I was drawing mountains. No particular purpose. Just to pass time and fill my notebook pages as I sat in the student lounge.
What I did not expect was that my friend Risheek Chummun would look at it and say, "Oh! You’re drawing my island!"
My island.
He’s from Mauritius, which I mostly knew through small details, like the dodo souvenirs I had seen on his country’s table during an international food event. The dodo, a symbol of something that no longer exists, but is still somehow present.
Later, when I thought about his comment, I realized his island is a place with things I have never seen, like the underwater waterfall he mentioned, something that sounds invented until you look it up and realize it’s real.
None of that was in my drawing.
But still, it reminded him of his home.
Later that day, as I was adding shadows to the mountains while sitting on the first floor of MSA with my sister, she said: "These mountains remind me of our trips to the north of Iran, the road had mountains like these."
I wasn't planning to draw those mountains, but she wasn't wrong about the similarity. Now the drawing had a second identity. In addition to Risheek's home island, it now also held a road hidden between the mountains. A road from Tehran to the northern cities of Iran, a car packed with food for a trip, and a memorable playlist in the background.
It’s a strange thing how quickly people upgrade a simple image into a memory.
You draw a few lines, and suddenly someone is revisiting childhood.
You leave space between peaks, and someone fills it with a road.
You don’t draw trees, but somehow they are there. Probably green ones. Probably very meaningful.
We don’t really just look at things. We recognize them. We adjust them to what we have in mind. We replace them with something more familiar, more ours. Which means that the image in front of us is never just itself; it’s layered with everything we’ve already seen.
That is why sometimes the less there is, the more we see. This is a quiet reminder that most of the time, we don’t just see what’s there.
We see what we’ve been carrying all along.
Written by Pegah & Pariya Palizban
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