rowing up in Pakistan’s side of the Punjab in the 1990s included the festival of Basant. Tied together with the larger Jashn-i-Baharaan (festival of spring), it was a staple event in our lives.

I remember being introduced to kite flying by older cousins and adults in my family on a hot summer evening in Multan. As I looked up in the sky, I saw many dots of varying sizes in pink, orange, green and bright yellow. This was not the first time I was seeing the sky full of kites. The sky would be populated by an assortment of kites throughout the hotter months. However, during spring, around February, when Basant used to be celebrated, there was hardly any place in the sky where at least some kites could not be spotted.

As I climbed the roof of our three-storied house that day, there was quite a bit of excitement. We had all our supplies. This included the kite string, two sets of kites as well as some tape to mend our kites and fortify them to fight the winds. Once we tied the string into the kite, we were ready to get down to business.

I remember one of my cousins going far away with the kite and one of my uncles telling him to wait for his call. I understood immediately that the timing had to be right. I was learning that getting a kite up involved understanding the movement of the wind. There was also something intuitive about it like using sails on a boat.

After two failed attempts when the kite landed back on the roof and the other time in our house lawn on the ground floor and having pulled it back up, we revived the kite and were ready to try again although admittedly with a bit of frustration on my uncle’s part.

The third time, powered by what Punjabi men would consider a healthy amount of anger, my uncle was determined not to fail. As I stood there watching, my cousin threw the kite in the air at my uncle’s call. What followed was a dance of pulling and letting go of the kite string intermittently. It was fascinating.

I remember one of my cousins going far away with the kite and one of my uncles telling him to wait for his call. I understood immediately that the timing had to be right. 

There was a lot of shouting and I was given the kite string roller to hold. Every time my uncle or a cousin called out “dheel day” (let the kite string unwind), I would hold it in the groove between my thumb and index finger and it would roll aggressively.

Our kite was now like the other kites — a small pink dot in the sky. To see a kite we had just been holding in our hands up so far in the sky and for us to be controlling it was electrifying. Once the kite was up, I was given the opportunity to hold the string and lead the kite. It was trickier than I had imagined. Half of it was what one did with their kite string and the other half was the wind. It was the perfect activity to unite one with nature, not to forget the community.

Soon after, somebody called out to my uncle that a neighbour had been trying to get competitive for a paicha. This was perhaps the most interesting part of Basant where people would get into competitive kite flying. There was a lot of excitement around it. Once the kite strings of the two kites got tangled, it was a game of cutting the other’s string by using yours like a saw.

The kite string was now handed over to my uncle, giving precedence to experience over youth. The competition were neighbours that we could barely see on their roof about five houses away. Then all of a sudden there was a lot of noise my cousins started to make. “Bo kaata!” was what they were cheering as loudly as they could and over and over again. As I looked over to my uncle, he was standing there proud. We had just cut our neighbour’s kite. It was 1999, and spring had just come to the Punjab.

Uneeb Nasir writes about culture, art and identity. More of his work can be found on instagram.com/un.eeeb/