Drawn to the flap and free-fall of brightly coloured diamonds, I have wandered to the heart of the Old City on the day of the annual Jaipur Kite Festival. I have escaped a rooftop of drunken men who tugged violently at string and watched bleary-eyed as hundreds of metres in the sky, a kite bowed. It is time to explore some more.
Street children scurry amongst the litter, watching the skies from the gutters for falling kites, severed from their string and drifting down to their grubby palms. Some of the bigger kids walk around clutching several kites to their chest, having had the guile to go up to rickshaw drivers or the roadside stalls and ask to untangle kites from the steel frames.
Every rooftop in the city has people on it, some more than others, some with sound-systems and all with bottles of liquor stashed next to a pile of kites. Telephone wires and electricity pylons collect fallen kites, whipped there in an instant, but left to hang for a ragged eternity. These parallel wires stretch out across the city – rainbow shrapnel: explosions of joy.
The hand movements of the flyers range from slow tugs to full on rooftop pirates climbing the rigging, frantically yanking the kite, urging it to climb higher. Like Icarus, some are doused in the flames of the sun, bursting indigo only then to nose dive into the outstretched and mocking limbs of a tree, another jewel in the necklace already heavy around its neck.
When evening settles, the chemical tang of liquor fills the air. I realise that everyone is drunk. Men stand around on street corners, bathed in orange sunset and dewy-eyed with booze, basking in the joy of the kite festival. As I pass, they point up to the dot-to-dot skies, and say ‘Kite Festival’ as if it were the name of their new born child. Occasionally, they drag me over, introduce me to uncles, brothers, friends, and ask me questions until with back-pats and handshakes they send me on my way.
One of these men shakes my hand and doesn’t let go. He leads me up to his rooftop to meet his family and of course fly a kite. He shows me how to prepare a kite: how to rub the tissue paper on a brick to create four holes for the string to pass through, how to balance it and how to tie the knot when it reaches equilibrium. Once prepared, this threaded string is then tied to a great spool of stronger thread which is then fed out as the kite ascends on the breeze, away from the rooftop, to join the others in the bleeding sun.
I eat paneer and potato curry from a bowl and peas from his pocket. We drink straight whisky from a glass until there is no more. He has three daughters who giggle into their hands and a young son who he describes affectionately as “Kite-hungry”. At one point, I am given a kite that is soaring over two hundred metres in the Jaipur sky. In my hands, it instantly nose-dives. Whenever a kite breaks free from its string or gets tangled in another, the men scream and whoop in delight. They start to whoop now.
After an hour, the man’s wife comes upstairs and asks me politely to leave. Apparently I am getting her husband over-excited. I look over at him and he repeats the phrase “January 14th – kite festival, Jaipur” with a grin that threatens to split his face in two. She might just be right.
Night is ushered in with fireworks set off from rooftops. Drunkenness is not conducive to safety, India is not conducive to safety, and great sparks fly from the tops of buildings as gargoyle-faced men writhe in flames of their own foolishness. Everyone is high on kite fever and the carnival is town.
