Holi Festival - Day One

Holi Festival started on the 10th of March and finished on the 11th. The first night everyone celebrates by burning a giant pyre to symbolize the burning of some old evil dude who forced people into worshipping him by terrorizing the masses. It's a pretty cool story but I'll probably butcher it so I'll just leave it alone. : ) On the 11th everyone continues the celebration by throwing coloured powders at everyone else. On this day everyone is supposed to forget past feuds or enemies and make friends anew. It's a really neat day and everyone is covered with colour. We were in Udaipur for the festival.
~ excerpts from my journal~
March 9th
...After leaving the city palace we found more greatness. We were lazily on the hunt for some white, cheap clothes for the Holi Festival when we stumbled upon a shop owned by a man named Ash. We could immediately tell that this man was different from the masses of shopkeepers we'd stumbled passed on our travels. He had on a white mesh Fedora that read more Cuban than Indian and from his first, "welcome inside, ladies" we could feel the eccentricity like electricity in the air. His accent jumped all over the place and generally told the story of his travels. Italy, France, and various other European countries (with a strange mix of something that sounded like he was perhaps stealing lines from Good Will Hunting). When we asked him if he had anything cheap for us for the festival he chuckled a little, rocking back and forth ever so slightly, and replied, "why ladies, would you pay for something to be thrown away when you could simply have it for free?"
Well, of course. How silly of us.
Ash swaggered to his feet and began, in his grandiose way, to toss various articles of clothing at us. Before we really had any idea what was going on, the man had bullied us with his strange charm into having a cup of black tea and lime with him while he performed card tricks for us and amused us with silly stories.
The 10th
We arrived back at Ash's shop the next morning to introduce to him to our friend, Kate. When we sat down and asked him what he'd been up to that morning he waved his hand nonchalantly through the air and replied, " Oh, not too much. I had to settle some business. I bought a hotel on the lakefront. Paid in cash....."
.......We met Ash in his shop to have some drinks before going down to watch the burning of the pyre. We all began to get the feeling that, although he had taken it upon himself to show us a good time, we were also his entertainment for the evening. Any time one of us commented that we might like to eat or drink domething, he would immediately order one of his minions to bring it to us while waving around large fistfulls of cash. It was all very over the top.
As the festivities began and fireworks began exploding dandilion-esque in the sky, we took off and left Ash to polish off the rum. We watched the fire throw up firecrackers and fireworks into the fray with mixed feelings of excitement and something nearing terror. We didn't want to get too close but Ash soon appeared, super tall in the crowd and clad all in white, to drag us to the fire. He walked us around the flames once (for good luck) and then decided that the colour throwing for us should start early.
There were a few people playing with colours and we tried to steer clear (to save it all for the next day) but once Ash had marked our cheeks with powder we were sure targets!
We all turned into rainbows in a matter of minutes and the silliness seemed to escalate in relation to how frenzied the paint looked on our crayon-box faces.
The police soon started sending everyone home so Ash snapped us up and hurried us off to the rooftop restaurant of his newly bought hotel. He walked in and everyone in the building jumped up to prepare us a feast. When we'd all eaten until we could eat no more, Ash bid us adieu and from out of nowhere, as though he'd conjured it from thin air, a man with a motorbike appeared. Ash hopped gracefully on the back as though it were some great white steed. He turned a lazy, drunken face at us and mumbled a slow smiling farewell from under his mustache before riding off into the night - his white clothes a ridiculous mess of rainbowed ruin.