Et Sequitur Magazine

Et Sequitur Magazine, Issue 14

Issue 14 (Summer 2025)

The Kite's Tail

By Garima Chhikara

Lately, I’m scared I might turn into my Ma. The distractions—work deadlines, scrolling, arguing over conspiracy documentaries with my boyfriend—only go so far. I used to think grief was like drowning, but that, with time, you’d learn how to swim. You’d let memories wash over you without panic. That, with time, it wouldn’t feel so bad. I felt selfish for hoping it might someday ease, selfish for wanting a version of life that didn’t feel crushed by the weight of losing my sister.

But last week, a phone call from an unknown number pulled me under again, into darker waters than I’d known before. It was Reeta Aunty, who managed the Anganwadi, the place where Ishita, my younger sister, and I had spent our summer and winter breaks. We both loved winters more. Ishita loved them for the kites, carrot halwa, and foggy evenings perfect for hide-and-seek. I loved them for their brevity—a fleeting pause before life resumed its relentless pace in the city.

Ma hadn’t filed tax returns in years. The Anganwadi wasn’t registered like the government-run ones, but she still handled its expenses under her name. She had stopped paying Aunty Reeta, too. There was no money left in the deposits, and a recent flood had damaged the plumbing and electricity—bills Aunty Reeta had covered herself. My first thought wasn’t childhood nostalgia or aching for Ishita. It was the insurance. We’d been locked in a dispute over the policy Ma should have had since my father’s death. The lawyer said we were close to settling, but she’d need clean financial records, tax documents, and bank statements before the court date. Had I always been this shallow? I told myself it was just being practical.

On the flight home, I let a young girl take my window seat. It was her first time flying, and her mother kept leaning over protectively, as if something might leap in through the glass. I’d never flown with Ishita. She had visited me once, during my first year in college. I wondered if she got the window seat, if she spent the whole flight watching clouds, wondering if kites ever made it that high.

The cobblestone street stretched before me, unchanged, etched with dust and time. The neem trees exhaled their bitter scent, mingling with cow dung drying in the cold air. The Anganwadi stood ahead, its walls sun-bleached and weary.

Kalpana Angan, founded by my grandmother, was once a haven for children, a place where they gathered for meals, snacks, and stories. It housed the town’s only library outside the schools, though its shelves were mostly lined with hardcovers of Hindu scriptures and academic texts. The few books meant for children were limited: short stories by Ruskin Bond and Sudha Murty, and a single tattered copy of Chacha Chaudhary, its edges curled, a name scratched off the cover, forgotten by some long-ago visitor.

I had never understood Ma, and I thought I’d made peace with that. But now, I kept picturing what might be going on in her head. Last night, she sat at the edge of my bed, her mouth opening and closing. She struggled to speak. I was glad she didn’t. I was afraid of what she might ask, something impossible, something selfish. Like forgiveness. Like death.

The next morning, I told her, more than asked, that I was closing the place down. She stared past me, as if watching something beyond the walls. Maybe a memory. Maybe nothing at all.

"You don’t need to worry about money or the legal stuff. I’ll handle it," I said, and mentioned the insurance case, and that we might have to appear in court soon. For that, I needed clean financial records. I said it all like a status update I would give to a client. A reason, I told myself. A deadline. A way to make sense of the trip.

Ma stood still, lips pressed together, the same look she wore when Ishita fussed over her bracelets. She would add stars, moons, and seeds, but they were always for herself. Never for the other girls at school. Not even on Friendship Day. It was also the same blank expression that Ma gave me when I asked questions she couldn’t answer.

If she had an objection, she didn’t voice it. And if she truly cared, wouldn’t she have?

I sat in a small, stuffy Uber for over three hours to officially shut the place down. Though here, “official” meant little. Rules faded fast, only superstitions endured. Sweeping after sunset was forbidden, even if cow dung festered in the corners of the street. It invited bad spirits, they said. No one questioned it. No one dared test the unseen.

To me, it had always seemed like a place waiting to fade, except during festivals, when it briefly became a village of its own.

A lemon-chili charm still hung from the building, its thread brittle, its blessings long forgotten. Ishita made her own charms, sometimes adding tamarind for extra luck. With the leftover thread, she mastered cat’s cradle, weaving intricate patterns that outshone every other child.

The rituals Ma passed down, gentle routines that shaped the Anganwadi and its gardens, belonged to Ishita. She moved through them with the kind of ease that felt instinctive—something Ma never expected from me. I didn’t expect it from myself, either.

I told myself I had bigger dreams. I hoped Ishita would too, that one day she’d see what I had: sometimes, roots don’t steady you. They hold you back.

Ma always said serving the Anganwadi was a duty: sacred, generational, and carried with pride. For Ishita, it was a legacy. For me, it felt like an inheritance meant for someone else.

I wasn’t asked to carry it. Ma said I lacked Ishita’s grace, her patience, her touch. I believed her.

And now I’m here. And Ishita is gone.

She never blamed me for leaving. When the time came, I flew across the country for college. I chose freedom. But our home wasn’t a cage for her like it was for me, was it?

We lost Ishita a year ago, though I hadn’t seen her in two years. The last time, she was working on a remedy for Ma’s lingering cold. Ma never trusted Western medicine. I’m sure she figured something out, something worthy of being passed down, like one of those cures whispered through generations by grandmothers.

Reeta Aunty arrived with her daughter, who carried a dusty kite—a leftover from Makar Sankranti, our most beloved winter festival. While Aunty fetched receipts, her daughter tried to fly the kite, its wooden spool abandoned on the ground.

Ishita, in her red ghagra skirt, had once run across the street, her dupatta trailing behind her like a second kite tail. Unlike the other children, she never let her kite soar too high.

"A kite is bound to the ground until one frees it," she’d say, pressing the frayed edges smooth with careful fingers, taping over the smallest tears. "My kite is bound to me. Tat Tvam Asi."

Tat Tvam Asi—"You are That." Maybe she picked it up from the dusty scriptures on the kitchen's top shelf or from the faded red letters on the Anganwadi wall. She would recite it with such reverence, and I never asked what it meant. But now, her words echoed in my head, daring me to see what I had always overlooked.

As a child, Ma would roll her eyes at my questions about the Anganwadi, the customs, everything, like a teacher dismissing a foolish back-bencher. So I stopped asking. A quiet distance grew between us, one I couldn’t cross. Eventually, Ishita and Ma moved as one, their rituals a secret language only they spoke, leaving me a side player.

My kite, unlike hers, soared recklessly, its tail squirming as it drifted away. My hands would bruise from cutting other kites, but I never cared. Freedom was worth it, or so I thought. Now, I’m not so sure.

“No, no—cash only, beta," Aunty Reeta said, tucking the notes into her blouse. "I don't trust those phone transfers.”

I didn’t have enough on me, so we headed to the ATM for the rest. On the way, her daughter tugged at her arm, begging for Layz, a localized snack. The shelves of snacks reminded me how much had, and hadn’t, changed. Our go-to snack, the powder pipes that tasted like tangy dust, were still there.

"Your Ma was always asking, fussing, throwing tantrums right in the middle of the street," Aunty Reeta said, laughing as we walked back. "Once sat there the whole day till she got her way. Just for a school fair. Left at your age too. But she came back, beta. Kept coming back."

But I knew better. She was never coming back.

A small part of me wanted to be wrong. But I wasn’t. I bit the inside of my cheek until the sourness filled my mouth.

I wanted to feel something beyond the heavy hollowness. I despised the part of me that didn’t know her or myself, or where we came from. I despised how, even now, I couldn’t be trusted to take care of what mattered.

I felt like a root left behind after the stem had vanished, like something stubborn and misplaced.

"You should think twice before closing it," Aunty Reeta said, adjusting her pallu. "This place holds blessings, beta. Shutting it down might bring a bad omen. But who am I to say? Ask your mother."

It felt strange, hearing about Ma from someone else, as though she belonged here more than to me. A reminder I didn’t need. She didn’t socialize with the people in town, but she ran the Anganwadi like a well-oiled machine, with Ishita and Aunty Reeta as her steady hands.

I felt something unfolding within me. A voice I’d tried to ignore, now pulling me closer.

The garden beside the Anganwadi, once overgrown with tall grass, now lay barren. After kite flying, Ishita would sit there, her kite wrapped in a thin cotton shawl, eating sweets by herself. She was always alone, like Mother, who preferred solitude.

At dusk, she’d sneak into the storeroom, hide the kite in a grey suitcase filled with barely torn kites, and ask for my help unlocking it the next year.

The only familiar thing that remained was the loamy air, still carrying the scent of Ishita—her braids, the tamarind in her pocket. Beneath the mango tree, something flickered. A parrot or a kite tail, I couldn’t tell.

I sat down. The ground, though firm, seemed to hum beneath me, a heaviness rising through me. It wasn’t just grief. It was something quieter, unnamed, slipping into spaces I hadn’t known were there.

Then I felt something stir in me, a voice I knew too well.

The voice that told me to leave for college across the country. The one that said money would fill the gaps. That convinced me to stay with a boyfriend who asked big questions but never bothered with the answers or my opinions.

The voice that made separation from Ma feel like strength instead of surrender. The same voice that said I’d get over losing Ishita.

I despised that voice.

Would I ever learn to swim the dark waters of grief and resentment? Perhaps not.

But I could let myself be here, instead of denying everything: this place, the guilt-ridden thoughts of failing my family, the horrifying scenarios that all led to unimaginable ends.

"I’m bringing Ma back," I told Aunty Reeta. "Please have the place cleaned up."

I didn’t know if Ma would agree. But as I breathed in the crisp winter air, fully for the first time in a long while, I realized I wasn’t just doing this for Ishita or Ma.

I wanted to stay, at least for one last winter, to give this place and my grief a space to breathe before it flooded me completely, or worse, before it disappeared.

That night, I dreamed of Ishita. She appeared as a gentle yellow kite, hovering just above me, her tail moving in patterns, like some message I was supposed to recognize. In our culture, they say ancestors return as crows, or as whispers on the wind. Maybe that was her way of visiting. She had come as yellow. Next time, maybe orange.

If I came back, would I fly too? What color would I be?

I told Ma later. She didn’t speak, just listened. Really listened.

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