Kites

There is a pall over Faizabad today. Remains of plastic kites tatter in the trees. The clouds in pathetic fallacy cover over the blue with a shapeless shroud of gray. Against this backdrop another kite flies black against the sky, making a machine gun racket as it ascends in sharp spirals towards the loaded heavens. Last week on the second day of Eid a boy stood on a high hill above the city, flying such a kite as this. Then he was shot dead.

Ever since I arrived in Afghanistan over a year ago and saw the kites flying over the hills of Kabul at dusk, I’ve seen them as a symbol of hope. Bits of colour in the crumbling brown, going up and up while the world below falls to pieces, children running below holding tight to the strings like they’ve hooked heaven and won’t let go. Hope. You have to hold on to something. Flying a kite is a playful act of resistance. While the Taliban ruled they banned kite flying. They said that children would fight with their kites, rubbing glue and sand into the strings, trying to cut each other loose, and gambling on the winner. They said that from the rooftops where people flew kites they could see down into the yards and view the forbidden women imprisoned there. To fly a kite in Afghanistan is to deny this place it’s heaviness, to ignore its oppression, to send a bit of life into the sky for all to see and run after it saying, “so there!” and “hooray!” It shows that after all the years of war and madness there is still lightness in the soul of Afghanistan.

But today the kites hang like rags in the fingers of the winter-killed trees. They flap weakly like trapped birds. Somewhere up above the clouds a lonely frame of twigs stretched with plastic spirals to heaven, trailing a bloody string, loosed from the fingers of a boy as he fell.

The soldier, people say, told the boy he should not fly his kite where he was, said that from up there he could see women. They say the boy left then, started down the hill, or maybe he let out a couple of handfuls of string and told the soldier to stuff it, it’s hard to tell, really. And the soldier shot him between the eyes. “But why?” I ask. “Why,why why?” It is so senseless. I grasp at anything that might bring some meaning to it. “What about the soldier’s commander? What did he say?” My Afghan friend looks at me.

“He say this accident.”

“That’s it? An accident?”

“Here shooting,” he points between his eyes, “no accident,” he says.

“So why?”

“In Afghanistan, ask why, he say accident. In Afghanistan is no why.”

People asked why. They marched and shouted, they went to the commander’s house. He said he would shoot them all. “Ask why, maybe tomorrow you is died, killed,” my friend says. “In Afghanistan, why is died.”

Today while the sky hangs over me, I almost cry for this place, not for sorrow or mourning, but for the sheer frustration of defeat. How does life prevail in place where you can be shot for flying a kite? The single black square still keeps its spiraling vigil in the wind above me, tugging for freedom, held to earth. I follow the string down to the boy standing on the rooftop next to me. He’s been watching me, and he meets my eyes. He points to his kite with a grin and waves his hand. He says something I don’t catch, but the meaning is clear: wanna give it a try?

The why may be dead, they may kill us all, there may never be any rhyme or reason to any of it, but somewhere, on some rooftop, some kid like this one will be flying his homemade kite and flashing his cheeky smile, and life will go on in Afghanistan.