India, March 4 -- Holi never arrived quietly in the early 1980s. It gathered momentum. When my father was a chemistry lecturer at DAV College, Ambala, we lived in the professors' colony on campus. Sixteen families occupied the ground and first floors of that modest building, and when Holi came, those two floors became a world of their own.

Celebrations didn't require invitations. We began at one house and moved to the next, a travelling carnival of laughter. Doors didn't just open; they were expected to stay open. Elders settled into easy conversations, while someone cracked a joke or narrated an anecdote. Children were prodded to recite poems. Laughter travelled effortlessly through stairwells and corridors; the festival depended less o...