{"id":1233,"date":"2019-01-23T08:51:26","date_gmt":"2019-01-23T14:51:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/sto-milestones\/?p=1233"},"modified":"2019-01-24T08:36:08","modified_gmt":"2019-01-24T14:36:08","slug":"kites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/sto-milestones\/2019\/01\/23\/kites\/","title":{"rendered":"Kites"},"content":{"rendered":"

For whom do the kites fly?\u00a0 During our days in Hyderabad, over the cool of the HMI compound which shielded us like a leaky box from the dust and exhaust of the city, their number increased each day.\u00a0 At first only a few could be seen through the thick smog that cloaked the Sivaramapalli neighborhood.\u00a0 But as the yellow moon ticked nightly from nearly new to full there were more and more all the time until they seemed to be everywhere, straining and floating off of every building, dead or exhausted in nearly every tree, visible everywhere by the time we climbed the Venkateswara temple hill and turned around slowly on its marble top, peering through the thick brown air at the city below.\u00a0 A city of kites.\u00a0 But why we saw more and more each day I did not know.<\/p>\n

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Kites and birds before dusk<\/p><\/div>\n

It was nearly the time of\u00a0Thai Pongal<\/em>, (aka\u00a0Sankranthi<\/em>, aka\u00a0Uttarayana<\/em> aka\u00a0Maghi<\/em>) the great Hindu festival of the harvest and thanksgiving that marks the slow return of longer days.\u00a0 A Telegana government tourism pamphlet which I read during a long and somewhat torturous bus ride stated with no elaboration that\u00a0Sankranthi was a traditional time for “kite flying joy.”\u00a0 Was it therefore a killjoy or trickster (or worse, a sectarian agitator) who made fake-news headlines<\/a> by falsifying a Hyderabad police press release so that it appeared to announce a complete kite ban during the festival in order or preserve “law and order, peace and tranquillity”?<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, on the streets of Hyderabad, a crush of cars, scooters, animals, busses, motorcycles, pedestrians, bicycles, trucks, mobile vending stalls, police vehicles, 7-in-alls, auto-rickshaws, tourbusses and the occasional oxcart made it immediately obvious to us that there was little law, order, peace or tranquility to preserve.\u00a0 Our HMI hosts taught us to cross the road. The chaos must be traversed with a steady, serene and predictable gait.\u00a0 This allows the motorcyclists and autos to part around the pedestrian like schools of fish.\u00a0 One must never dart, leap or do anything at all sudden or unexpected.\u00a0 They demonstrated.\u00a0 We followed.<\/p>\n

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wall of motorcycles<\/p><\/div>\n

Some of us developed volcanic coughs from the exhaust and poor air.\u00a0 Coughing became a background noise, like the hum of traffic, or the clanging of bells, or car horns or the call to prayer . At night, coughing in my room, I thought at times of one beloved to me back home.\u00a0 \u00a0A few years ago in the spring she’d started coughing and never stopped.\u00a0 Doctors removed the cancerous lung, but she died nonetheless:\u00a0 a proud, defiant and loving woman brought low by smoke.\u00a0 I read that life expectancy in Delhi was reduced by ten years<\/a>\u00a0on average due to pollution.\u00a0 It could hardly be better in Hyderabad.<\/p>\n

At the memorial for my loved one, I stood shivering on an atypically clear and cool autumn night in Seattle as family and friends released three sky lanterns.\u00a0 They floated up quickly, becoming hard to spot and small against the other night lights of the city — airplanes, planets, strange glows.\u00a0 In Hyderabad these are called Tukkals, and are used as tethered kites, especially at this time of year:<\/p>\n