2/16/2004 » Musings

The rooftop kite fights of the Basant festival of Punjab have begun in Lahore. Even the Israelis are taking note.

As an eight year old visiting Delhi, I went patang (kite)-crazy. Brightly colored diamonds in tissue paper and balsa wood, they were my chocolates, my truffles. My older cousins would take me up to the rooftop and let me run with the kite. If I was lucky, they'd let me fly the kite, holding the spool gingerly, for a minute or two. And they'd yell counsel to their young charge: 'Go left! Take that one!'

But kite fighting was war, man's business, for fifteen year olds at the very least. When my cousin was feeling magnanimous, he'd pull out the expensive cutting string which he carefully hoarded. This string, menacing and obsidian, was coated with glass to take down opponents from distant rooftops. Actually taking down a kite made us feel like Luke Skywalker threading the Death Star defenses.

If the special string failed, we could entwine the enemy kite, tug it over our rooftop, and throw homemade bolas over the string until the enemy, tossing and snorting like a rodeo bull, finally fluttered down, deflated. The richer the opponent, the fancier the kite (three-toned! metallic!) and the more sneering our rooftop taunts. A captured kite was ours to be flown in the next round, a surrender flag mockingly waved, a captive paraded. The Geneva convention didn't apply to kites.

If we lost a kite of our own, we paused to mourn the fallen with a Thums Up or Limca. Then my cousin would palm me a couple of rupees to run down and buy another one from the vendors down the street. Sometimes he'd accompany me and haggle with the seller, disparaging the quality of the last kite and extracting a discount. If he was feeling flush, we'd buy two, and he'd let me pick the colors.

Visiting Delhi as a kid was marvelous. There were daguerreotype kits of glossy paper and iodine pressed between two sheets of glass and held together tightly with rubber bands. There were carom boards, bamboo flutes, amazingly tasty biscuits, Bournvita, hard candies of all kinds, rooh afza in iced milk, music tapes from sidewalk vendors, Amar Chitar Katha and Tin-Tin comics. I had indulgent cousins, aunts who'd spoil me rotten, grandparents with wide, warm, musty bosoms. Returning to American 'burbs felt like a small death, and not the French kind.