Smiling Through the Pain
Gujarat, India 2009
Men set up their kite string shop on the side of a busy boulevard. One man reeled out the string along the roadside and others, like this man, applied ground glass to the string with bare hands. Well, they did have a few strips of gauze wrapped around their fingers.
I didn’t see any droplets of blood. That shows their skill. They were pleased to be the object of our attention. As our guide in Uzbekistan used to say, “They’ll have gossip for a week.”
Did you read the book, “The Kite Runner”? These photos remind me of that story and the cutthroat way the boys in Afghanistan used to fly kites.