Another kind of insect, many-legged and mild, lived in the cracks of that top-terrace. There was perhaps in all of India and the world no insect so nonviolent and peaceful.

That time in Calcutta, when lakhs of locusts had swooped upon the city, Harbart had been astonished at the sound of them crashing against the tank. How different that was from the sound of rain!

In winter, Harbart would climb up to that sun-warmed top-terrace, wearing the sweater from Krishna-dada and the wrapper from Jyathaima.

Every year, long before Vishwakarma Puja, the season of kites would start. One of those days, Harbart was fast asleep on the empty top-terrace. Suddenly, something slid across his stomach. Opening his eyes, he found a strand of string severed from a kite. The infant Harbart, lying not too far from his mother’s dead body, had witnessed, up in the sky, a slack-stringed struggle between two kites. Even though he did not remember it, he felt the terrible tug of that slack-stringed fight. But for a slack-string fight, one needed a reel full of string. Because you had to let loose lengths and lengths of it, because if you ran out of the glass-glazed manja string, if you got to the reel-end plain white string, then you were bound to lose.

To pull off a tight-string fight, you needed more twist and violence, and then, if there wasn’t a strong enough breeze, the kite seemed to mutter-stutter through clenched teeth all the frustrated thoughts of its owner. Harbart used to stare, incredulous, at those thrust-and-destroy contests—kite-kidnap games being fought in midair, as though the flyers were feeling the throb and thrill of rape.

What Harbart loved most, though, was to see, at high altitude, a loose kite drifting off on its own. If it seemed to swing a lot, then one knew it had been severed right beneath the tail—that it barely had any string left. And if it seemed to proceed at a stately pace, rolling like a heavy coin, then one knew it had a lot of string to it still, that it would bring good luck both to its captor and its new reel.

Dhanna’s three sons used to fly kites from the big terrace. The small terrace higher up was forbidden to them. If Harbart ever caught a kite up in his high place, he gave it to them.

The Gayla, the Candle, the Bird King, the Four Square, the Splitbelly, the Badge, the Chessboard, the Burnface, the Betel Leaf—no matter how gaily glorious all those were, the deep-dark Booloom was the king of kites. Once, he’d seen a severed black Booloom floating across a clouded sky and been almost afraid. Neither before nor after had he seen such a solemn final journey. As a matter of fact, even his own final journey had not been so grim.

It was on that same top-terrace that Harbart, one day in his youth, felt erupting from his body an incredible elation and sensual satisfaction. In his eyes, then, the darkness of the sun. And around him, the foot and a half-tall terrace walls gleaming with green moss.