Kites and Lemonade by Yasmeen bint Ahmad

Author:Yasmeen bint Ahmad
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448218332
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2024-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

TRYING OUT THE KITE

It took two days to make the kite’s tail with two hundred paper bows, a hundred green and a hundred red. It looked magnificent and Leena was sure it was going to help make their kite the best in the world.

She sighed happily. Life in the city was turning out to be much better than she had hoped. She had made two best friends. She had settled in at school and, more importantly, she was managing her selective mutism around her friends. The more she got to know Rima and Jojo the less anxious she became.

Saturday dawned nice and bright with a stiff breeze blowing through the window, making the blind rattle. The first thing Leena did after breakfast was check the glue on the kite. It was bone dry. She tugged at the bows on the tail to make sure they were tied securely.

Leena couldn’t wait to try out the kite but Saturday morning was for helping her mother to tidy up their apartment. They cleaned and polished the tiles in the bathroom, hoovered the rugs and mopped the floor, telling her father to keep his feet off the tiles. Her mother draped the rugs over the railings on the balcony to air.

But at last Rima and her mother rang the door buzzer. They’d brought a picnic cooler with them, as well as an enormous thermos flask filled with more of their special lemonade.

Leena’s mother had packed a cooler too. They were going to make a grand afternoon of it. The two mothers and Omar squeezed into the lift while Rima and Leena fetched the kite from the bedroom and carried it carefully down the stairs. Jojo was waiting in the courtyard, the cat with emerald eyes sitting on her lap.

“Good afternoon,” she said brightly, getting to her feet while the cat hopped to the ground. “Look at how all the bows on the tail are trembling. This kite can’t wait to fly.”

Leena’s mother reached out of her wheelchair to buzz the gate open. The girls carried the kite out, Jojo holding the tail like the train on a bride’s dress. When they got to the park, they found it full of people trying out their own kites. It seemed everybody was getting into a festival mood. The two mothers settled in the shade of a tree with Omar. The cat, who had followed them, sat close by the coolers.

“She knows there are fish finger sandwiches in ours,” laughed Rima.

“Right, how do we fly this kite?” said Jojo.

Leena checked her notebook. “We secure the end of the string on the spool to the bit where the spine and the cross spar meet,” she said. “You two each take one side of the kite and run across the park with it. I hold the spool, letting the line out. Then when I shout ‘NOW!’, you two let go off the kite, I run with the spool and, if everything works and the wind is blowing in the right direction, the kite should soar straight up into the sky.

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