KITE FLYING

If you look back hard enough, you see  that the big lessons assumed as learnt only as adults actually happen when your legs swinging from benches are still way up the ground.  I learnt the important lesson that you can still keep flying if you don’t tell yourself you have hit the ground from a simple childhood past time: kite flying.

I love anything that flies; perhaps it ranges from kites through airplanes to the graceful stalled flight of an elegant eagle.  I feel life rise in me as I watch a kite take off.

Unfortunately just as much I was  poor at fishing, so was I at kite flying. Being the sole girl in a gang of patriarchally cloned boys, I had not much say over the flown or the fished.  Still just as I proudly fished tadpoles, I also learnt to carry a beautifully coloured kite every flying festival. We usually flew them on a vast expanse of sandy grounds where the winds were good. And once the boys had their kites foisted at good heights , they would tie the ends to wooden logs on the sands or some would bury the spool. Amidst all this I would still try to get mine a little above my head. The boys would watch me a while and then shrug into their own world of war pilots and planes talk. They would instruct me to keep an eye on their far flying kites just as much they asked me to watch the fish filled cans during fishing time.

 And yet watching my kite fly a little above my head and then watch it somersault and hit the ground amidst the shouts of glee from the rest, I still felt glad it did fly. It didn’t matter if it somersaulted and landed nose down flat, its coloured papers slashed all it mattered was it had been above ground , flying. Now who says the sky is the limit, what can anybody do if I decide an inch above my head is my sky of no limits.