Kite Flying | Makarand Paranjape

Kite Flying

        Since that evening, I have been wondering how to tell this story. What happened was not unusual and, doubtless, you must have read many stories of this sort. but, believe me, when it actually happens to you, you feel like an altered being, as if you've traded in your old life for a brand new one. But perhaps you're already getting restless with this introduction... As usual, that evening I was being driven back from my office when on the way I happened to notice a whole row of bright kites with coloured reels of thread hung in front of a neighborhood shop.

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        All in all, it hadn't been an unusual day for me. I had left home around 9:30 a.m. when the company car came to pick me up. I had a normal day at the office. The routine of work. Some visitors. Tea. Chatting. Files. Launch. A meeting in the afternoon..

        About my job, I won't tell you much more. Let's just say that I am a middle-aged, middle-level executive in a large company. Yes, I could have been working for the Government or for a Public Sector Corporation for that matter and It wouldn't have made the slightest difference to my story. I had a reasonably comfortable home, not without the usual challenges, of course, but nothing really to worry about. My wife worked as a teacher in one of the better schools in the city and that's where my eight-year old daughter studied too.

        So as the months and years trickled away, like sand through fingers, somewhere within I grew terribly afraid and impatient. I was waiting for God knows what to happen - something to get me out of my hopeless rut. Otherwise, I knew, it would be too late. I would turn into something irredeemable, something that I had dreaded becoming since my childhood - a nameless, average, uncreative, and predictable slob. I'm running out of time, I kept thinking. This thing is catching up with me.

        That evening, as I already told you, I was returning home after a normal, ordinary day at the office. Well, I had been looking vacantly outside my window when those bright Kites caught my eye. And suddenly, I felt a deep stirring inside me like a painful wrench. Thanks a lot uncle Freud, the cynic in me said, look what you've upturned-childhood memories. Yes, the row of kites brought back sharp images, crowded, undigested, out of some vault in my mind which I seemed to have sealed up long ago.

        I remembered my childhood in a pol in Baroda, where every Sankranti, kite-flying is a ritual. The nights that the Ustaads spent in making manja, then the inter-muhalla kite-flying competitions, the loudspeakers announcing a victory, the large charkhas of coloured thread, the variety of kites, the davpench or competition, the kheench or the dheel (the pull and let), the two techniques used to attack one's oppenent, the cuts in the fingers despite the leather guards, the boys running with bamboo poles to catch kites that had been cut, the yells of kati-hai (I've cut it!), the lean and hungry Ustaads, with pan-stained teeth spitting abuse at one another and as kids on the roof, proud to be entrusted with the slightest  task...

        "Driver, gadi roko," I heard myself saying suddenly. We had already crossed the shop with the kites and I found myself breaking into a run to get back to it. This was a different city and I didn't know the conventions of kite-flying here. It was only Dussehra; the kites were available early. I got into a shop shyly, looking, I am sure, incongruous in my jacket and tie.

        The shopkeepers was surprised to see me. I had never entered this shop before. An unkempt young men of 14 or 15 came to attend to me. When I asked, "How much," motioning to the kites, his face lit up. He simply loved anything to do with the kites, it seemed, and until I left, his smile never vanished. Perhaps I was his first customer. Yes, that might have been it because I had not seen the kites there before.

        In a transport of both confusion and deja vu I bought two kites for rupees each. Then a 400 yards spindle off thread (I went in for the one with the brand name : Madura Coats). Price: Rs 7.00. Then I selected some manja. On second thoughts, I decided not to buy the manja at all. How would it matter if my kite was cut or not - I wasn't a kid anymore nor was I going to compete with anyone. I found myself laughing at this thought as I left the shop. Yes, I felt light-hearted and free after quite a long time.

        The driver stared at the kites in my hand but said nothing. The neighbour's children smiled conspiratorially. I must have looked foolish, I kept the kites in the guest bedroom. Perhaps I wished to hide them from my wife. At any rate, she must have noticed because nothing really escaped her. But, mercifully, she said nothing.

        Then, yesterday, I came home a little earlier. The house was silent. I turned on the UGC programme on TV just for company and took out my kites. I decided to harness one of them. I had forgotten the Gujarati word for tying the pilot string from which the thread is attached to the kite (lagam?) but I discovered that I still remember how to do it. Ilit an agarbatti and burned two pairs of tiny holes into the delicate bamboo cross-bow chassis. Then took a double foot or so of the Madura Coats thread and tied it at both ends. Then measuring an equidistant spot on the loop from both ties, I knotted it rather well, I thought, after all these years.

        You must be wondering what happens next. Did I fly the kite? How did I feel? Changed, liberated? Was that the point of the story? How does an ordinary, even insignificant event becomes charged with extraordinary significance? And so on. And if I did any of this, you might react a little contemptuously : "What a predictable little story". So, I shan't allow you any such easy satisfaction, I'm afraid. I refuse to tell you anything more at all. You can end the story your own way. Go ahead, it's yours.

        I'll do, instead, something rather different, in lieu of an ending -  for What's a tale without a sense of ending? I sell reproduce below a few lines I wrote, after many years, that evening:

        Kite-flying can be a symbol of so many things -  of freedom, of imagination, of human respiration, of our attempts to reach the skies, to fly, soar in the wind, to quench our thirst for the infinite. Yes, the finite's longing for the infinite, we can call it.

        Who knows if we'll ever succeed? Perhaps, success will never be granted to us. Because, in the end, the kite must be lowered after all. However invisible, the string to pull it, to navigate in the skies, to manipulate, it always remains. However high up in the sky, our kite is always anchored to us, earthbound that we are even when we are on the roofs of our houses.

        But what happens if we let go, if our thread is cut, no matter if it's Madura Coats Glaze Superfine? Where are we then? Who is to say whether we shall disappear into the sky, lost forever in the azure heavens or be grounded again, trapped by the brambles tied to the end of a long bamboo pole in a little boy's hand? Only to be mounted up again, sent up to cut down other kites or be cut by them? Then at last, mangled, our ribs showing, left forlornly struck on an electrical pole? Or caught in the branches of a tree, fluttering when the breeze move us?