Makar Sankranti Tilgul and Kite Culture

Makar Sankranti marks the sun's turn northward into Capricorn, and it is one of the few Indian festivals pinned to the solar calendar rather than the lunar one, so it falls on 14 January almost every year, occasionally slipping to the 15th.

• In Mumbai it is not a festival with a single address.
• It happens above street level: on the terraces of Girgaum's old wadis, on the chawl rooftops of Dadar and Mahim, and on the flat roofs of Bhuleshwar and Kalbadevi, where families climb up after breakfast and stay until the light goes.
• At ground level the day is carried by a small, sticky sweet — tilgul, sesame bound with jaggery, pressed into ladoos or snapped off a slab of chikki and handed to neighbours with the Marathi phrase tilgul ghya, god god bola: take this sweet, and speak sweetly.
• The kite half of the day belongs to the older island city.
• For roughly a week beforehand, temporary stalls string up bundles of paper patang and spools of thread in the lanes around Bhuleshwar, Kalbadevi and Girgaum, and the trade is at its loudest in the Gujarati and Marwari neighbourhoods, where the Uttarayan kite tradition has long been part of Mumbai's fabric.
• Mumbai's skyline is denser than Ahmedabad's and its January breeze comes gently off the Arabian Sea, so the flying here is more scattered and more neighbourly than competitive — a hundred small terraces rather than one vast field.
• One caution is worth taking seriously: nylon and synthetic "Chinese" manja is banned in Maharashtra because the coated line injures birds, cyclists and flyers alike.
• Use plain cotton thread, keep spools away from children's hands, and note that city animal-welfare volunteers run bird-rescue helplines through mid-January.
• Indoors, Sankranti opens the haldi-kunku season.
• Maharashtrian women host gatherings from Sankranti through to Rathasaptami in early February, exchanging turmeric and vermilion, small useful gifts known as vaan, and sugar-coated halwa ornaments; black, unlucky on most days, is worn on Sankranti as the auspicious colour of a cold-season sun.
• For a visitor, the honest expectation is this: there is no ticketed ground and no parade route.
• What you can do is walk the kite markets in the days before, watch the sky from a public stretch such as Girgaum Chowpatty or Marine Drive, and always ask before photographing someone's terrace, family or home.
• Food is where the festival is easiest to join.
• The seasonal sweets are vegetarian by their very nature — tilgul ladoo, til chikki and revdi, and gul poli, a thin flatbread stuffed with jaggery and sesame and pressed with ghee, sold across Maharashtrian sweet counters in Girgaum, Thakurdwar and Dadar through January.
• Gujarati farsan shops in the Bhuleshwar and Kalbadevi lanes add khichu, undhiyu-season vegetables and jalebi to the same week.
• A blunt word of guidance: Mumbai holds one of India's finest pure-vegetarian food cultures and, alongside it, a very large seafood and non-vegetarian one, so never assume a lane or a class of eatery is meat-free.
• Look for an explicit pure-veg board, and confirm with the kitchen before you order.