Fly With Me Kite Festival

On August 20th this year, people in more than 30 cities across the U.K., Europe and the U.S. participated in a kite festival to mark one year since Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. In truth, the verb “fall” may not be the best choice. Did the country fall? Or was it dropped? Abandoned? Treated like a chess piece in a vast game of international dominance?

I am reminded of not one but two picture books by my friend of many years, Canadian writer Rukhsana Khan. The day I read about the kite festival, it seemed as if the two books merged in my mind and melded into a single, bigger story, one that involved war and fear, and also beauty and hope and determination. King for a Day is set in Pakistan but the theme of overcoming disability and longing to wing a kite into the sky crossed right over into the real world and into the longing of people of Afghanistan for peace, for the right of girls to go to school, for a land that has been wrested out of its people’s hands by generations of international meddling, political corruption. and religious demagoguery.

It’s weird to me that The Roses in My Carpets and King for a Day should still feel feel relevant, that we seem, as a species, unable to put violence and prejudice behind us. If anything, we’re experiencing an upsurge in both. Like the kite festivals worldwide, Rukhsana’s books remain a call to us not to forget Afghanistan in the chaos of the next news cycle and the next.