kite season

With scores of evenings lost to the inescapable confinement of a desk job, I was slowly but surely turning into a full-blown cynic. The statistics will tell you that it had all gone horribly wrong this year – the monsoons had failed, the economy had plummeted and Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest again. I was becoming more and more convinced that we were all doomed to merely exist in a world mutilated by ‘growth’. That’s when I decided to cut me some slack, work a bit faster during the day and make it home in time to watch the evenings. 

I did it for two weeks and it was brilliant. I discovered that my terrace was a lovely place to be on from six to seven; the breeze was just right, the light slanted at just the right angle and the other day, I caught sight of a bright yellow White-Eye. I tried to catch up on all the reading I was behind on in my worn-out cane chair in a corner that I was so beginning to love. I would read into the last hour of fading light, till the sun finally sizzled behind the buildings. Then last Sunday, just as Bhisma swore his larger than life oath of celibacy, a kite crash-landed on me. I decided to give up the comforts of my corner and cane chair for the safety of the indoors for a while.

It’s kite season; the time of year when the rains come down to a trickle, the last of the mangoes flaunt themselves in a final bid to summer, the winds pick up and stir the great god Vishnu from his four-month slumber, the holidays draw closer and a thousand kites ornament the sky. My neighbour, he is a seasoned kite flier; a fighter who flies alone and cuts down any other kite that crosses his air space. Rooted to a spot on his terrace, his face burnt by the sun, neck craned heavenwards, his eyes in a perpetual squint, he brings down without fail diamond-shaped bits of paper, yellow, blue and red, from the sky.

As I watched him at it I wondered why we did that, fly kites that is? Was it because it was the one thing that was denied to us as a species? We being all top of the food chain, harnessers of the forces and evolved creatures were but bound firmly on terra firma. I sensed that maybe in every kite we sent out, there, tied ever so tightly to the thread, was a Promethean desire or hope to always reach, further and further, into the far reaches of the unknown. Sure, on the face of it things looked dismal. Sure, we were capable of only so much. But in the paper-thin realities that we live in today, hope, I think, more than anything else can infuse a sense of lightness into the soul. It is then a strange coincidence that the kite season times so beautifully with August 15th. We should maybe pick up from that; bury our hatchets, live a little more responsibly and be aware of the possibilities that lie in that spool of thread.

It was almost dark when I got home last evening and the sky lit up momentarily with flashes of lightning. I stepped out onto the terrace to gather my crisp clothes from the line when I noticed that he was still there, a silhouette against the wind, his thread now invisible, doing a mime of pulling the moon in.