By Vijay Phanshikar :
The urge to surge
High and deep
Into the sky’s expanse
    To delve and dive
    Into the element immense
And to linger there
And to savour
The limitless vastness
     Above the breeze
     Deep into the vacuum ...
... Of my inner being
As dark and as bright
As the space beyond 
     ... Oh, dear kite,
     How I envy you !
                                          - Self 

FOR the little child across the globe, there may not be anything as enchanting as the kite dancing -- sometimes indolently sometimes violently -- on the breeze ! The child in me has refused to die in all these taxing decades just because long, long ago, a bright red-and-blue-and-white kite had promised to take me into the unknown depths of the sky, floating at the end of the tenuous thread, merrily or morosely -- craning the neck to look beyond and beyond ...! That promise is yet to be fulfilled -- no matter the numerous flights in fancy flying machines one took in life. Years got added to life, but the child lives on -- waiting for the kite to fulfill its promise made eons ago on the slope of the hill in the neighbourhood. True, every kite knows, it has to return to the ground -- restricted by the thread’s limit or the frailness of the paper out of which it is carved.

 

 

And every kite-flier, too, does. Yet, kites are hoisted high on the winds, and what ensues is a romance that cuts across all narrow barriers that may seem to divide the humanity into small silos, so to say. The kite is not just a twig-and-paper flying object, but a vehicle of innocent dreams to the regions unknown, a bird that seeks to take a flight straight to heavens, or a little paper-boat that sails on waves on winds ...! But as every child -- and even adult -- sees, the kite is a flight of fancy whose romance nobody would ever forget -- no matter the lapse of time, no matter the fading of other memories ! For, once the kite takes to winds, it also etches a deep burrow on the fertile mind !

 

That is a line of poetry, a line of a sketch, the well-chiselled slope of the nape of neck of a feminine statuette ... ! Anything, and everything that imagination can come up with ! As a little child when my kite took to winds, I also rode on mentally, spiritually, to have a peep onto distant lands which, I believed, were visible from the kite’s perch. The young mind dreamt of people also popping up in sight from that awesome height, waving and seeking to be noticed. Many a poem got written in the mind in those wonderful days, and many a dream got seen in sleep when the little body and mind slouched to lull in the night -- all egged on by the kite-flying during the winter days and noons and evenings (tinged by lengthening shadows both from the setting Sun in the west and rising lights from lamps in homes). With the kite, a ceaseless conversation went on all the time -- as if the long thread was the telegraphic line over which the dialogue took place.

 

The poetic lines at the start possibly remained etched in the memory of those days, but written down now -- expressing a genuine sense of envy one felt about the kite that could soar over everything -- higher than the tallest trees and buildings of those days several decades ago. With advent of adulthood, flying of kite ceased to be an activity that kept one engaged for long hours, all right. But the mental engagement continues even to this moment. In that state, the kite often flies as high and far as the Sun -- whose aura this time of the year is celebrated as Sankranti.