It's kite flying season and the sky is peppered with colourful kites. But strangely enough you cannot buy a kite anywhere in the market.
I discovered this when my little nephew and niece were visiting and I thought it would be fun to learn how to fly a kite.
Finally I asked one of the boys, 'Where do you get your kites?' He replied that his friend made them and directed me to a fat boy of thirteen or thereabouts.
'Five rupees per kite,' the boy told me, adding generously, 'Three rupees for children.'
The kites were rather fine with many long tails.
As we three amateurs struggled to get them off the ground – first the blue one, then the red one – we were trailed by two small boys who gazed with rapturous longing at our kites. They probably were too young to have learnt how to make the kites. When one of our kites got entangled in a tree and the other got caught in a bush we finally gave up.
With the greatest glee the two small boys ran to retrieve the kites. And soon they were soaring high in the sky. One boy finally went away but the other boy, an intense little fellow with dark eyes, was there all morning and all afternoon. In the evening he was still there, his eyes fixed on his kite in the sky. You knew he was not standing on the ground but flying high with that kite.
Probably he'll grow up and forget what it was like. He'll learn to get drunk on fenny or to get high on something else. And one day he'll make kites for his son and then maybe it will all come back to him.
Monday, November 10, 2008
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2 comments:
This makes me recall my childhood and the times when I used to "fly high" with my kites. But as you have rightly anticipated now I get high on different things which I myself don't like sometimes.
Why did it happen?
Maybe because children can do the same thing again and again and not get bored because everything is still new to them. While adults suffer from ennui, which they try to lift themselves out of with an artificial high. That's one explanation anyway. Another might be the problem of what Jean Paul Sartre called 'freedom'. This freedom is the gap between the self (me) and the world, which is what gives rise to alienation and anguish. According to Sartre we try to close this painful gap through various stratagems, negative and positive. Getting high is obviously one way of doing it. Sartre himself tried to use his writing to close the gap.
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