What she's shouting about
"You're hugging it." That's her whole complaint, all morning, at everyone on this roof and two roofs over. You stand there with your fists locked on the thread like it's a rope in a well and you wait for something to happen, and what happens is the other flier lets his line run and it saws through yours in eleven seconds while you hold perfectly still for him.
The manja is cotton. Ordinary sewing-weight cotton, boiled up with rice paste and glass ground fine as flour and colour thrown in so you can tell whose is whose on the ground. It does not cut by being strong. It cuts by moving. Two lines cross in the air and the crossing is just a little dry knot of friction, and whichever thread is running faster through that knot is the one eating. A still line is a file's worth of nothing. A still line is the thing being filed.
Why it won't fly straight
Your kite has no tail. Nobody's does. A tail is the thing that makes a kite point where it's going, and a fighter is built specifically to not do that — one bamboo spine, one bowed cross-spar, a diamond of tissue the size of a dinner plate, and no stabiliser anywhere on it. It is unstable by design and it is unstable all the time.
Which means: the nose points wherever the thread last told it to point. Let the line go slack and the nose falls off sideways and the whole thing slides away on its edge like a dropped plate. Snap a hard pull into it and the nose comes up and it shoots straight forward on that heading, hard, for as long as you keep the tension. That's the entire vocabulary. Pull to aim, give to drift, and everything in between is you guessing.
The green one across the way knows this. Watch how it moves — short pulls, long gives. Whoever's flying it is not standing there hugging.
The hundred metres in between
When you have eighty metres out, you are not holding a kite. You are holding one end of eighty metres of wet-ish thread with real weight in it, hanging in a long slack curve, and every command you give has to travel down that curve before the kite hears it. Give a hard pull at a hundred and twenty metres and the kite responds about when you've finished doubting yourself.
You'll see it in the line on screen. Slack and it bellies out into a fat sag. Hauled and it goes dead straight and thin, and that's the moment it's most likely to be a file for someone else.
Where the glass actually is
Here's the part people forget. The abrasive is only on the first stretch nearest the kite — maybe the first forty, fifty metres, whatever was on the frame when it got coated. Past that it's plain cotton on the reel, cheap and smooth and completely useless in a fight.
So a crossing that forms up near your kite is a crossing you can win. A crossing that forms way down your line, out past the coated stretch, is you rubbing plain sewing thread against someone else's ground glass. You cannot win that. You can only get out of it — give line hard, let the crossing slide off the end, and take the engagement again higher up.
And most engagements end that way anyway. Two lines touch, both fliers give, the angle changes, the crossing slides right off and nothing happens at all. Nobody cut. That's the ordinary outcome. That's four out of five.
Falguni's count, kept out loud, disputed by nobody
She counts hers loudly and yours grudgingly and she is not going to concede that the second one she got was a chhoti green thing already half-cut by somebody on Dhal ni Pol. Don't bring it up. It goes badly.