Uncertain Times

As far as commercial farming goes. This is a very strange year. You see the weather is capricious this year. It rains for three days straight, then it turns scorching hot for the rest of the month….not a single drop of rain. In such times a man must be steady. He cannot run helter skelter, otherwise he will unravel at the seams. The weather is like a girl who says no in the morning, yes in the afternoon and maybe in the evening….there is nothing more dangerous than that to a farmer. In the beginning of the year, they said it will be an la nina year with loads of rain, three months ago they changed it to El Nino, now no one cares to listen to what they have to say. Uncertainty can kill a man slowly from within….she turns this way, then another in a breathe…what does she really want….does she mean to drive me stark raving mad. I once heard a story deep in the folds of the Sahara, so deep and remote that one could find footprints only to follow them for hours on end only to realise the finality of the irony that it was made by the same man. There in a wadi. I heard a grizzled Beduion with a thousand folds of skin recount in pidgin Francaise, a tongue so ancient that it harks back to the Atlantic slave trade in the island of Zanzibar. In this tale, a Sultan was so maddened by the relentless whine of a strange ochre colored wind that he demanded the uhmah to declared jihad against the evil wind and marched to face with a broad line of archers who loosed so many arrows the sky darkened into night and pikemen that ran a line as far as the eye could make out and armored elephants only to perish somewhere in the ocean of the sand in the Sahara. A man has to remain steady and calm in such times…..otherwise he might end up like that deranged sultan of lore. I spent three hours at the edge of my lands early in the morning just feeling her…the winds….yet I am none the wiser. She turns with a wanton caprice this time that I cannot seem to decipher. If this persist into the next month. Something will break. What that might be. I dont really know. We are well and truly in uncharted water. I must have grown a tad arrogant like an old soldier who has seen more battles than he has scars and now this man is confronted with a big question mark. Maybe its my ego who feels slighted. Could even be my inferiority complex that seems to flare at this prevailing mood of uncertainty. Maybe I should go visit the village soothsayer. They say he has a smart yellow bird that fits into his palm and this bird can pick a card that foretells the future. Maybe the bird knows. I certainly dont. But why do I feel that I above all men should know…why? What accounts for this perverse sense of entitlement….I laugh into the wind, she hears my rebuke, I reckon as suddenly the wind tacks again and this time, I can hear a tree snap and fall nearby. Maybe she has curled her finger nails into talons. Perhaps I shouldn’t think aloud and just play dead and allow her to humiliate me further to know where she’s going with all this plate throwing…….********* ****** lah, my experience counts for nought against this strange wind. My petitions are all swept aside like tissue paper….. Its as useful now like a comb to a bald man. Maybe this is what she really wants…..somewhere deep down I whisper to her – don’t be like that lah….am I too proud?….. perhaps. One can so easily assume all sorts grandiose delusions concerning the self here sorrounded by an ocean of green that seems to go right on forever….maybe I should just concede defeat this time. Should I supplicate myself before her feet?

I look on at this impenetrable wind like a priest studying pigs entrails to make out the barest morsel of the future…..but she doesnt yield.