Putting the Wind Up You (April24)

Five or six days in the last fortnight uncharacteristic wind-blow here on the Equator. On two or three of those occasions it had been of such strength that the flutter of leaves on the trees was audible—a first for the region and bringing the reminder that in other locales people had words for a range of winds; winds through bamboo in Japanese, and the like. Japan and other northern countries had an extensive vocabulary for snow for example. Kicking against the wind in junior football matches returned as a shadow memory; only a semblance of memory, because the example here was of a very minor kind; some greater strength up in the trees than at ground level. Attempting to mark the football too was much trickier in the wind, and not so much because it affected judgement of the ball flight, but more so because of a kind of rattling of the brain and body. Wind returned like an old friend in a couple of passages crossing a bridge over a river once or twice, the slender reed of the trunk like a sail on a dhow. One had wanted to lean into the adversary as one had done in other places. Sometimes the larger leaves brought down by the wind here, after a day’s baking under the sun, scraped like plastic on paving and made you turn round in case you may have dropped something. This afternoon rounding the base of J. C. Complex a tunneling effect was created through the walkway beneath the pillars; a good stern barreling such that the old Chinese chap at the carpet store on the corner, an old compulsive smoker still, adjusted the collar of his polo, where the plastic blow-hole in his throat had evidently let in gushes of air.