The Kite With a Poem for a Tail
Every festival, one kite in our sky carries someone's couplet upward.
In my neighbourhood, the sky publishes one poem a year.
Every Sankranti, somewhere in the swarm of fighter kites over our rooftops, there is one kite with a strip of paper knotted into its tail, and on that paper, in handwriting the whole mohalla can identify at fifty feet, a couplet. Two lines. Never signed. The rule, old as anyone can remember being told the rule, is simple: whoever cuts that kite and brings down the tail gets to stand on the highest roof and read the lines out loud, and everyone within earshot has to stop, mid-flight, string burning their fingers, and listen.
The kite was Rafiq chacha's.
Everybody knew and nobody said... the way everybody knows who feeds the street dogs. He was a tailor with a shop the size of a lift, and for eleven months of the year his poetry lived where most men's poetry lives, which is nowhere, folded away under the measuring and the hemming and the small talk. Then January came, and he would climb to his terrace with a kite he had made himself, black so it could be found in a bright sky, and send two lines of Urdu up over the water tanks like a man releasing a bird he had raised in secret.
I cut it once. I was eleven.
I want to tell you I did it with skill, but my cousin Bunty did the actual flying and then got called down for lunch, and the black kite drifted across our terrace low and wounded, already cut by someone else's line, and I simply grabbed it out of the air like catching a falling towel. The tail said, in letters I had to get my grandmother to read:
The thread is in your hand, the wind is in His. Fly anyway.
I stood on our water tank and shouted it twice, voice cracking on the second line, and the rooftops crackled back, wah, wah, an entire neighbourhood of uncles in banians granting me, an eleven-year-old in cricket shorts, the full honours of a mushaira. I have since read poems to rooms with microphones and mineral water. Nothing has ever come close.
You have to understand what this did to us as children. We grew up believing poetry was something you fought the sky for. Not homework, not a chapter with a moustached poet's photo in a textbook. Loot. Treasure with a string attached. Half the boys who slashed at that black kite every January could barely sit through a lesson, but they could recite four years of tail-couplets from memory, because memory keeps what it wins in combat and loses what it is handed. When I finally wrote about all this, decades later, it came out filed under childhood, though at the time it just felt like winter.
Rafiq chacha died in October, nine years ago now.
Quietly, in his sleep, with a wedding order unfinished, which the whole gali agreed he would have hated more than the dying. That January, nobody talked about the kite... What was there to say? Traditions don't die of murder, they die of vacancy. We flew our kites on Sankranti and the sky was loud and bright and completely ordinary, and I remember standing on the terrace at noon feeling like a man at a wedding where the food is good and the groom is missing.
Then, around four, when the light was going gold, my neighbour Pintu started shouting and pointing, and there it was.
Black.
Climbing steadily out of the lanes behind the mosque, with a white strip knotted in its tail.
The rooftops went quiet the way a stadium goes quiet... all at once, by agreement. Then every fighter in the sky went after it, and the sky over our mohalla turned into a story we still tell.
The couplet, brought down forty minutes later by the milkman's daughter, of all people, said: You buried the tailor. The stitching continues.
Wah, said three hundred people, some of them crying into their string.
For a week the mohalla played detective. His nephew? The nephew could not rhyme lassi with lassi. His old ustaad? Dead longer than him. I let everyone theorize... because I had recognized the paper. It was cut from a tailor's pattern sheet, and I had seen the biscuit tin it came from, once, years before, on chacha's shelf, when I went to get my sherwani fitted and he caught me looking and said, "Hisaab-kitaab." Accounts. It had not looked like accounts.
So one evening in February I did the shameless thing and knocked. Ammi jaan, his widow, gave me tea I hadn't earned and let the silence do its work, and eventually she brought down the tin. Inside, maybe sixty strips of pattern paper, each with a couplet, folded once. Decades of two-line poems, written in advance the way other men keep savings.
"He knew he would go before the tradition did," she said. "So he left stock. Like a shopkeeper." She smiled at the tin. "I can't read them. He read them to me every year before flying. Now I just pick the one that looks the most tired of waiting."
I did the arithmetic in my head and my heart sank doing it. Sixty strips. One a year. I must have flinched, because she looked straight at me, this small woman who had threaded his needles for fifty years, and said the thing I had walked in half-hoping and half-dreading to hear.
"Beta. You write, don't you? He told me. He said, that boy caught one with his hands. The sky picked him already, I don't have to."
A poem on a kite tail is the purest publishing there is: one copy, no byline, and a reader chosen by the wind.
I want to be honest about what happened next, because the honest version costs me something. I said yes on her doorstep... and then I went home and could not write two lines for three months. Two lines! I had notebooks of long ambitious poems, and every one of them fell apart when I imagined it shouted from a water tank by whoever won it. Kite poems have a merciless editor: they must survive being yelled by a twelve-year-old to an audience holding sharp string. Chacha had made it look easy for forty years.
It is not easy. It is the hardest form I know.
The tin sits on my shelf now, his sixty and my nine, and the tradition has not skipped a January since. The mohalla still speculates, and the mohalla, I am fairly sure, still knows, the way it knew before, and keeps the secret the way it kept his, which is to say lovingly and with terrible acting. Last year I posted the story of the black kite, no names, on a community wall for poets, and a woman from another city wrote back that her colony has a wall where wedding poems get pasted, and someone else described couplets painted on boat hulls, and I sat there at midnight grinning at strangers, thinking... it's everywhere. The stitching continues. It just changes thread.
On Sankranti this year I stood on the terrace at dusk, after the winning kid had bellowed my two lines into the orange air and gotten his wah, and I stayed up there a long time after the sky emptied. Somewhere below, a tin with fifty-one strips left. Somewhere above, whatever it is that keeps accepting our submissions. I checked the knot on next year's line, out of a tailor's habit that is not mine but lives with me now, and went down to dinner hopeful in the only way I trust: two lines at a time.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.