Write From Home Anthology

Sanou Niapégué, Tetouan.

The Diurnal Wind and the Homeless “Yesterday,” said the young man, “our leader announced in the national television that, next week, there will be a curfew in all the cities. He said there are difficult days to come.”

Another man had a camera connected to the microphone the young man was holding and standing to my friend and me, sitting on an old mat, and waiting for the charitable people of the day. It was there we were also living, in the big street near the big market in the capital.

People were coming and going and some of them who passed would still keep looking back as if having lost something.

“Everyone,” the young man continued, “will have to stay home from dawn to dusk, for a new diurnal wind is spreading and may arrive here in a month, which means people without protection will not be able to go out during the daytime. Only the rich, employed by our leader, will be able to do so, being protected then, while the rest of the people will have to wait till sunset be able to see the outside, and this, only to look for what is necessary as food. I think you have heard of this.”

“Yes,” I affirmed. I explained to the young man that when I was begging in the market, I had heard people complain about some passengers who had come from the country of the white man, fleeing the diurnal wind. This wind, they said, was killing people by just blowing during the daytime, the time of activities. Some whispered that the wind was invented or, more plausibly, intoxicated by a yellow man; they whispered because some yellow men were present and listening. Others said it was a divine punishment to warn, test and then purify the believers. Yet others maintained it was neither invented nor divine but the very consequence of a transgression against animals. They said our leader and all his friends were no longer wearing business suits but were now attired in some strange elastic clothes to prevent the deadly wind from penetrating their skin. I also saw some rich dressed in the same clothes. As for the poor, they were afraid, for they would have to stay home, close doors and windows from the penetration the wind and cover themselves from the feet to the head with what they had, that is, blankets. They said they could not digest how people could come from the country of the white man though our leader himself had already declared the borders of the country were closed and no international flight was to be allowed anymore. Perhaps, some opined, it was to import the wind which will replace the police to stop the poor from demonstrating.

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