“Qabool hai?” There’s another voice. The quivering eighties ask for reassurance.
The loud scream ends the count before it can reach three. I wake up to a blazing sun spreading summer fire on the Khyber Pass. My eyes take a moment or two to attach to the grey shades of shapeless granite and basalt scattered across the road. Some of them have had the audacity to form mountains.
“Kabul jaana hai?” A Pashtun voice asks. The source of the voice soon emerges, with a handful of beard and forty-some years of hardship with him. He is a stout man, making even my six feet three inches of appearance look docile.
“Jee,” I say and he points me towards the car. The rugged landrover looks older than India’s independence, but like the region’s men and women, it too has gained battle-hardiness over the years. If these people trust this khattara, so should you.
The delight that I was sitting by the driver by myself is short lived. He is like a sentinel, hardly talking during the trip, holding the steering wheel with a force of a dying man. I look to the other side. The road is littered with rocks, and our car tumbles through them, somehow avoiding the thousand feet fall. At a distance, Ibis jump through the decline like swifts on a cliff. My mind wanders in this nothingness, this valley upon valley filled with rocks and pebble and high mountains and deserts.
For the first time, I feel there’s something romantic about this abyss.
Here they call an assembly of ten huts a village.
I see two little boys in one of those villages. The car stops for a while. Our driver needs to fill his water satchels. One of the two boys look at me and whisper something to his friend.
“Hey,” I call them, “Come here.”
Both of them run. Not towards me, but away.
I follow them like an idiot, forgetting that the car can leave any moment. Soon I find myself amidst half-broken stone huts.
“There,” a little voice coos.
I see the kid standing ten paces from me, panting. “There,” he says again, “It is stuck there. Can you fetch it?”
The hot wind blows on my face. Some say it blows from Kandahar where the old kings sleep. Their breath is dry and warm.
I push my body to the roof of the house. It is hard, and me not particularly being in shape doesn’t help either.
Two minutes later, I make it to the roof with a red face and bruises on my body. Below, I hear laughter. Then I see the object of interest, a mundane quadrilateral of paper, stuck to one of those unshaped chunk of stone, slowly flailing with the wind.
It puts a smile on my face.
When the car starts, I don’t feel so awful anymore. The thousand feet drops look fine.
The car turns and I see the kite soar in the sky, defiant to the sun. A lammergeyer screech fills the old valley. I feel a different warmth this time, and it pushes me back to those days by the Hooghly growing up with the jute mill sirens.
It makes me a kite runner again.