The verdict comes early

Some time in the third week of every Ramadan, somebody senior says one sentence about how the month is going, and that sentence becomes the history of the month.

It is always short. The month is soft this year. Or the month is ahead. It gets said on a call or in a corridor, to four people, and within a week it is being repeated by someone who was not there and has no idea where it came from.

The month, meanwhile, is not finished. The last stretch behaves nothing like the first twenty nights. The holiday at the end is expected in the final days and carries its own trade. What is bought this week is delivered after it. Returns arrive later than that. The full reconciliation of the month lands well into the next one.

By the time the real number exists, the story has a shape, and the number has to either fit it or fight it. It rarely wins that fight. Arriving late, a number reads as a correction, and a correction reads as an excuse.

So I stopped treating the mid-month sentence as chatter. It is the review, held early, in public, by whoever was willing to speak first.

Which is an argument for speaking. Not spin: the honest sentence, said while the month is still open. What is up, what is down, which of the two is likely to hold, and a date for when I will know the difference. Volume behind, basket bigger, and here is when the answer arrives.

That sentence costs nothing this week. Three weeks from now it is not available at any price.