. Men and women covered in color strolled about, in step with the cows that also showed evidence of merrymaking: they too hadn’t escaped the gulal.

After dodging monkeys down an alley of bookstalls, the group underwent security checks. Women went through physical searches, men through metal detectors, and they reached Krishna Janmasthan, the site of Krishna’s birth. The temple has been a target for terrorist activity and communal strife ever since a mosque was built next door 500 years ago. But today even the guards were in good spirits as they gleamed with a bright pink hue as they watched over Krishna’s holy site.

“He was born 5,000 years ago,” explained the group’s local tour guide, Deepak Baradwaj. “Krishna was born in a jail.” Fortune-tellers predicted that a child would overthrow King Kansa, so the monarch killed all children born around that time. Krishna’s parents were imprisoned, and the king awaited their newborn, but Krishna’s mother had been told in a dream that her son would be a reincarnation of Vishnu.

As this was the first Hindu temple the group visited, and also the most foreign religion to many students, they tried to filter their understanding through their own experiences.

“Was Krishna born to a virgin mother?” asked Mariana Martinez, a Mexican Catholic, as she looked upon the actual spot considered Krishna’s birthplace. She stood in a dank, dark room that held only a simple raised shrine under six colorful panels depicting the story of his birth. Just as Jesus was born to the Virgin Mary, a birth foretold by the archangel Gabriel, so too Krishna’s birth was prophesized and divinely conceived.

In order to save the baby, Krishna’s parents snuck him out of jail in a basket of rushes and replaced him with a girl. “This is a similar story to Moses,” observed the Israeli-born Dikla Kadosh. Moses, too, was born in captivity and escaped through a basket of rushes sent down a river.

When Kansa came to kill Krishna, he picked up the baby girl to throw to the ground. Instead the goddess Durga appeared, saying that the one who would kill him was still alive. Krishna was then raised by the community and was a mirthful child, stealing yogurt and butter from the cowherds. In his youth, he became a playful, womanizing god who had 16,108 wives.

The temple opened to a tree-lined courtyard, with colorful pieces of cloth tied on every branch. Mannika Chopra translating the guide's story, said that maidens used to bathe in the river naked and Lord Krishna told them not to. When they continued to do so, he mischieviously tied their clothes to the trees. Today devotees mimic this story, and make wishes as they tie bits of sari to the trees.

“Krishna is portrayed as so human,” said fellow student Aili McConnon as she looked on the throngs of worshippers that had come to end Holi with offerings to Lord Krishna. “It’s nice to see Krishna’s birthplace, who is so mischievous, on such a mischievous holiday as Holi.”

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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.

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