why i became a kite, part 2

Today is the first day I have loved Kolkata. I adored it briefly, for the way it made me feel. The classic case of "exciting and pretty" like the new red shoes I bought this summer. Then, soon after, I began to watch it suffocate me, as my own desperate needs bubbled to the surface. I couldn't simply kick it away like those shoes when they began pinching, walking barefoot across the grass. There is little grass here, and what there is lies spotted with ants and foil chewing tobacco wrappers. Needless to say, the honeymoon phase doesn't last long in Kolkata. I don't mean that I didn't still see beauty in this place. I admired her from a distance. I saw the richness of her sari. Calcutta cotton is known across the country. Her eyebrows black parenthesis turned horizontal... thin storm clouds surrounding a red bindi sun. This is how I took in Mother India. Until today, when she caught me gawking and surprised me with a smile. In that smile was the laughter and promise of her youth, and wrinkles and sorrow of her age. All this I saw today as the bike rickshaws fled the heat, in hot pursuit of the row of Jacaranda trees. This too, I saw, when I became the teacher and the playground for twenty of her abandoned children. I see it now, in perfect peace as the airplane rises. From here it looks like the crows surround the flying lights like moths around a lightbulb. This lightbulb is the same one that has come on above my head, blinking an idea like in the old cartoons. This idea is love, and it makes itself known to me on my porch. It winds around the garden growing wildly from the cement head of a neighboring building. The one whose hair is styled like a terrace Cubano. It ends up wound around the kite of the little boy across the way. It whispers to the kite as it watches the birds and the plane, turning green with envy. The kite of scavaged plastic and twine belongs to a little boy with no field, only city. As we sit together in this Kolkata night, the kite says, "cut me loose, so we too can return to the ones we belong to, and the roads that know our feet." Not this time... No. I whisper back. Tonight I choose to be like you. And in an act of silent joy, I put down my pen and pick up a rope instead. Tied roughly around my ankle I stand on the mottled banister and jump. For love of Kolkata, I become a kite.