I travel from one land to another in just a few fleeting moments as I stand in front of my closet. The grooves in my fingers have memorized the feel of dipping into gold rivers of thread that twist into the opening of the Bay of Bengal.
Crimson blood and royal blue battle along embroidered borders on my salwar kameez and I wonder which belongs to East Pakistan and which has already become Bangladesh.
I drape a scarf of georgette in all its flowered details as if I'm planting daisies along my neck.
I turn my boat around and swim into stripes of plains and seams that create skylines interrupting the clouds above cities I'd never see on the other side of the ocean.
Angles of frayed collared shirts meet in a gridlocked map of streets lined with townhouses identical to each other.
I've spoken to the land, the rivers, the lakes in a language I learned for them, one they can understand.
I have come to expect a silence in return.
I can always hear the sounds drifting out from the Ganges River across the sea.
Sound unknown to a land where the bottoms of your teeth merely greet each other, but never hold a conversation.
Sound requiring curling of the tongue and gritting of the teeth in a manner that is foreign to me.
I can walk along the edge of the river knowing that the men and women and children with skin like chai will beckon me in a language I can no longer recognize.
I’m only a tourist in this land, I’ve only the knowledge to speak a language where my teeth hardly graze each other.
I can only peer into my closet and admire the handsewn embroidery mapping out the right side of my closet as I set sail across the Atlantic and land among the striped T-shirts on the left.