Give it. Give it.
Don't hug the line.
Nine in the morning, the roof is full, and my cousin is standing behind you with the firki on both forearms telling you exactly what you are doing wrong. Cursor high on the sky = dhil, you're paying line out. Cursor low = kheench, you're hauling it in. That's the whole control. You never touch the kite. The kite does whatever the tension last told it to do, and the tension is you.
The thread, since you asked
It's cotton. Six-cord, plain, off a reel that cost nothing. Then it sat in the yard on Tuesday while it got run through rice paste and powdered glass and pulled through a palm three times to dry, and that is the entire secret, so stop looking at me like it's a trick.
It is not strong. Snap a length with two fingers — go on, do it, I'm not precious about it. It cuts because it saws. Sawing needs movement. So a line that is standing still is not defending itself, it is a surface. It is something for a moving line to eat through, at leisure, while you stand there with your jaw set feeling brave.
Say it back to me: the one who gives, cuts.
It has no tail, and that's the point
A tail makes a kite behave. A tail makes it sit where you put it like a dog. We do not want it behaving. We want it able to turn on the spot and go, which means it is unstable, permanently, by design, on purpose, deliberately.
Its nose points wherever the tension last told it to point. Slack, and the nose falls off sideways and it starts slipping and turning and looking for the ground. One sharp pull and it snaps upright and shoots forward like it's been shoved. That's not steering. That's you telling it something down a hundred metres of string and hoping it's still true when it gets there.
A hundred metres is a weight
You keep flicking your wrist like there's a wire between you. There isn't. There's a long soft heavy curve of wet-ish thread hanging in the air with its own belly in it, and every single thing you ask for has to travel down that belly.
Short line: it answers you. Long line: you ask, you count to two, then it answers, and by then you've asked three more times and it's doing all four at once and going over on its back.
Feel the sag. When it's slack you can see it, that curve, that's your delay drawn in the air. When you haul it, it goes dead straight and now everything is instant and now everything is also very easy to cut.
Where the glass actually is
Only on the first stretch. Thirty metres off the kite, near enough — that's the manja. After that it's plain cotton the whole rest of the way to my arms, because nobody coats a full firki, that's madness and it costs money.
So: a crossing up near your kite is a fight. A crossing fifty metres down your line is not a fight, it is a donation. If he's caught you low, come out of it. Turn out, drop away, let the lines slide apart — most of them slide apart anyway, that's normal, that's the majority of every morning, two lines touch and nothing happens and everyone screams for no reason.
What I'm actually going to shout
GIVE IT — you're clamped and he's running thread across you. Get your hand up. Let it run.
PULL, sharp — it's gone slack and floppy and the nose has fallen off and it's about to spin down into somebody's tank.
Come out of it — he's on your bare cotton and you cannot win there, no matter how loud you are about it.
And if the hiss goes high and thin — that's the crossing eating. You'll hear it before you can see it. That's not me being poetic, that's just what it sounds like.