the wind moves the desert (alternate title: when i was crusoe)

Right before a haboob, the natural world is quiet. It's like Mother Nature powers down. There's no birdsong - in fact, there are no birds to be seen either. I don't know where they go at this time. Alley cats disappear and the roaming packs of dogs that have claimed the city are nowhere to be seen. The stray goats, which roam around Khartoum like they own the place and compete with dogs for the title of most self-entitled animal, vanish. Cattle stop mooing, sheep stop bleating, and the donkeys stop braying. It's bizarre.

There's no breeze either. But we know where the wind is. Somewhere in the desert, gathering its strength, summoning all draughts, blasts, eddies, gusts, and puffs to a predetermined meeting point.

As a result of nature's hiatus from the acoustic world, manmade sounds are intensified. Car horns are louder, sharper, and more indignant. People's voices carry, and domestic discussions, previously muffled by the wind, bounce off buildings and into neighbours' yards. This is the so-called calm before the storm.

When the haboob starts, you can see it from kilometres away. It looks like a big reddish-brown wall heading your way. During a haboob, it seems like the wind picks up the desert and brings it into the city for an unannounced, and definitely undesired, visit. There are no ways of differentiating between the city and the badlands, as the boundaries between them are erased. The wind unceremoniously dumps as much sand as it can carry all over the city, not unlike how pouty little boys on beaches dump contents of buckets all over antagonistic (and preferably unsuspecting) older sisters.

Once it's spotted though, you know you've got some time. Enough time at least to get indoors and seal all gaps between the in and out to stop the fine desert dust from slipping in. Everything will end up covered in red-brown desert sand - buildings are dusted over, roads are swallowed in the onslaught, and newly-formed dunes appear in the most awkward spots. Travel is impossible - the strength of the wind alone makes it difficult, the sand blinds, not to mention those sand dunes. Everyone remains indoors until the haboob's done - it's unwritten but perfectly understood. That's-just-the-way-things-are.

Once, before a haboob, in the chaos to get everything indoors - possessions, progeny, and pets - I was forgotten outside. Or I sneaked out to experience - I can't remember which, although now that I'm older and beyond reproach, I can admit this, and it seems the more likely scenario. I wanted to experience the haboob from inside it. I was eight years old, or round about there, and at the time, my family lived in a second floor flat with the hugest balcony I have ever seen.

The world was quiet, calm. Khartoum was still. Not a sound was made as everyone and everything waited indoors for the haboob to pass through.

Suddenly, all hell broke loose. It was like being in a reddish fog sent up by Hades as the sand swirled and stung. It blinded and irritated as it got into my eyes, my mouth, my lungs. I couldn't breath without feeling the graininess in my throat, and tears flowed down my cheeks covering my face with mud.

I held my t-shirt across my mouth so I could breathe easier, bowed my head a little to stop the wind whipping sand into my eyes, and I waited.

It could have been half an hour, or half a day. Occasionally, the haboob appeared to calm down. Like a fishwife exhausted from berating her husband for staying out too late, the wind lost steam and while the desert continued to fill the sky, the gusts weakened, and the dust started to settle. Like the pissed-off fishwife, the sandstorm caught its second, third, fourth winds. Each time it seemed the scolding was over, it would renew its intensity.

When the wind had weakened for what seemed like the last time, I was excited at surviving what in my mind was the worst storm of the century. I was tough, a hero, a survivor like Crusoe. I decided to set off on a solo mission and begin the inevitable clean-up, a task more daunting than Hercules' fifth.

You know how there's two types of impossible? The type that's impossible by name only, and then the type that's the real deal? Yeah, well, this was the real deal. Among the debris, I located a broom and I began sweeping. I swept and I swept and I swept. And I didn't accomplish anything. Every time I would manage to push a small pile of dust off the balcony, the not-dead-yet wind would cover the area with more sand.

This carried on until I was exhausted, and could sweep no longer. Covered in dust, my body drafting its letter of resignation in protest, and with a gloriously muddy face, I surrendered in recognition of what I should have known was too much to handle.

Two decades later, I still know the despair of crashing down from on top of the world, a feeling reinforced several times over (thanks, Life!). From feeling like Crusoe and Hercules, to experiencing defeat by grains of sand. Albeit billions of them. Now I'm older and wiser, but I still haven't internalised that lesson: whenever I sense that I'm about to squander my energies on a futile endeavour, something inside tells me I'd be better off hiding.

But I don't hear it though.