The Kite String

Wednesday comes in with a shy sun.

The fog still sits in the low places—over the drain, over the neem leaves, over the bicycle seat left outside—but there is a pale brightness behind it, like someone has opened a curtain one finger-width.

Sunita has been awake long enough that the kitchen has already decided its mood. The pressure cooker is on the stove like a promise. A steel plate holds small, tidy piles: rice, moong dal, peanuts, a pinch of turmeric, a bit of ginger.

“Today khichdi (rice-and-lentil khichdi),” Sunita announces, not as a plan but as a fact.

Arjun is up too early for his own dignity. He pretends it’s because of the festival and not because the neighbour’s kids have started yelling from the lane.

“Uttarayan (the sun’s northward turn)!” he says, as if he learned the word in a textbook and now wants to spend it.

Rakesh is asleep in the back room, his blanket pulled over his ear. The house keeps its volume low without discussing it. Festival or not, night shift sleep is treated like a fragile item.

Priya stands near the stove, warming her palms over nothing, and watches Sunita move.

The way Sunita cooks on festival days is different. Not grand—just slightly more careful. The salt is measured with less anger. The ghee tin is opened without sighing.

“Go wash your face,” Sunita tells Priya. “Then help me roll the last laddoos.”

Priya nods, but before she moves she takes her notebook from under the pillow.

She opens to the page where she has been keeping numbers like prayers.

KEYBOARD.

₹170.

₹250 (needed).

₹80 left.

The ₹80 looks smaller today than it did yesterday. Maybe the sun has made it shrink.

Sunita catches her looking.

“Still counting?” she asks.

“I’m just… seeing,” Priya says.

Sunita makes a sound that is half approval, half warning. “See, but don’t stare. Some things only move when you stop staring.”

Priya doesn’t tell her that this is exactly the problem with the college portal.

She washes her face at the hand pump, the water cold enough to make her mind feel clean. Then she comes back and rolls sesame laddoos with Sunita—til and jaggery pressed into warm, sweet balls that stick to her fingertips.

Arjun steals one, gets caught, and claims it was “quality check.”

Sunita swats his hand with a towel.

“Til-gud khaao, meetha bolo,” she says—eat sesame and jaggery, speak sweetly—and then immediately adds, “But don’t speak sweetly and do mischief.”

Arjun grins. “Festival rules are confusing.”

By late morning, the lane has decided to celebrate in its own modest way. Kites appear like small coloured arguments in the sky whenever the fog thins enough to allow them.

From the roof, someone shouts, “Kati!” —cut!—and another voice answers with a groan that is half heartbreak, half laughter.

Arjun looks up, mouth open.

“Sis,” he says softly, in the voice he uses for cricket highlights, “today I will win.”

“You will lose,” Priya says. “You will blame the string.”

Arjun points at her hands. “Your hands are already trained now. You can catch the string fast.”

Priya lifts her fingers, sticky with jaggery, and laughs.

Trained.

It is such a serious word for what she has been doing: fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there, like stealing tiny pieces of a different life.

Around noon, Sunita sends Priya out with a short list—ginger, a packet of salt, and coriander if it looks alive.

“And don’t get stuck at Sharma Ji’s shop today,” Sunita adds, because it is a festival and everyone has a weakness.

Priya raises her eyebrows innocently. “I won’t.”

Outside, the air smells like smoke and sesame and wet earth pretending to be dry. The bus stand is louder than usual. Men in sweaters talk about the weather like it is an enemy they are forced to respect.

At Chai Uncle’s stall, the stove is working at festival speed.

Chai Uncle sees Priya and holds up a laddoo between two fingers like a precious object.

“Festival,” he says. “Eat. Speak sweet. Don’t fight with anyone.”

“I don’t fight,” Priya says.

Chai Uncle laughs. “Yes, you only fight with paper and network.”

She takes the laddoo, warm and crumbly, and feels an immediate, unreasonable gratitude.

A man beside her is forwarding something on WhatsApp, tilting his phone so others can see.

“IMD says fog again tomorrow morning,” he announces, as if the fog needs an introduction.

Chai Uncle snorts. “Fog and politicians, both come without invite.”

Priya drinks her chai slowly. The ginger burns a clean line down her throat.

Her phone vibrates.

For a second her stomach tightens, the old habit—portal, status, under review.

But the screen shows a different name.

Sharma Ji.

She stares at it like it is a dare.

Chai Uncle watches her face change. “Trouble?”

“No,” Priya says, and answers.

Sharma Ji’s voice is already annoyed, as if she has made him call.

“Where are you?”

“Bus stand,” Priya says.

“Come for twenty minutes,” he says. “Only twenty. There is a list. I need it typed before afternoon. Then I will close.”

Priya bites the inside of her cheek.

Sunita said don’t get stuck.

But Sharma Ji said twenty minutes.

And inside her notebook, ₹80 is sitting quietly like a thirsty person.

“Okay,” she says. “I’m coming.”

She buys the ginger and salt quickly—like a girl who is trying to be innocent—and then walks to the cyber shop.

The shutters are half down. Inside, the air is warmer than outside, and the computers make their usual soft humming, like they are annoyed by human needs.

Only two customers are there. One is printing a Sankranti greeting with a sun clipart that looks like it is smiling too much.

Sharma Ji points Priya to the chair.

“You know the drill,” he says. “Slow. Correct. Spaces.”

He drops a sheet of paper in front of her.

A list of names, addresses, and phone numbers.

At the top, someone has written in blue pen: Khichdi Distribution.

Priya’s eyebrows lift.

“So holy work,” she says before she can stop herself.

Sharma Ji grunts. “Everything is holy if it is urgent.”

Priya places her fingers on the home row.

F and J.

The bumps.

She types.

The names are familiar village names, Lucknow-side names, a mix that makes her think of bus routes and wedding cards. She reads each digit twice before letting it become a printed fact.

Sharma Ji hovers once, sees her being careful, and retreats. This is his version of trust.

When she finishes, he prints the pages and checks them with the seriousness of a man inspecting crops.

“Good,” he says.

He pulls out money from the drawer and places it on the counter.

₹80.

Exactly.

Priya’s throat feels tight for a moment, not from emotion like in films, but from the simple satisfaction of a number completing itself.

She picks up the notes carefully, as if they might change their mind.

“Now go,” Sharma Ji says. “Festival. And don’t tell people I’m doing charity.”

“It’s not charity,” Priya says, surprised by her own confidence.

Sharma Ji makes a face that could mean anything.

Outside, the sunlight is stronger now. The fog has retreated to the edges like a person caught gossiping.

Priya walks home with her bag of ginger and salt and her ₹80 folded inside her notebook.

In the courtyard, Sunita is stirring the khichdi in the cooker, listening to it hiss.

Arjun is on the roof already, holding a kite like it is an extension of his ego.

Priya goes to the shelf, opens the KEYBOARD envelope, and adds the ₹80.

₹170 + ₹80 = ₹250.

She writes it down.

The line looks clean.

Sunita sees her face and understands without asking.

“It’s done?” Sunita says.

Priya nods.

Sunita smiles—small, quick, like she is saving it.

“Tomorrow you can buy,” she says. “Today we eat.”

Priya wants to run to the market lane immediately. She wants to hold the keyboard, to hear its keys, to bring it home like a new utensil.

But the day has its own rules.

She helps Sunita set plates. She carries the steel tumblers. She puts a little extra ghee on Rakesh’s portion because he has woken up and is sitting quietly, rubbing his hands.

Rakesh eats two spoons, then looks at her.

“How much left?” he asks.

Priya hesitates, then decides not to be poetic.

“Nothing,” she says. “I reached.”

Rakesh nods once. Then, after a pause, he says, “Good.”

It is the biggest celebration he knows.

In the late afternoon, Arjun’s kite war begins in earnest. From neighbouring roofs come shouts and laughter and the sharp, satisfied cry of kati.

Priya goes up to the roof with a plate of til laddoos and peanuts.

The sun is visible now, a soft disc, like it is trying to prove a point.

Arjun hands Priya the spool for a moment.

“Hold,” he says. “I need to adjust.”

Priya holds the string.

It bites her finger lightly—thin, tense, alive.

She thinks of her hands on the keyboard. The way they have started learning where to belong.

Two different strings, she thinks.

One is cotton and glass powder and pride.

One is plastic keys and English letters and a screen that listens.

Her phone vibrates again.

She almost ignores it.

But something in her—Sunita’s morning warning, maybe—tells her not to stare, but also not to pretend.

She looks.

A message.

Not from Sana.

Not from Sharma Ji.

From the college portal, in that plain language that never tries to be kind.

Status: Approved.

Under it: Download confirmation slip.

Priya’s thumb hovers.

Arjun is shouting at someone on the next roof. The kite string is vibrating in her hand. The sun is sitting there like an old witness.

Priya doesn’t refresh.

She doesn’t screenshot.

Not yet.

She just lets the word Approved exist for a moment, without asking it to prove itself twice.

Then she pockets the phone.

She calls down to Sunita, “Maa (mother)!”

Sunita looks up from the courtyard.

Priya smiles and lifts her chin toward the sky, where Arjun’s kite is still fighting.

“Later,” she says. “After he wins or loses.”

Sunita narrows her eyes. She understands that look too.

By evening, the khichdi smell has settled into the walls and the courtyard is full of small warmth. Somewhere in the lane a bonfire crackles, and someone’s radio plays an old song with too much reverb.

Priya sits on her bed with her notebook open.

She writes two lines, one under the other, like matching bangles.

• ₹250 (keyboard)
• Status: Approved (print slip)

She closes the notebook.

Outside, a last shout of kati rises and dissolves into laughter.

Priya lies back and holds her hands up for a second in the dim light.

Til has left a faint sweetness on her fingertips.

Tomorrow, she thinks, those same fingers will press real keys at home.

And somewhere, in a system that runs on slow servers and sudden decisions, her name has finally moved from under review to something that feels like a door opening.

Not loud.

Just… open.