Kites

Sixteen kites have fallen over the Dutch graveyard below, lost forever. Most are white. Some red or green. They’ve appeared on the ground like twirling seed pods or some fallen seasonal fruit.

Don't they allow the kampung boys through the gate (where the groundskeeper solemnly asked if we had family buried here) or do the boys from the less-hallowed graveyard just not bother to retrieve their lost kites, only made of paper, sticks & string? Maybe they will be gathered up by the gardener's little son, a boy of 4 or 5, whom I’ve seen crossing the grounds stark naked & newly bathed, alone (if you don’t look up) in his vast garden of foreign ghosts, happily shivering up the flagstone path after his father.

Just across the street, the Javanese graveyard is full of kiting boys, who scramble over the statuary & make way for funeral processions. Many graves are raised rectangles of stone planted over with grass: perfect platforms. Six or seven kids will jostle together atop one of these, their kite lines somehow not tangling. Given the number of fallen kites, I have to wonder if their lines are coated with glass, as described in The Kite Runner. A few adjacent graves have a kind of metal cage over them, maybe to prevent this very thing: being danced upon by kite boys. It seems stingy.

As I’m watching, three loose kites bob right by me, born along on an invisible air stream 25 stories off the ground. As if they weren’t merely cut free but are going somewhere.