Cold Bay Area rains fail to shut down vibrant Holi celebration in Fremont

The color of Saturday was pure drab gray until Purav Bhatt and his friends filled the air — and each other’s faces — with fistfuls of hot pink, bright yellow and deep blue powder.

On a cold, rainy day in Fremont, dozens of Indian Americans gathered at Irvington High School to celebrate Holi, a colorful Hindu festival celebrating the triumph of good over evil and the arrival of spring.

Temperatures were in the 40s and the courtyard at the high school was doused in rain, but that didn’t hamper the spirit of hundreds of people, who tore open bags of colorful powder, exchanging greetings of “Holi hai,” or “Happy Holi,” to celebrate the holiday and their Indian heritage with friends and family.

“This is the festival of color, and we are playing with color,” said Bhatt, a Fremont resident. “It’s like sharing love with each other, you know? That’s what we’re celebrating.”

The crowd livened up the gray afternoon by throwing colored powder and adorning one another’s faces in an array of hues — rich cobalt blue and electric lime green, warm golden yellow and fiery crimson.

Rima Mehta, who attended the event with her family and friends, said the festival is nostalgic for her – she remembers much bigger Holi festivals from her childhood in Mumbai, India, where it was “all on the streets.”

“It’s not confined to a park there,” Mehta said. “We play in every building, every apartment – everybody comes together,. Sometimes people start celebrating a week in advance.”

Although the celebration is smaller here, Mehta said, it’s still a lot of fun — which is why she and others still chose to attend, despite being zipped up in puffy coats and warm layers.

“It’s so cold, we’re playing in jackets — it’s supposed to be colored clothes, not colored coats,” Mehta said. “But we’re still coming together so we can play together.”

Romesh Japra, the chairman of the Federation of Hindu Americans, said the organization began planning their Holi celebration about a year in advance — they’ve been holding the annual celebrations in the Bay Area since 1983.

“It used to be a lot smaller in the 80s, and in the 90s, we got out into bigger fields,” Japra said. “Not only Hindu Americans or Indian Americans, but everyone comes and joins us.”

Japra said events like these are important for Indians to pass their culture down to younger generations, who might take root in the Bay Area and continue passing on these traditions.

“As Indian Americans, we feel very strongly that our heritage, our culture, our philosophy, our values and ethos, need to be passed down,” Japra said. “The things which we celebrate — how we should throw away our inhibitions and our enemies, and how we should all get together and embrace each other — through these festivals, we can get this message across.”

Japra said it’s tough to choose a favorite color out of the many you might see at a Holi celebration — every one of them is important.

“You have to have different colors on your body,” he said. “That’s the only way you can look good. Everybody should color themselves up.”