Kids don't fly kites anymore

For lattai-maker Meera Sthapit, the Nepalese Dashain |festival is a year-long affair. By February, crafts woman and artists from Banasthali, Kathmandu, have already procured the wood and bamboo needed to make the traditional kite reels that will be in demand come October, when the country celebrates the festival commemorating the victory of gods and goddesses over demons.
By the end of August the lattais must be shipped to the kite and lattai stores in Kathmandu. September and October are for taking last-minute orders, if any. The 15 days during the actual Dashain festival are Meera’s only rest days, and then it’s back to planning for next year, as well as what upgrades and new features she can add to her craft.
Meera toils in a workshop located adjacent to her house, which is itself only a small cinderblock shack with a corrugated tin roof propped up by bamboo pillars. It’s filled with piles of wood and bamboo slates, and here she spends most of the year breathing air thick with sawdust, her body stooped over her homemade, making her spindles.
Meera’s lathes are nowhere close to the multitasking, precision-timed, finely calibrated workhorses found in factories, but they get the job done. They are basically motor- and belt-driven spindle units bolted to the floor, and they can be used – with the right tool-bits and some ingenuity – to cut out circles, sandpaper surfaces, etch grooves and apply spirit and varnish to the wood.
When Meera first started making lattais 40 years ago, she did so without the help of machines. She had taken up the craft at age 15 because her father, who had inherited it from his father, needed another pair of hands to keep up with orders.
Meera’s grandfather was a carpenter who specialised in wooden window frames, staircases and banisters, and had taken up lattai-making as a hobby rather than for profit. He had pieced together his first lattai out of spare wood and bamboo splints, simply because he needed it to fly his own kites.
Seeing the craftsmanship in that homemade lattai, his friends begged him to make some for them too, and before he knew it he was making kite spindles for everyone. By the time Meera’s father got into the craft, lattai-making had become a family business.
Meera admits that, when she was younger, she made lattais as a way of ensuring a nice Dashain for herself. Even though she wasn’t paid an hourly wage while working for her father, the “tips” she got enabled her to buy the clothes and other knick-knacks she coveted over the year.
As she grew older, her siblings married away or started their own businesses. Meera saved up to buy better tools made friends with the owners of wood mills to get discounts on raw materials. She hired a few workers and started to expand the family business.
Over the years, she made additions and changes to the original design, upgrading it. Her standard design involves two discs cut out from lakuri wood planks, connected by a truss of bamboo splints. A middle disc of cheaper uttis wood reinforces the structure. A long wooden handle is then inserted through the centre of the cylinder, with extensions on the outer two discs.
Meera next etches various designs on the disc, both for decoration and to enable the kite-flyer a better grip on the lattai. Her lattais also come in different sizes, Size 2 being the smallest and Size 7 the biggest.
Meera’s lattais have been well received and sought out by retailers in the Kathmandu valley for over 30 years, and business has been good all this time. However, she says, she’s recently been losing customers, particularly among the younger generation, to the Internet and video games. Children today prefer to sit at a computer rather than playing outdoors with kites.
But she plans to continue making lattais as long as there is a demand. Judging from current trends, it won’t be long before she has to venture into something else.
Her nephew, who lives with her, helps with the lattai-making, but his interest lies in dog-breeding, a more lucrative business in today’s Kathmandu. He’s built a kennel next to his aunt’s workshop, and Meera is sure that, as his business grows, her workshop will have to make space.
A new venture is in the near future is inevitable, she says, but she will make every effort to sustain the lattai business as long as she can, because every lattai she makes is more than just a product for sale – it’s a family heirloom.