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He sells custom-ordered kites to Afghan and foreign corporations and clients for much more, he said.įor the kite-fliers of Kabul, the release of "The Kite Runner" will help to draw the culture of Afghan kite-flying out of the shadows of the much larger and more prosperous kite-flying nations in Asia. While most kites in Shor Bazaar sell for less than the equivalent of 30 cents, Noor Agha's kites can fetch upwards of $1. But his business has gotten so large that he has enlisted the help of his two wives and several of his 11 children.

Noor Agha, like most Afghan kite makers, inherited the craft from his father, who made kites until he was too old to grip the tools.Īlone he can make about 40 kites a day, he said. "My prestige is higher than the interior minister," he said. His tools were arrayed before him: long stalks of bamboo and sheets of tissue paper pliers and blades to cut and whittle the bamboo into long, flexible dowels for the frames scissors to shape the tissue paper and a bowl of glue. "Nobody can beat me, nobody can do what I'm doing," he said one recent afternoon as he sat barefooted on the carpeted floor of his workshop making a kite. But factories in other more-developed kite-flying nations like Pakistan, India, Thailand, Malaysia and China now churn out tens of thousands of spools of machine-made nylon fighting string that swamp the Afghan market.īy consensus in Shor Bazaar, a block-long market of tiny kite shops in Kabul, the best kite maker in the capital is Noor Agha, a slender and vain 53-year-old man who lives in a squalid mud-and-stone hovel in a cemetery and is missing most of his teeth. Kite-fighting string in Afghanistan was traditionally homemade by a laborious process that involved coating cotton string with a concoction of crushed glass and glue. "Even if I am cut 40 or 50 times," he continued, "I will fly again because I know how the taste is." "These things all the time have a special taste." "It has a taste," he said, and he likened it to the thrill of horse riding or driving a car. Rashid Abedi, 25, a business administration student, described the satisfaction of killing another kite. The key to excellence depends on a combination of factors, both empirical and ineffable: the flexibility and balance of the kites' bamboo frames, the strength of the glue binding the tissue-paper skin, the quality of the string, the evenness of the spool and, of course, the skill of the fliers and their ability to adjust to the vicissitudes of the wind. The inveterate kite fighters speak of their craft as part science and part art. He added: "This is the only game we have every Friday. "We don't have any good places for that," he said. He had cuts on his fingers from handling the blade-like fighting string. "We don't have, like, soccer, baseball or basketball," said Ahmad Roshazai, a translator at a medical clinic near Bagram who was flying kites on the hill with two of his brothers. They fought in teams of two, with one person tweaking the string and the other handling the spool. All strata of Kabuli life - male Kabuli life, that is - were well-represented: Schoolchildren were fighting ministerial officials, doctors were battling day laborers.

On a recent Friday afternoon, there were scores of kites locked in duels above Tapeii-i-Maranjan, a high bluff in a southeastern neighborhood of the capital and the city's most popular kite-flying venue. The big kite-fighting day is Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, when thousands of boys and men flock to their rooftops and to the summits of the craggy hills that ring the city, carrying stacks of kites fashioned from bamboo and brightly colored tissue paper, and miles of sharp string on wooden spools. Kite-fighting string is coated with a resin made of glue and finely crushed glass, which turns it into a blade. The objective of the kite fight is to slice the other flier's string with your own, sending the vanquished aircraft to the ground. The sole reason for kites, Afghans will tell you, is to fight them, and a single kite aloft is nothing but an unspoken challenge to a neighbor: Bring it on! But this is not the stuff of idle afternoons or, as in American culture, carefree picnics in the park.