[MUSIC]
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI: I often tell students that a simile is a way to bring our readers close to things that they don't know by comparing them to things that they do know, and to bring them close to emotions or abstract ideas by comparing them to sense images that are very clear in their mind. So it's giving, it's defining the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar for me. It's defining that which is difficult to grasp in terms of that which, physically, we can grasp on our senses. The passage where she is trying on American clothes first time, she compares herself and her stance and her attitude, she's like the models who are on TV she thinks of herself. And then when she's wearing a short nightie, she looks at her legs and they are the legs like the legs of a movie star. They're long and sleek like the legs of a movie star. And here she's defining her old life, her familiar self, in terms of that which she finds exotic and desirable. And that's one of the ways in which similes are working in this passage. And then I'll look at a passage right at the end of the story called when she is remembering, she's remembering an experience where she almost drowned. And she describes it in this manner, when she drowns and she's coming back up. She kind of goes under and she's coming back up. "The desperate flailing of arms and legs as I fought my way upward, the press of water on me, heavy as terror." Then here, a physical sensation and an emotional sensation are being equated. "The wild animal trapped inside my chest, clawing at my lungs." And again, a physical sensation being described, but metaphorically. There's a wild animal inside of her, that desire for survival, that needs to live.