Patang-Baaz

--

Hai ghaib-e-ghaib jis-ko samajhte hain ham shuhuud

Hain khvaab mein hanoz jo jaage hain khvaab mein

The absent of the absent: what we see is merest seeming

It is the dream into which we awaken from dreaming

- GHALIB

--

I always hang around shops that seldom see any customers; inevitably they close and I have to move on in search of others like them. It’s a habit I picked up as a child perhaps, owing to the amount of time I spent idling on the bench outside Chacha Mian’s shop.

Chacha Mian was a spare old man of indeterminate age - an age at which counting years is like counting stars because everything then must lead to the beginning, be it man or universe. Chacha Mian sold kites, and just didn’t sell them, he made them too. And for as long as anyone could remember he had been in the business of kite making. Though he would surely disapprove of my calling it a business; he was never in it for the money he said and it showed too. At all times of the day in the semi-darkness of his small shop, Chacha Mian could be found sitting cross legged on a chatai, bent over bare kite frames and surrounded with brightly colored sheets of paper and sweet smelling glue. And yes coils, coils and coils of thread snaking all around him, and from him, as if he himself came from them and if one were to start rolling the charkhi, he too would unravel.

The shop itself was bare. At the front was a display case, always draped with a thin film of dust that I used to trace patterns in; mostly drawings of kites engaged in fierce battles, or of kites with long tails and lithe bodies, kites that smiled and those that sneered. And sometimes of only a single kite that soared, wiggling its way up to the sun to disappear behind it. It could only be done in dust. Maybe the case had once seen better days but in those days the sanmica had started to come off at the corners and the half-a-dozen kites that stood pressed against the glass were discolored - their once bright colors bleached by the slanting late afternoon sun a long time ago. I wondered if he had made them intending to put them in the case. Were they still fly worthy having lost their colors? I never asked.

Under the steps of his shop and all through the length of that narrow lane, a gutter flowed, on which he had placed a rickety wooden bench that rocked. I don’t know why the bench was there, perhaps when he had first opened the shop, he had expected hordes of impatient kite flyers outside and had thoughtfully put it there so that they could wait while he rushed about to get their orders ready. But I only think about the bench now. Then, I would just spend hours on it, without thinking, watching him work and rocking the bench forward and back by shifting the weight of my body in a pendulous motion with my legs dangling. But it was not time that I killed there, for then I had no conception of time; not a clue that it could run away and could change unlike everything else in that neighborhood. I didn’t know that they both were entwined, that one carried the other, that nights could be black and stay black forever. How was I to know? For then, the afternoons all seemed languorous and dusk fell in multi-hued sheets. Just like Chacha Mian’s kites.

I have never been a good kite flyer. They say a good patang-baaz must let the dor wrap itself onto his nerves; they must act as an extension of his nerves; that he must feel each movement, and each tug and pull must speak to him; and for that to happen he must be well versed in this tactile language; for it’s nothing less than a conversation with the skies that he holds. But my dors were never long enough, the pulls were too great for me, and my kites though at first would soar defiantly with their chins up but in the end would cut loose all by themselves. Not that I lost them in a pench. It’s just that my dors were never strong enough either. I should have known.

Chacha Mian didn’t sell manja - the dor treated with powdered glass – he disapproved of it. He was old school, if there could be such a thing among kite makers. He also scoffed at kites made of thin plastic sheets that were all the rage those days, imported from China. But I am sure it wasn’t because they lasted longer and their nylon dors were harder to cut. It was just the way he was. A maker of kites.

. . . . . .

And that is all I remember of Chacha Mian and his shop. We soon moved to another town and I never saw him again.