Bali in July and August is an island of wind. Candles blow out. Trees flex and stretch over rippling grass. Cooling breezes flirt along heated skin, bearing whispers of night-blooming jasmine.
Bali in July and August is an island of kites. Their silhouettes soar overhead, dancing on the wind and humming eerily. Almost every tall tree holds the bamboo skeleton of a kite that danced too close.
July and August are busy months in my garden; every kite in the neighborhood seems drawn to my trees like moths to a flame. Every year I meet a new generation of small, grubby boys who gather around my gate with anxious faces, piping “Layang, Ibu!”. Usually their little kites get caught up in the frangipani trees and together we delicately disentangle them. One landed on the roof once, and another had to be cut out of the mango tree.
Sometimes we catch a real monster. One Sunday afternoon the dogs began baying hysterically and I ran out to find a really large kite sinking into the jungle at the edge of my cliff. Soon half a dozen boys hastened single file along the business side of the wire mesh fence that keeps my dogs in the garden and the larger creatures of the undercliff out. Together we surveyed the damage.
Four metres of fragile black plastic attached to a split bamboo frame had fallen into a tall banana plant right on the cliff edge. The largest boy began to edge toward it. “Careful, it’s dangerous!” I warned. His smaller companion regarded me bleakly. “I’ve been playing here all my life,” he stated, putting me firmly in my place as an outsider who had usurped their territory.
Penitent, I offered a range of long bamboo poles I keep for the purpose. Eventually we freed the kite almost undamaged and manhandled it carefully over the wall onto the road. The very next day there was a loud pealing of the bell at the front gate, where yet another herd of small boys waited to rescue their kite from my waru tree, its long string hopelessly tangled in Pak Mankgu’s power line...
Wayan gets dreamy in the windy season. One day she pointed to a white mango tree about 50 metres tall that towers across the river. “When I was small, we kids used to climb right to the top of a big tree like that,” she remembers fondly. “We stood on the highest branches as they swayed in the wind, screaming with delight.” Where was her mother? “Screaming at us to come down!”
Wayan’s fearless streak has been passed on to Kadek, her daughter. Barely five, little Kadek wanders off alone into the sawah or the forest for hours at a time and thinks nothing of visiting a friend’s distant house on her own. Although it’s very unusual for girls to fly kites, she’s developed a passion for them.
“
She asked me to help her make one but I don’t know how,” Wayan relates. “It’s not something women do. So Kadek follows the boys when they fly their kites in the sawah and comes home hours later, covered in mud. Now she knows how to make her own kites.”
Boys begin to play with tiny home-made kites when they’re young, then graduate to the huge, traditional community kites when they become members of the banjar. These legendary Balinese kites are inspired by mythology, nature and modern cultural icons. Blending ancient and contemporary techniques and materials, some of these fabulous flying images have tails over 75 meters long.
Kite making and flying has a long history in Asia, where it’s recognized as a traditional art and sport. There are written records of contests in Malaya going back to the 15th century. Long before that, bamboo kites were used by the Chinese during battles, humming and shrieking in the wind to frighten the enemy. Some were large enough to carry spies above enemy territory. Kites are used as a fishing aid in Indonesia and in Korea to announce the birth of a child.
Bali’s ceremonial kites may be the most spectacular in the world today. The entire process, from conception to flight, is enveloped in ritual. When a banjar decides to build a kite, the Mangku selects an auspicious day to start its construction. A traditional kite can cost as much to make as an ogoh-ogoh. When it’s finished the team prays, and a ceremony marks its readiness to fly and gives it life. After the kite has flown it’s tenderly put to rest until the following year, often in the rafters of the temple wantilan.
The annual kite festival at Sanur sometimes attracts hundreds of teams. The enormous kites are loaded onto trucks and driven to the beach accompanied by supporting truckloads of team members and gamelan players, causing endless traffic jams on the way to the Bypass.
Once at the beach, the kites are launched after a final prayer. It takes about 10 men to hold the flying rope and control the kite, while several more lift it into take-off position. The gamelan plays lustily and increases in tempo as each kite leaps into the wind. Sometimes 10 kites are launched at once in a deafening cacophony of gongs, drums and cheering crowds. Vast dragons, butterflies and gods soar and dance in the energy of wind, wild music and human energy, tethered to the earth by only a slender filament of rope.
Five years ago a women’s gamelan was uncommon, and now nearly every banjar has one. Perhaps one July day I’ll open my gate to a group of anxious little girls piping, “Layang, Ibu!”. And maybe a few years after that I’ll follow them to Sanur to watch their giant kites dancing in the wind.
