over the ocean like an overripe orange, ready to burst. The road we’ve taken this time curves by the rippled dunes. It seems like the edge of the world. There are long rushes, like old women’s hair. But I gaze upward, always more interested in the things of the sky. Above me, bright particles, hovering. They look like kites flown by giants. I clutch Anju’s arm and point.
Huge and wheeling over the bay. Every possible color. But where are the cords? It takes me a moment to see the people dangling from them.
“They must be hang gliders!” Anju leans out of the window in her excitement, shielding her eyes. “I read something about them in California Living— they like to take off from the cliffs around here because of the strong offshore winds.”
One of the gliders is arcing back toward land. I admire the ambidextrous dip and lift of his wing spans. Their wide abandonment. Like being in love. I haven’t felt this way in a long time.
I grip the seat and speak to the back of his head, forgetting to be careful. “Can we please see where they land? Can you find it?” My voice vibrates like a tuning fork. Even Anju stares, surprised. He swivels his head for a long, risky glance at me, takes the next exit. I shouldn’t have asked. I shouldn’t have. In the driver’s mirror, a small pulse beats in his temple.
I am afraid of that erratic beating. But I will wait until later to be sorry. Right now there’s a spirit wind, wild and snatching. I open my fisted hands to it, feel it fly across my palms, rearranging lines. Sunil has wrapped Dayita in his coat. We walk across the parking lot—just a dirt strip on a cliffside. A platform of sorts where one can stand. Then the gliders are all around our heads, coming in to evening. Enormous winged creatures, helmeted and goggled, something other than human. But delicate and fervent, too. Are such things possible? To be so free of gravity, so deliciously loosened from earth?
“I’d like to be up there,” Anju says. She bends so far over the railing that I grow afraid and grasp her sari. There are purple shadows around her, aureoles of yearning. “It must be special, to feel the wind going right through you. All your problems slipping away—only you and the sky and the waves so far below they look painted. To maybe keep going into the light …” She leaves the sentence unfinished, languid with possibility.
Sunil puts out his free hand. His fingers are lean and polished as the copper the jewelers back home beat into bracelets. They encircle her elbow entirely, she’s lost so much weight. “Now you’ve seen them, let’s go home.”
“Wait,” said Anju, pointing. Two of the gliders are landing next to the platform. The men’s legs bracing against the ground, puffs of dust, gravelly scrape of shoes. The current from their wings pulls at my hair. Someone rushes up to unharness them, but they’re shrugging off their gear already, laughing, raising their arms high to clap hands with each other, pulling off helmets to let their hair—black, agile red—tumble out over their shoulders.
“Why, they’re women,” I cry. “Kingfisher women!”
Sunil and Anju look at me. “Kingfisher women?” asks Anju, raising her eyebrows at the bright yellow of their outfits.
I nod.
Once long ago, I’d seen them. Near a gorge. We were standing on a bridge. It was early morning, filigreed with fog. The birds were blue-backed and shining. Slim-beaked. They came out of nowhere, plunging down, soaring up, chasing each other, diving to the river for food. It seemed to me they sang. And kissed in the air. They weren’t afraid of anything. Even when the train thundered by, they kept doing what they loved.
“Is this real, or is it a tale like the ones you used to make up when we were girls?” Anju asks. “Because I don’t remember any such bridge—or any such birds.”
I realize that I’ve been speaking aloud. I hadn’t meant to. “You weren’t there,” I say