Severe Weather: Intellectual vs. Emotional

marthaengber
Jan 26
2 min read

I started researching THE WIND THIEF in 1995, the story of Madina, a strange, young Sahara Desert woman who believes she can stop a forthcoming war of winds, and Ajay, the young male thief from Mumbai who tries to dissuade her.

The concept of climate change had been a thing for some thirty years already. What inspired me more than any news reports about a warming globe and more severe weather, however, was experiencing nature while backpacking. Standing atop a snow-covered mountain in Colorado in below-freezing temps on a step ice-crusted slope in 50 mph wind teaches you at an emotional level what happens when Mother Nature gets her dander up, even just a little.

For your enjoyment, here's an excerpt from the first chapter where Ajay has just met Madina in the desert and the two experienced a dust storm in which she wordlessly showed him what to do to survive:

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“What did you yell into the wind just now?” he asked.

“It was just a Chichili,” she said. “A spring wind storm.”

“I didn’t ask what kind of wind it was. I asked what you

yelled.”

When the young woman didn’t respond, Ajay said, “You told

it to stop, didn’t you?”

The young woman remained silent. Ajay didn’t press her for

an answer as he busied himself strapping his pack to his shoulders.

She’d yelled and the storm had stopped. Though if she could really

communicate with the wind, why not convince the storm wind to

stop before it began?