The wind again. It was not even a wind. It was a gust of deadly movement of air; a movement of air lacking creativity in every sense of the word ‘creative’. Creative wind is that which whistles as it breezes by your ear; it brings the scent of distant flowers so that you can have a taste of the essence of the flowers. In this case, it should have brought the tantalizing air full of the wind’s awareness of the environment; it did not carry any awareness this wind.
It banged the doors, swept the dried leaves under the stems of drying cactus and acacia plants. It fixed dust particles at the corners of your eyes. This made your eyes acquire the grinding feeling when you blinked. Later, when you had tried to blink without succeeding, your eyes took upon themselves to attract some white foam at the corners closer to the nose. As you walked in the baking sun, sweat would trickle down and meet the white substance at the corner of the eyes. And on-lookers would feel like vomiting.
It went to a whole new level this wind. It transported hoards of dust into your eyes. This wind. Beni wished it could do anything else. Any other thing except trying to make him stop thinking. It almost made his mind go blank with desperate musings about why he thought things could be better. The wind almost succeeded in its determined scheme until the heat rushed down. The heat was not like the wind. Where the wind had failed in creativity so that it came in violent and confused brutality, the sun sought a more direct line of action. It did not flatter. The sun. The heat.
Beni remembered his Physics lessons. Light years. He almost got amused by the idea that light from some celestial bodies took eight hundred years to reach the earth’s surface. This heat – he thought - could only be the effect of rays racing from the centre of the sun while still raw. Funny aint it? No it could not be funny. This was because what nature had been running on to save humanity from assured extinction was finally getting consumed. Ravaged. Mere musings. It was neither funny nor tragic. It was tragicomic. Smiling while dying. Thoughts lost in the thin wind. The heat. Sweat. All these were drastic expressions of nature’s disgust with man; nature’s dissatisfaction with prevalent hollowness of action.
The floodgates had been opened. And from the floodgates, came thoughts. You might have been tempted to think they were thoughts in a hurry to be known. And as it would one day be said, they were thoughts that could only be described in the superlatives: the worst of thoughts; the most extravagant of thoughts; thoughts of the most tragicomic aspect; thoughts of the most random element. But he was happy. As long as he was thinking he had to be happy. This was eloquent testimony to the assertion that he was a thinking man. With ideas of such magnitude, he reassured himself. With such ideas in his mind, he could lay claim to the belief that he had an intelligence; an IQ he would have liked to believe was in the region of double digits.
His mind was racing with abandon disregard to speed; it may even have reached a speed at which he thought it could not effectively process the information that was getting in and out of it. Talk of mighty data in the range of terabytes being processed on a computer with a mere 256 MB of RAM. He wanted to get a tight grip on his mind and arrest it but he could not. At this rate he was going to stop being rational; he was bound to get unrealistic. In this surrounding where everything was getting ravaged by the fury of climate, you needed to be at the peak of his senses. The wind again! This time dust did not come like a chariot of pharaoh’s soldiers. He began imagining what his diary might have looked like twenty years ago:
Monday 23rd February 1991
Mum is not very clever. She did not even know I was not sick when I said I was. Mr. Paulo the Math teacher saw me running with sugarcane from the church’s farm. Couldn’t go to school today. In our school the teachers punish you even for things you do at home. Like failing to go to church or making noise at the river. I even got punished yesterday for rehearsing a signature at the back of my book. Was thinking of using the signature in KCPE registration three years from now. I had to miss school today. What with the merry-go-round beating?
Tuesday 24th February 1991
After five minutes of trying to persuade Achero our cow that she needed to be milked, she let me milk her. Moments later, she induced her most accomplished frustration strategy. I was almost filling the jug when she faithfully lifted her right hoof and silently placed it inside the jug. My bro laughed as if he had been expecting it all along. I hate that! Anyways, I transmitted the contents of the jug to my brother’s face. Next thing? We were rolling in cow dung. But I love my brother. Younger than me but he has a way of driving sense into anybody who attempts to mess with me at school. No hard feelings about him.
He stopped the crap about diaries. Beni was just arriving at the BP Filling Station at the major junction in Maralal. Dust partially covered the polythene bits of paper that lay scattered in trenches by the road side. Cold Pilsner at the BP Cafeteria would soon help mitigate the adult heat in his throat.
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