lifeplace
What the wind carries
On kites, monsoon afternoons, and the sort of quiet that arrives only after a storm.
The best afternoon of my childhood involved a kite, a field behind a row of shophouses, and a wind that could not decide what it wanted. My cousin held the line. I ran. We were bad at it in a way that felt enormously important.
I have been thinking about that field because I have spent this week writing about wind, and I keep having to stop and check what I actually know about it against what I have imagined.
The monsoon has a manner
People who have not lived through one imagine drama. Mostly it is a routine. The sky goes the colour of an old coin somewhere after three. The air gets heavy in a way you feel behind your ears. Then it comes down like someone emptying a bucket, and it is loud, and it is over, and everything smells of hot ground cooling.
The part I find myself writing about again and again is not the rain. It is the twenty minutes after, when the drains are still talking and nobody has come back outside yet.
Silence after noise is a different substance from silence that was always there.
Why it ends up in the books
I did not set out to write about weather. But when you write for readers who are ten or eleven, you quickly learn that they will forgive you almost anything except vagueness. They want to know what it smelled like. They want to know whether the ground was hot.
A child reading has a very good instrument for detecting an adult who is bluffing. The only way past it is to have actually stood in the field, holding the line badly, while somebody ran.
Wind carries more than kites in The Girl Who Kept the Wind, where every child is born with a wind that carries their voice.
More from the journal
More by Elin Suriya
- The Morning a Word Went Missing 20 Oct 2026
- The Morning the Sky Held Its Breath 20 Oct 2026
- The one thing the magic in my books is never allowed to do 20 Oct 2026
- The character who would not come in out of the rain 15 Oct 2026
On the same subject
- The sound the harbour makes at the hour nobody is awake for Adele Merchant · 11 Oct 2026
- The rules my grandmother had about water Elin Suriya · 30 Aug 2026
- What the ice was holding Kestrel Hara · 30 Aug 2026
Discussion
House rules
- Sign how you like, but be one person. You may use the name on your account, a name of your own choosing, or none at all. What you may not do is wear somebody else's: no pen name of ours, no member's name but your own, and nothing that reads as the studio or its staff.
- Argue with the point, not the person. Robust disagreement is welcome; contempt is not.
- Nothing unlawful, hateful or harassing, nothing that identifies a private individual, and no advertising.
- Post only what is yours to post. That includes other people's writing and private correspondence.
- We may hide a remark, remove it, or close an account to the discussions, and we may do so without notice.
What a chosen name is and is not
A chosen name hides you from the room, not from us. Every remark stays linked to the account that wrote it, and the studio can see that link whenever it needs to. Please treat it as a way to speak freely, not as a way to say something you would not put your name to.
Where responsibility sits
Remarks in this thread are written by members and published without prior review. They are the views of the people who wrote them and not those of eQuill Studio. We do not verify their accuracy, and we accept no liability for them or for any decision taken in reliance on them.
If something here breaks these rules or infringes your rights, report it and we will look at it promptly.
House rules
- Sign how you like, but be one person. You may use the name on your account, a name of your own choosing, or none at all. What you may not do is wear somebody else's: no pen name of ours, no member's name but your own, and nothing that reads as the studio or its staff.
- Argue with the point, not the person. Robust disagreement is welcome; contempt is not.
- Nothing unlawful, hateful or harassing, nothing that identifies a private individual, and no advertising.
- Post only what is yours to post. That includes other people's writing and private correspondence.
- We may hide a remark, remove it, or close an account to the discussions, and we may do so without notice.
What a chosen name is and is not
A chosen name hides you from the room, not from us. Every remark stays linked to the account that wrote it, and the studio can see that link whenever it needs to. Please treat it as a way to speak freely, not as a way to say something you would not put your name to.
Where responsibility sits
Remarks in this thread are written by members and published without prior review. They are the views of the people who wrote them and not those of eQuill Studio. We do not verify their accuracy, and we accept no liability for them or for any decision taken in reliance on them.
If something here breaks these rules or infringes your rights, report it and we will look at it promptly.
This thread belongs to this piece alone. Members choose how they are signed, and can change it from the box below. When the studio or the writer joins in, the page says so with a badge, so you always know who is talking.
OPENING THE THREAD…