Tinwad was a little boy who lived in the crowded city of Aswastan in Northern India. Every evening he enjoyed going on to the roof of his house and watching all the other children in the city flying their kites from the rooftops.

Tinwad liked to lie on the wooden bench his father had built and stare at the horizon. In the summer months the sun took a long time to set in the sky and stars would start to appear before the sun had fully gone down. He would like lie there and flick his glances back and too, first at the kites, then at the stars, then back to the kites; back to the stars, until the two became to appear inseperable parts of the same object - one great glittering, wavering sky.

Soaring high in the air on a thin piece of string, the kites where little more than tiny specks of dust twinkling in the distance a million miles from earth. The stars, still faint in the early evening, would also flutter in the heat-drenched atmosphere, as if pulled to and fro by the boys on the roof tops.