Opposites
One of the most powerful ways to use a simile is to make two comparisons that diametrically opposed in meaning.
“Work he expected to be doing for the rest of his life. Most days, that prospect weighed on him like a sentence. Tonight, hiding from the police, it felt like a hope.”
...A Hard-Knock Life
Abdul expresses an unusually developed and mature philosophy of life through a metaphor accessible to nearly anyone, but especially to those who live under harsh conditions.
“Even the person who lives like a dog still has a kind of life.”
“a fortune beyond counting”
This is Abdul’s metaphorical term for what is treated among many in Mumbai as a genuine source of income being put at risk by officially sanctioned government waste disposal engineers: the garbage tossed out by the city’s big luxury hotels.
Cultural Referencing
Metaphorical comparisons come with certain built-in limitations. A comparison referencing certain cultural differences can be immediately obvious to one reader and fairly meaningless to another. To those unfamiliar with this reference, the problem is obvious: does it mean it's a small family or an enormous family? Lacking any concept of the number of players on a cricket team, the simile loses the precision it carries to readers who cricket fans.
“The Husain children had another sort of backing, a family the size of a cricket team.”
Characterization in a Nutshell
A solid metaphor that gets right to heart of the matter can be more effective at describing the fundamental personality of a character than paragraphs of either prose or dialogue. The following is a magnificent example of this efficiency:
“Zehrunisa Husain was a tear-factory even on good days; it was one of her chief ways of starting conversations.”
