Bahadour

The sun stamps his shadow on the wall and he’s left one wheel of his bicycle spinning. It is dusk, there are a few minutes before he must pedal his wares through the streets again. But now, nothing is more important than this kite working its way into the wobbly winter sky. For the time he can live at the summit of his head without a ticket, he is following the kite through pastures of snow where his father calls into the mountains for him, where his mother weeps his farewell into the carriages of a five-day train. You can see so many boys out on the rooftops this time of day, surrendering diamonds to the thin blue air, putting their arms up, neither in answer nor apprehension, but because the days tenders them a coupon of release. He does not think about the failing light, nor of how his legs must mint so many steel suns from a bicycle’s wheels each day, nor of how his life must dropp like a token into its appropriate slot; not even of constructing whatever angles would break the deal that transacted away his childhood – nor of taking some fairness back to Nepal, but only of how he can find purchase with whatever minutes of dusk are left to raise a diamond, to claim some share of hope, some acre of sky within a hard-fisted budget; and of how happy he is, yielding, his arms up, equivalent now only to himself, a last spoke in the denominations of light.