Illustration by Misbah Ahmed
How I birthed the world through metaphors
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, when Kundera says that a single metaphor can give birth to love, I’m not quite sure what he means. And I worry, because if I cannot analyze that single phrase, then I may very well be unfit to be a writer.
Having just re-watched, for the fifth time, the Bollywood film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (also known as DDLJ) with my favourite on-screen couple, Kajol and Shahrukh Khan, I can safely say that actions in themselves are metaphors. “If she loves you then she will turn around and see you … turn … turn!” the subtitles interpret Raj’s lines to his new love, Simran, who is boarding a train back home. One of the Hindi words for “turn” sounds like “palat” and looks like पलट, a word that sounds much nicer in its cacophony than “turn,” which has many meanings but one sound. Turn to look at someone. Recoil at my touch. Turn back. It’s fitting in Khan’s moment of love to hear an urgent “palat,” which is such a quick sound but hastily dressed in so much hope. “Palat,” and then she turns on the third. They smile at each other, and the rest is history. What if she didn’t turn back?
“Palat.” When the boy I think I love walks away.
“Palat.” When my grandmother boards Wheel-Trans back to her home in Markham.
“Palat.” When my mother is angry with me and I have to leave for school.
The turn is the metaphor. The action says I am desperate to stay, so will you just look at me? Your eyes are my selfish reassurance that we will be alright together. Whatever is in front of you is a lesser thing than when my eyes meet yours and give me life. Palat is the desperate ache itself. The stakes of love and life are based on a meeting of eyes, a turning of the neck to see, see, see.
What about meeting your own eyes? That feeling of staring into a mirror while brushing your teeth, only to turn around before you turn the bathroom lights off to make sure what you saw was correct. To ensure that you’re a three-dimensional being with a beating heart. What about the surprise you feel when you realize your reflection is not three-dimensional? It has a heart that fails to beat, so maybe no heart at all. Then looking into a mirror is death; it is Bloody Mary’s semiotic murder.
Suppose I lived a life without mirrors. Say I simply felt my own teeth as I brushed. Then looking into a mirror is life, because there is my own face borne out of a physical form I have never seen. I haven’t imagined what I looked like because there is no need, there wasn’t a thing like a photograph because nobody desired to look themselves. It would be astonishing to me that suddenly I could be beautiful. I have seen beauty, but I would wonder if humans can be beautiful too. Isn’t it only flowers, I’d think, that seize the brain of physical pleasure? The touch of a loved one on the back, or letting a baby’s fist curl around my pinky? What if my face was more beautiful than all of these things?
I’ve given birth to myself just by looking. I have given birth to a romanticized idea of a high school crush. I have renamed him Fred, because his real name is unsuitably elegant. I have given birth to Fred by smiling at him when he turns to say, “have a good weekend,” or, “can I borrow that Tylenol?”
A guy like Fred was full of wild metaphors, and this is where stacks of digital poetry are born. Each handing of a pencil was a step closer, closer to nothing and everything at once. Each smile was a sign of something daunting and disturbed, each laugh and accidental eye flutter a sign of intrigue. There were warning signs too. A crushed paper airplane, the first I ever made, under Fred’s heavy foot without so much as a sideways glance at me. A glance would have said to me that he’d done it on purpose, which I could live with, even embrace. If a single metaphor can birth love, then maybe it can birth death too.
I’ve given birth to myself just by looking.
When Tomas compares Tereza to Moses, solitarily floating downstream, he births tenderness, he births love, Kundera proposes. But maybe he births illness, and maybe devotional love is that illness. To care for Tereza like a baby, protect and adopt her as part of his own heart is a disease that cannot be cured. “Palat” is such a virus.
If Simran never turned back in DDLJ, then that would be a very different metaphor, but for Raj, maybe it would still be love. If he gave up on her then, then love it never was. Either way, the moment he says, “if she loves me, she will turn around,” he creates a signifier of devotion. Kajol’s expressive eyes are implanted in my brain, and whenever someone turns to look at me my heart rate increases. Even a bus driver. Even the lady who sells iron-on badges on the street corner. Even my mother. The man who sits across from me on the subway, his legs twisted together like the croissant I had for breakfast, even him. I turn away (palat).
I’m recovering from the flu as I write this. In a hot haze of not doing anything for days, I can see now how it is I survive. Illness was my metaphor, and if it is a device like that then it is a lesson. That fever was a metaphor for my need to relax. The heat swelling in my head was a reminder to take it easy, take a break to cool off my anxiety. A warning sign like the flattened paper airplane, drenched brown under his soggy Chuck Taylor.
When someone asks for an answer and I only nod, is that a metaphor for lifelong silence? I edited myself out of my best friend’s essay because it deemed me disproportionately special. The flu is the kind of illness that lets you know that you need to stop and consider your metaphors before you think of waking up the next morning. Once you consider them you consider yourself lucky for owning the ability to perceive things in retrospect. When you wake up with a cough, you allow yourself to go to back to bed. Nobody else can do this, can understand this like you. This could be love.
