There is a specific smell I associate with Holi.

It is not the gulal. Not the sweet chemical tang of colored powder cutting through the air. It is something warmer ghee and sugar and cardamom hitting a hot pan somewhere inside the house, drifting out through every window and crack in the door, wrapping around you before the first splash of color ever reached your face.

That smell meant something was about to happen. That smell meant today is different. When I was a child, Holi didn't just arrive it built. Days before, there was a particular electricity in the house. Mom in the kitchen from early morning. The sounds of preparation the clink of steel vessels, the rhythmic pat of dough being shaped. Gujiya. Mathri. Whatever she decided that year. The anticipation of it was almost better than the thing itself.

Outside, the whole neighborhood was in on it. Everybody was excited. Not just the children everybody. The uncles filling up buckets the night before. The aunties calling across the courtyard. There was a collective leaning-in, like the whole world briefly agreed to become lighter.

And we ran. We played. We came home drenched in colors that wouldn't wash out for days, grinning, breathless, skin stained pink and blue and green proof that we had been fully, completely present in the moment.I didn't know then that I was storing these things. I didn't know I was building a version of "home" inside me that I would carry for the rest of my life.

I don't remember when it stopped feeling that way.

That's the strange thing about becoming an adult the shifts are so gradual that you can't point to a moment and say there, that's when it changed. Somewhere between growing up and growing away, Holi became just another date on the calendar. A day I would acknowledge, maybe call home, maybe post something.

The excitement didn't leave dramatically. It just… thinned. Like a color that's been washed too many times. And then came the years of not going home at all.

Work. Deadlines. The particular war-like logic that quietly colonizes ambitious people I cannot afford to stop. I cannot afford a break. Every day I am not building is a day I am falling behind. Holi became a casualty of that logic. A gentle thing that couldn't survive the urgency of everything else.

I don't remember the last time I went home for Holi. That sentence sits in me strangely as I write it. This year, I called my mother. I asked, casually the way you ask when you already almost know the answer whether she was going to make sweets and snacks this time.

She paused. And then she said something that has not left me since:

"If there are no children around, what's the point? Who will eat it?"

She wasn't accusing me. She wasn't even sad, exactly or if she was, she had already accepted it, the way parents accept things quietly, one resignation at a time. She was just stating a fact about the world as it now exists.

But it hit like something physical.

Because she wasn't just talking about sweets. She was talking about the ritual. The reason. The whole elaborate beautiful act of making something for people who are present enough to receive it. Without that presence, the ghee and the sugar and the cardamom don't become gujiya. They're just ingredients sitting in a kitchen.

I am the missing variable. I have been for years. Here is the thing I keep turning over in my mind:

I have been running this race this relentless, exhausting, eyes-forward racewith the logic that it will eventually mean something. That the sacrifice is investment. That the distance is temporary. That one day the work will pay off and I will return, not just physically but fully, with something to show for all the Holis I missed.

It has to work. I have kept no other choice.

That last part is the truest thing I've said to myself in years. I have burned the boats. I have made this the only path. And so I run it, because what is the alternative to have missed all those festivals for nothing?

But my mother's words cracked something open.

What if the work working out and the life being lived are not sequential? What if they are not a before-and-after, but things that have to exist at the same time imperfectly, messily, simultaneously?

What if the children she's waiting for… is just me? I don't have a resolution for this. I'm not writing this to tell you I've figured it out, or that I'm flying home next week, or that I've suddenly discovered balance. I haven't.

I'm writing this because Holi is today, and the color-smell is in the air somewhere in my memory, and my mother's kitchen is quiet, and I am sitting far away building something that had better be worth it.

I'm writing this because I suspect I am not the only one.

There are a lot of us out here people who left, people who are building, people who chose the war-like path and are now too far in to turn back. People who call home and ask about sweets and receive answers that sting in ways we didn't prepare for.

And maybe that's enough for now to name it. To say: I see what I've traded. I understand the cost more clearly than I did before. And I am carrying it with me, alongside the ambition, alongside the urgency, alongside the hope that it is all, somehow, worth something. The colors fade in water. But they stain your skin for days afterward.

Maybe that's the whole thing, right there. You don't have to be standing in the chaos to carry it with you. Holi is already inside me in the smell of cardamom, in the particular feeling of a neighborhood leaning into joy together, in my mother's hands shaping something sweet for whoever is lucky enough to be present.

I am not present this year.

But I'm paying attention now, in a way I wasn't before. And maybe that's the beginning of something.

Happy Holi.

If this found you somewhere far from home I see you.