Upsilamba

Upsilamba! - the word carries me back to the spring of 1994, when four of my girls and Nima were auditing a class I was teaching on the twentieth-century novel. The class's favourite book was Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through his originality in a society where uniformity is not only the norm but also the law. Even as a child, Nabokov tells us, Cincinnatus appreciated the fressness and beauty of language, while other children "understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or catapult with wondrous consequences."

No one in class had bothered to ask what the word meant. No one, that is, who was properly taking the class - for many of my old students just stayed on and sat in on one of my classes long after their graduation. Often, they were more interested and worked harder than my regular students, who were taking the class for credit. Thus it was that those who audited the class - including Nassrin, Manna, Nima, Mahshid and Yassi - had one day gathered in my office to discuss this and a number of other questions.

I decided to play a little game with the class, to test their cruosity. On the mid-term exam, one of the questions was "Explain the significance of the word upsilamba, in the context of Invitation to a Beheading. What does the word mean, and how does it relate to the main team of the novel?" Except for four or five students, no one had any idea what I could possible mean, a point I did not forget to remind them of every once in a while throughout the rest of that term.

The truth was that upsilamba was one of Nabokov's fanciful creations, possibly a word he invented out of upsilon, the twentieth letter in the Greek alphabet, and lambda, the eleventh. So that first day in our private class, we let our minds play again and invented new meanings of our own.

I said I associated upsilamba with the impossible joy of a suspended leap. Yassi, who seemed excited for no particular reason, cried out that she always thought it could be the name of a dance - you know, "C'mon, baby, do the Upsilamba with me." I proposed that for the next time, they each write a sentence or two explaining what the word meant to them.

Manna suggested that upsilamba evoked the image of small silver fish leaping in and out of a moonlit lake. Nima added in paretheses, Just so you won't forget me, although you have barred me from your class: an upsilamba to you too! For Azin it was a sound, a melody. Mahshid described an image of three girls jumping rope and shouting "Upsilamba!" with each leap. For Sanaz, the word was a small African boy's secret magical name. Mitra wasn't sure why the word reminded her of the paradox of a blissful sigh. And to Nassrin it was the magic code that opened the door to a secret cave filled with treasures.

Upsilamba become part of our increasing repository of coded words and expressions, a repository that grew over time until gradually we had created a secret langauge of our own. That word became a symbol, a sign of that vague sense of joy, the tingle in the spine Nabokov expected his readers to feel in the act of reading fiction; it was a sensation that separated the good readers, as he called them, from the ordinary ones. It also became the code word that opened the secret cave of remembrance.

Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi