Let's Go Fly a Kite!

Dear dedicated reader,

I’ll never forget the image: Kadod’s villagers atop their sloping corrugated roofs, faces to the sun squinting into its rays to follow the unpredictable swooping of the lines which they fed from spools in their hands, the ends of which were attached kites of all colors flooding the sky and dancing blithely in the wind. Popular Bollywood tunes pounded from giant black speakers rented for the occasion and hauled up to the top of the houses to amplify the atmosphere.

The festival of Uttarayan is much anticipated: on almost every house tour that we’ve taken in our many visits here in Kadod, this festival has been detailed as we reach the roof terrace or the top floor of the house. “This,” the family giving us the tour will announce with pride, “is where we fly kites in January.” In the morning, the family prepares a special dish of sesame seed ladoos and take these, along with a special berry-like fruit called boor to the temple to offer up to God in celebration of the beginning of the time in which the sun starts moving to the North (I had to look this up on Wikipedia as no one explained this to me). Then, everyone climbs to the topmost turret of their houses and flies kites.

Melissa and I had been awaiting this with the same bitten finger-nail anticipation as our students as we watched every business in town set up an array of multi-colored paper and plastic kites outside their shops. I watched the hostel boys make some careful purchases one day, turning the kites over in their hands before selecting ten or fifteen kites to buy.

“Why so many?” I asked one of them, as he walked away with his precious purchase wrapped in newspaper.

“Teacher,” he said, as if it were obvious, “I need them if the others get cut.”

The seemingly innocent diversion of flying kites from roof tops does indeed have a darker, competitive side and one which the boys and grown men of Kadod gravitate towards: the spools of cord which tether the kites to their adept fliers have been carefully embedded with shards of ground glass such that, when skillfully maneuvered into position by their owners, they can rub against the string of another unsuspecting kite in the sky and break the string, freeing the kite to waft at the mercy of the winds through the air until it finds a final resting place upon a palm frond or in a street gutter. The gutters of the Kadod streets have been running hot pink and deep purple and electric blue leading up to the festival as students take their kite strings to be ‘colored’ by a local expert who sits on the side of the street with a rickety wheel like contraption which reminds me of what you use to wind yarn into a ball before knitting a sweater. He runs the string carefully through pink or blue or purple dye stained fingers, dipping them periodically into a rusted can full of dyed water like a potter at his wheel, turning the white threads the intense shade of the student’s choice.

Our hosts for the festival were Darshanbhai and his family who run the local STD/ISD/PCO booth (the Indian equivalent of the payphone) from which Melissa and I make all our calls overseas. The frequency of our visits have kindled a friendship with this family who speak with us in a mix of English, Hindi and Gujarati. Darshanbhai et al are part of what I like to think of as Kadod’s party squad: a number of younger couples who live on the main bazaar road who make it a point every festival to do things up right. Loud music, dancing, and as Darshanbhai told Melissa in a melodramatic whisper a few days ago when he invited us to the roof party, “drinks” (a definitely hush-hush off the menu item in the dry state of Gujarat).

To my relief, we were not asked to take part in any such illegal activity, though as we carefully made our way onto the roof made of planks of corrugated iron or steel or some such thing this morning, we saw that despite the early hour, the party was in full swing. Men, wives, teenage boys and small kids looked up into the sky as they loosely held running spools or tensely controlled kite strings, causing their kites to dive low to snag an unsuspecting soul on another roof or to fly high above the reach of others' strings.

Darshanbhai, along with his younger brother, took it upon himself to teach us to fly. The first few attempts were soon aborted by the quick cutting string of their next door neighbor who’d cut their kites down as a joke as soon as they’d launched. After a heated but well meaning shouting match between roofs, the neighbor left well enough alone and we were finally able to get some air between us and the kite, which was toned a patriotic shade of orange and green and emblazoned with a picture of a smiling Narendra Modi (Chief Minister of Gujarat).

As soon as the kite was up, Darshan’s brother handed me the spool and instructed me how to hold it so the thread would run easily off and the kite could be let out as far as the wind would take it. Darshan himself controlled the kite’s movements, ducking it down or raising it up or frantically pulling in a jerky, sawing fashion as he went in for the kill on another kite string.

I found myself lulled into a semi-trance regarding the looping and soaring of our kite. Against the back drop of the cloudless blue sky, I had to squint to see which way the string moved and my eyes worked over time trying to pick our kite out of the plethora of moving bodies across the skyline. All of a sudden, I was jolted back to reality by what can described as nothing less than a piercing war-cry followed by a high pitched scream. I looked over to see Darshan and his brother rejoicing with an arm-flailing dance and their young neighbor Parth still screaming his congratulations at a pitch that made my ear beg for mercy.

“We cut a kite! We cut a kite!” They told me hurriedly as they refocused and went in for a second kill. This pattern continued until three, then four, then five, then six kites had been cut, all followed by the requisite screaming. I came to understand through watching this ritual repeated that the whooping was not only self-congratulatory: it also served the important purpose of letting the unfortunate soul (always located on a roof-top within hearing distance) who exactly had been victorious. This was then followed with an affectionate exchange of trash talk as the loser reached for the next kite in his arsenal.

Then, all of a sudden, our kite began to drop. We pulled in the slack in the hope that we could jerk it back into the air, but as we frantically tried, I noticed a similar phenomenon across all of the roofs in Kadod. That was when it hit me: the wind, fickle as it was, was dying. The collapse of the kites was valiantly fought as I watched men and boys try for the next two hours to try and get their kites back up in the air; however, their efforts were in vain and eventually they turned their energy towards shouting between roofs and dancing wildly.

When darkness set in, the dancing didn’t stop, but Melissa and I decided it was time to head home. Our kites, unflown as they were, were still intact, waiting for another day when we will climb to the roof our humble guesthouse and attempt to make them air-worthy.

Best,
Cat