The Kite Maker

🔊 Read AloudI begged him to teach me. At first he was reticent — a gardener's son did not simply sit down with the family's child — but boys are quicker than their parents at forgetting which side of a wall they belong on, and within a week the two of us were spending every hot afternoon on the flat roof above the storerooms, where no one thought to look. He showed me how to balance the spine, how to judge the bridle, how to feel the wind through the string like a pulse. My kites crashed and tore; he mended them without a word and handed them back. When one of mine finally flew, he was happier than I was.

Those afternoons were the best of my childhood. We talked about everything and nothing — what we would be, where the wind came from, whether the hawk that circled the water tank was the same hawk each day. For a few weeks I forgot, entirely, that the world had decided we were not the same.

🔊 Read AloudThe world had not forgotten. My mother noticed the flour missing from the kitchen, the paper gone from my father's study, the hours I could not account for. "You spend a great deal of time with the gardener's boy," she said one evening, not unkindly, but in the smooth tone she used for settling things. "He seems clever. But he is not a suitable friend for you, and you must not encourage him above his place. People talk."

I said nothing, which she took for agreement. I did not stop seeing Tariq; I simply learned to lie about it, and in learning to hide him I learned, without knowing the word for it, a quiet condescension — the sense that our friendship was a gift I was giving him, and could take back.

🔊 Read AloudThe thing happened on a still grey afternoon when there was no wind for kites. To pass the time I had taken Tariq, against every rule, into the front rooms of the house — I wanted, I think, to show him that I was not afraid, though of course I was. On a low table in the hall stood my mother's most prized possession: a porcelain horse, pale and fragile, brought from far away, that I had been forbidden to touch since I could walk.

I was the one who picked it up. I wanted Tariq to see it, to hold it; I was showing off. It was in my hands when my mother's footstep sounded on the stair, and in my panic I pushed it at Tariq — "here, take it" — and his unready hands fumbled, and the horse fell, and broke into three clean pieces on the floor.

🔊 Read AloudMy mother stood in the doorway and looked at the three pieces, and then at the two of us. "Who did this?" she said. She was not looking at Tariq. She was looking at me, and her face already held the answer she expected and wanted: that the gardener's boy, brought where he did not belong, had broken what was precious.

Tariq did not speak. He looked at me. He had a way of waiting, quiet and steady, that gave a person room to do the right thing. All I had to say was three words: It was me. I felt them in my mouth. And then I felt my mother's eyes, and my fear of her, and the whole weight of the white wall and the many rooms, and I lowered my gaze to the broken horse and said nothing at all. My silence spoke. It said everything I was too much of a coward to say aloud.

🔊 Read AloudIt was over very quickly, the way the worst things are. Tariq was sent from the house that same hour. By the end of the week his father had been let go — "we cannot keep people whose children cannot be trusted," my mother said — and a new gardener came who had no son. I was not punished. I was, if anything, comforted, gathered up and told it was not my fault, that I should be more careful about whom I allowed near our things. Every kind word was a stone added to the wall.

I never said goodbye. From an upstairs window I watched Tariq and his father carry their bundles out through the gate. At the last moment he turned and looked back at the house — not in anger, I think, but to see whether I had come. I stepped back from the glass so he would not see me, and that small retreat, the moving of my own feet away from the window, is the cruelest thing I have ever done.

🔊 Read AloudI am a grown man now, with a kind wife and children of my own and a position my mother would have been proud of. I have apologized, in my life, for many small things. I have never been able to apologize for the one that matters, because I do not know where Tariq is, or whether he remembers a rich man's son who could fly the kites he built but could not, when it counted, open his mouth.

What I know is this. The lines that divide us — of wealth, of class, of whose child is "suitable" — are drawn by grown-ups, but they are kept alive by the small cowardices of children who learn to step back from the window. I learned that lesson the wrong way round, and it took me thirty years to understand it. When my own sons are old enough, I will give them kites. And I will tell them about a boy named Tariq, and about the three words I could not say, and I will hope they are braver than I was.