The Broken Kite

The purple kite was Meera’s best thing. It had a long yellow tail and a picture of a lightning bolt, and when it flew, it flew like it had somewhere important to be.

Ravi was not allowed to fly it without her. He knew that.

But on Saturday morning, Meera was still eating breakfast, and the wind on the terrace was perfect, and the kite was just lying there, and Ravi thought: only one small fly. She won’t even know.

The wind was strong. The string pulled hard. And then the kite dived — down, down, down — straight into the water tank railing.

Crack.

The purple kite lay on the terrace floor with its middle stick snapped, looking much smaller than before.

Ravi’s heart went cold. He looked around. Nobody had seen. Not one person.

The wind did it, he thought. I could say the wind pulled it off the shelf. Wind does things like that.

And the wind, whooshing past, said nothing at all. Wind never argues.

Then Ravi heard Meera coming up the stairs, calling, “Ravi! Want to fly my kite with me?”

She came out onto the terrace. She saw the kite. Her face did something that made Ravi’s tummy hurt — it went from happy to confused to nearly-crying, all in one second.

“The wind—” Ravi started.

And then he stopped. Because the words felt wrong in his mouth, like a stone in a spoonful of rice.

“It wasn’t the wind,” he said, very quietly. “It was me. I flew it without you. It crashed. I’m sorry, Meera.”

Meera was quiet for a long moment. She was sad about the kite. She was angry too, a little. But here is a strange thing she noticed: she wasn’t angry the way she would have been if she’d caught him hiding it.

“You broke it,” she said. “So you have to help me fix it.”

They found Papa’s tape. They found a rolled newspaper and made a new stick. The patch looked like a little bandage, and the kite flew crooked after that — it swooped left when it should have gone straight.

But it flew.

And the two of them flew it together all afternoon, taking turns, laughing every time it did its funny sideways swoop — the little purple kite with the bandage, which was still Meera’s best thing, and was now a little bit Ravi’s too.