Part I: The Bangle

“A border is not a connection nor a separation; it is the tension between the two.”

– Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

What if a bangle could carry a border? If you turned it slowly in your palm, could you find in its circular seam the quiet breath of two sisterlands, India and Myanmar, caught in a delicate orbit of kinship, rupture and return?

I have worn bangles since childhood, not as adornment but as memory. One of the bangles I still keep is from a small town in Arunachal Pradesh, where my father was posted during his service in the Indian Army. I was not born there. I arrived as a guest, a girl of ten, trailing behind the smell of camphor from army barracks and the starch of pressed uniforms. But two years is long enough to change the rhythm of your walk. Long enough to begin saying “we” when you speak of a place. The town let me in not with ceremony but with the slow grace of hill mornings, misty, murmuring, non-intrusive.

A local woman once said to me, “Some borders you cross. Some, you wear.” I did not understand her then. I think I do now.

This is not a story about a nation. It is a story about the skin of a place and those who feel with it.

Arunachal Pradesh, India’s eastern sentinel, is often reduced in national discourse to strategic geography, remote, rugged, sensitive. But I knew it as a place of dense green folds, tribal rituals, quiet laughter and rain that touched everything. The Myanmar border was not a distant diplomatic construct; it was a tangible ridge in the landscape, where languages bent into one another and customs overlapped like pine trees on festival days. The people across that line looked like those on our side. Their words twisted similarly at the end of sentences. Their food, their prayer rhythms, their crafts, all mirrored and mingled with what I found on my side of the slope.

Yet, they belonged to a different flag.

And I, in turn, belonged somewhere else too, but for those two years, I belonged enough to feel the wound of that artificial line. To feel the joy of sisterhood and the ache of separation in equal measure.

To call India and Myanmar sister countries is to engage in a fraught and fertile metaphor. It is both geopolitical shorthand and an emotional surplus, what postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak (1988) might call “an intimate otherness.” While mainstream international relations often interpret sisterhood between states as diplomatic formality, I am interested in another kind: an embodied and feminised sisterhood. One where blood and soil are older than borders. One that survives not through treaties, but through tea shared in tin kettles, in forest rituals whispered in Tangsa or Konyak, in the patterned shawls that pass from hand to hand. My view of Myanmar is not one of an insider, but neither is it entirely that of an outsider. I write from the threshold, a place of partial belonging, shaped by childhood immersion and adult reflection.

In this sense, sisterhood becomes an unstable but generative frame. Not sameness, but affective adjacency. A condition where you are not of a place, but it lives in you anyway.

I still recall the local festivals; Tamla-Du, Losar, how the mountain air felt sharper on those mornings and how women wrapped woollen shawls with colours that echoed Burmese patterns. My friends spoke of cousins who lived “just beyond the ridge,” in villages technically Burmese but culturally indistinguishable from ours. I use “ours” consciously, not to claim nativity, but to acknowledge a shared experiential space. As theorist Doreen Massey (1994) argues, place is never static or pure; it is constituted through relationships, memory and movement. I was shaped by that place as much as I passed through it.

And so I return, through writing.

When I think of Myanmar, I think of smell first. Smoke from bamboo fires. The tang of fermented tea leaves. Camphor and damp cloth. My father’s colleague had a friend who traded medicinal herbs across the porous edge of the forest. He brought back little satchels of bark, charcoal and saffron threads, often exchanged without official clearance. There was no sense of intrusion, only continuation. The hills did not care which side you came from. They welcomed you in the same hushed tone.

One night, a family from the other side shared dinner with us in a temporary officer’s camp. Their daughter gave me a thin silver bangle. “From our valley to yours,” she said. I did not know what that meant then. Now I think it meant: we are not strangers, only re-arranged.

This is the kind of sisterhood I speak of. Not legal, not diplomatic. But felt.

It is not without violence. It is not without gaps. But it is more enduring than most flags.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984) has critiqued the ways Western feminism constructs the “Third World woman” as a passive victim, erasing the nuanced solidarities and cultural knowledge within and between non-Western communities. In speaking of India and Myanmar as sisters, I resist both romanticism and flattening. I evoke a lived feminist geography, one where ecological rituals, shared aesthetics, interwoven mythologies and survival strategies create solidarities beneath the radar of formal politics.

There is an underground sisterhood that the state cannot see. It moves in songs sung while washing rice, in stories told of forest spirits who belong to no nation, in the shared grief over roads that never arrive and leaders who never listen.

This is what I was shown, not taught, during my brief but formative stay in Arunachal Pradesh.

My perspective is shaped by movement. Military postings teach you that belonging is elastic. But they also show you how certain places stay with you, wrapping themselves around your skin like the glass threads of that gifted bangle. To wear that bangle now, years later, is to touch a region I was never from, but never left.

Myanmar today bleeds through military repression, civil unrest and humanitarian crisis. In parallel, India’s northeast often slips into the margins of the national story. As one friend once said, “The rest of India remembers us only in floods or funerals.” This twin invisibility binds the two regions in a quiet kinship of forgetting.

To write about these sisterlands is to resist that forgetting. To stitch memory back into the archive. To say: we were here. We cooked, we laughed, we crossed invisible lines. We knew each other.

Let me return to the metaphor of the bangle. A bangle is not just circular. It is seamless, until it cracks. In its shatter lies its history. The bangle from that border dinner eventually broke in my suitcase. But I kept it anyway, in a pouch along with my school ID and a half-used notebook. Some things you keep not because they are whole, but because they hold a story you cannot afford to forget.

Sisterhood is like that. Not pristine. Not symmetrical. But enduring.

Part II: Ridge that Speaks in Tongues

“The lines we draw to separate nations often cut through languages, rivers and rituals that never sought division.”

– Unattributed oral saying in Pasighat

My childhood in Arunachal Pradesh was punctuated by voices, crisp, lilting, muttered, melodic. A symphony of tongues that felt both intimate and elusive. There were evenings when three or four languages were spoken around the fire, none of which I understood completely, but all of which felt like home. Hindi was only a scaffolding, used in school, with officers, on parade grounds. In the market, on verandas, in whispers between cousins, it receded. Galo. Miji. Singpho. Tangsa. And somewhere along the edge, Burmese. Not formal Burmese from textbooks, but a braided vernacular slipping across borders like steam between planks of deodar.

Language, here, did not ask for permission to move.

I learned this from a shopkeeper named Aunty Tzi. She sold beaded jewellery and fermented mustard greens in jars. Her speech mixed Hindi with her native dialect and a few Burmese phrases that she claimed “tasted better in the mouth.” When I asked her how many languages she knew, she laughed. “Enough to survive. Enough to mourn. Enough to sell.”

I have never forgotten that.

To know a language is to know how people carry joy and grieve loss. To lose one is to lose part of your survival kit. Borders are poor translators. They carry weapons better than words.

Arunachal Pradesh, though territorially part of India, is linguistically distinct in ways the national imagination often cannot compute. Ethnologue lists over 30 distinct languages in the region, many with no formal script, transmitted orally across generations. They live in lullabies, harvest chants and forest warnings. In this polyphony, silence too has meaning. It is the silence of what is remembered but not spoken or what cannot be spoken without betrayal.

I arrived as a child with perfect English grammar and an eager tilt toward textbook Hindi. What I encountered instead was an untranslatable world, dense with idiom and intent. Theorist Homi Bhabha (1994) writes of the third space,  a hybrid zone where meaning is negotiated, identities refracted and the nation-state unsettled. In hindsight, I think my childhood was lived in that third space. I was not native, nor completely foreign. I was allowed to listen, even if I could not always reply.

The ridge near our cantonment had no name on the map. But the locals called it “Kabu,” which they said meant “to listen with the body.” When I asked a friend why it was called that, she simply replied, “Because it remembers sounds we have forgotten.”

That place held voices even when no one spoke.

Myanmar, too, is a country of tongues, fractured, layered and often politicised. Burmese is the official language, but the terrain teems with others: Shan, Karen, Chin, Mon, Rohingya. To speak a non-dominant language in Myanmar today can be an act of survival or sedition. The State has long operated with a centralising logic, equating linguistic diversity with threat. But like the hills of Arunachal, the valleys of Myanmar whisper in plurality. Their resistance lies in their refusal to homogenise.

I sometimes wonder if Kabu Ridge and the hills beyond speak to each other. If languages, like rivers, remember routes even after walls are built. Perhaps the word for mother in one dialect echoes the word for soil in another. Perhaps what we lose in translation we gain in gesture, a touch, a sigh, a gaze that says: I remember you even if I can’t name you.

The body, after all, remembers what maps forget.

In a workshop years later, I studied the work of anthropologist Veena Das. Her writing on violence, memory and the “descent into the ordinary” offered a way to think about trauma not as a break, but as something that weaves itself into the fabric of daily life (Das, 2007). I thought again of Aunty Tzi and how she never spoke of the conflict, but her recipes changed. Her pickles grew sharper. Her laughter more brittle. There was history in her spices. Politics in her silences.

When I asked her once if she had ever been to the “other side,” meaning Myanmar, she said no, but her mother had. “Only once. To bury a sister.” Then she added, “She came back without her voice.”

That sentence stayed with me. I did not know whether her mother had stopped speaking or whether her language no longer fit her when she returned.

This is what borders do. Not always by barbed wire or bullets, but by erosion.

There is a kind of grief particular to those who live in borderlands, not a single catastrophe, but a daily attrition of connection. A steady unknitting of what was once seamless. Postcolonial geographers often speak of the “afterlives of partition,” those spectral residues that linger long after borders are drawn (Radcliffe, 2010). But for many, especially in India’s Northeast and Myanmar’s ethnic highlands, partition is not past. It is ongoing. It recalibrates kinship. It rearranges belonging. It redraws the terrain of mourning.

At ten, I did not have the words for this. I only knew that some letters never reached their destinations, that some festivals were celebrated in hushed tones and that certain names could not be said aloud. Now, I know these are the patterns of borderland life.

We write in code. We speak in footnotes.

In 2021, during the Myanmar military coup, news of refugees crossing into India filtered in through guarded headlines. Some found their way to border villages in Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh. The Indian government’s response was inconsistent, caught between geopolitics and ground-level empathy. But the villagers, many of whom had familial or cultural links to those crossing over, acted with quiet resolve. They offered shelter, food, language.

This, to me, is sisterhood.

Not the proclamatory kind. But the kind that brews tea for a cousin’s son who fled in the night. The kind that remembers recipes across state lines. The kind that lets someone weep without asking for a passport.

This form of relationality, what scholar Sara Ahmed might call affective economies, circulates outside the bounds of formal structures, yet carries deep emotional and ethical weight (Ahmed, 2004). In the language of the hills, it is simply called being human.

I still sometimes dream in half-phrases I do not fully understand. I hear women humming while weaving baskets. I see a boy balancing a clay pot on his head while laughing in two languages. In my dreams, no one asks where I am from. They only ask what stories I have brought.

This, too, is inheritance.

Not of blood, but of presence. Not of land, but of listening.

And so I write, not to claim, but to remember. Not to define, but to honour. The land I knew was not mine by birth, but it adopted me with a quiet generosity. I owe it more than nostalgia. I owe it voice.

Even if I have to borrow words from a dozen tongues to speak.

Part III: The Land Remembers Us Differently

“Even if we forget the land, the land will not forget us.”

– Indigenous Naga proverb

In the highlands of Tirap, the earth is redder. It clings to the soles of your feet like an insistence. When it rains, the smell rises, not of mud alone, but of something older: iron, root, smoke and breath. I remember standing barefoot outside our cantonment during a monsoon downpour, my toes sinking into the earth, watching streams carve temporary rivers down the sloped paths. That was when I first understood that land is never still. It moves, erodes, absorbs. It listens.

And sometimes, it speaks back.

It has been said that to live in a borderland is to live on a bruise. A place always slightly tender from being pressed too hard by too many hands. Yet for those of us who have lived in such spaces, especially as women, the land becomes more than territory. It becomes a ledger of survival. A witness. A mother. A sister.

For all the bureaucracy that surrounds it, land is an embodied experience.

You feel it in the way your knees ache before a storm, the way your voice carries across valleys, the way the morning mist does not just settle, it holds you. And in Myanmar, as in Arunachal, the terrain is not just political; it is sacred. Layered with myth, blood, prayer and labour.

The anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose speaks (2011) of “ecological kinship,” the idea that humans and non-humans are related not metaphorically, but materially and spiritually, through systems of care, memory and co-becoming. In this view, land is not passive backdrop but active relative. In many tribal cosmologies across India’s Northeast and ethnic Myanmar, mountains are not simply geological forms but ancestors. Rivers are not just sources of sustenance, but sentient beings.

As a child, I was warned not to speak too loudly near the Noa Dihing river. “She hears everything,” someone whispered. I took that seriously. When I lost a treasured book to the current, I whispered an apology and a promise. To this day, I believe she kept it for me.

We are always entering into contracts with land, even if we do not realise it. Some are formal, deeds, titles, wars. Others are intimate, footsteps, rituals, breaths. And while states draw lines and build fences, land remembers flows. This is why satellite maps can never fully capture the soul of a borderland. They do not account for where a grandmother planted turmeric or where a daughter buried her placenta.

The India-Myanmar border, stretching over 1,600 kilometres, is one of the most porous and under-regulated boundaries in South Asia. The Free Movement Regime (FMR), introduced in 2018, allows people from both sides to travel 16 kilometres across without a visa, recognising the dense familial and cultural networks that crisscross the region. Yet, this porosity exists uneasily alongside a militarised and surveillance-heavy infrastructure.

The land is free. The people are watched.

In these contradictions, entire communities must learn to exist as shadows of themselves. The Zomi, the Chin, the Nagas, they are split by nationality but united by ancestry. A cousin may live in Sagaing and a sister in Manipur. And still, the forest binds them. Foraging routes, ancestor groves, salt paths: these are maps no GPS will ever find.

And it is often women who carry these unmarked cartographies in their bodies.

In many of the tribal cultures of Northeast India and the highlands of Myanmar, women are custodians of land not through legal ownerships, but through rituals and labours. They know which herb to gather for fever, which root sings under the soil when it is time to sow. They keep stories not in books, but in the rhythmic cadence of grinding rice or weaving shawls.

My friend’s mother, a Miju woman, once told me: “Land is a jealous sister. If you leave her too long, she won’t feed you.”

She was not speaking only of agriculture. She meant the forgetting. The exile. The dangers of becoming too comfortable in someone else’s language, someone else’s capital. That warning returns to me now, as I write from a city where land is viewed mostly as commodity. Here, no one stops to ask the river how she slept.

This erasure is colonial in shape and neoliberal in pace. The nation-state, especially in the postcolonial context, functions as both custodian and aggressor, protecting some bodies while evicting others (Menon and Bhan, 2018). In Myanmar, the dispossession of Rohingya communities and in Northeast India, the evictions under the pretext of forest conservation or encroachment, are echoes of the same grammar of control. Both spaces bear witness to what the political theorist Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” the power to decide who may live and who must die (Mbembe, 2003).

But amid this brutal cartography, women continue to gather seeds.

They hide them in their blouses, in creases of sarongs, in the hollow of ancestral drums. They save them not only for sustenance, but for continuity. The act of saving a seed is also the act of dreaming a future. Of saying: This will grow, even if I do not.

Sometimes I wonder: If the land could speak in the language of treaties, would it dissolve our borders? Or would it ask us to make new ones, not of barbed wire, but of responsibility?

In both Arunachal and Myanmar, ecological degradation is not only a crisis of the environment, but of epistemology. When forests are cleared for mining or militarisation, it is not just biodiversity that is lost, it is also vocabulary. Ways of knowing. Names of trees that do not exist elsewhere. Medicinal practices without written records. Songs that only grow in a certain altitude.

We think of deforestation as economic damage. But for many Indigenous women, it is a theft of archives.

I remember walking through the Dapha Bum hills near the Myanmar border. It was early morning and the mist moved like a soft animal. The guide, a Lisu elder, pointed to a clearing and said: “That is where my grandmother made clay dolls when she had no daughters.” He did not elaborate and I did not ask. But I understood.

Sometimes, you mark your presence on land not with possession, but with tenderness.

It was also there that I encountered a practice I had never seen before, “forest weaving.” Women would braid long tendrils of grass and suspend them between trees as protection. Not literal fences, but energetic ones. To say: We see you. Walk carefully.

I think of these acts as cartographies of care. Subtle, invisible to the state, but powerful in their insistence that land is not empty. That every patch of soil is watched over, mourned, loved.

As I write this, I am far from the ridge and its silence. But I still carry its textures in my skin. I find it in the way I instinctively press my palm to the earth before sitting or in the way I whisper apologies to trees I brush too harshly. These are not affectations. They are habits born of a relationship with land that was never legal, but always intimate.

The poet Joy Harjo writes, “Remember the earth whose skin you are.”

I think I am still learning how to remember.

Still learning how to be remembered by the land that once held me, even if only briefly.

Part IV: Migrations, Known and Unknown

“To migrate is not merely to move, it is to rename the world in order to survive in it.”

– Ocean Vuong

It began with a suitcase that would never close.

My mother would sit on the tiled floor, her knees folded like the pleats of her mother’s old sari, gently compressing the layers of clothes, steel tiffins, borosils, plastic containers with missing covers, sachets of masalas, strings of dried chillies and a surprise each time, an old Godrej key tied into the hem of her dupatta. “For just in case,” she would murmur. We were never told what “case” might arise, but we packed for it anyway. Every posting brought the same ritual. Each migration wrapped in caution, grace and the quiet certainty that home must be portable.

Migration, for families like mine, army families, nomads in uniform, was not an event, but a condition. We did not leave; we lived in the act of leaving. Every two years, the address would change. School uniforms altered. Friends blurred into letters we forgot to post. And yet, Arunachal stayed in my bones. Of all the places we travelled, it held me the longest, perhaps because the land there was patient, not hurried like cities are. Perhaps because it touched the lip of another country and the border made silence hum louder.

We were not immigrants. We were itinerant. But the ache was similar.

And in that ache, I began to sense the deeper, older migrations all around me. The Assamese boy who shared his oranges with me in school had a grandfather born in Kachin, Myanmar. He used to sing lullabies in Burmese when he was sad. The Naga family down the hill still celebrated a festival for ancestors buried across the border. We were children of soldiers, but they were children of survival.

We all belonged to someone else’s elsewhere.

Migration is often spoken about as loss. But it is also pattern, recurrence, inheritance. In Arunachal Pradesh and adjoining Myanmar, migration has never followed a straight path. People here move in spirals, seasonally, spiritually, out of necessity or myth. Some stories say the ancestors came riding on elephants; others say they descended with the monsoons. These stories are not contradictory, they are reminders that truth migrates too.

According to James Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), the highland peoples of Zomia, a vast, mountainous zone covering Northeast India, Myanmar, Thailand and beyond, intentionally resisted state control by migrating away from the valleys where empires took root. These were not refugees of violence alone, but of over-governance. They sought what he calls “escape agriculture,” growing root crops over grains to avoid detection and taxation. Their migrations were modes of refusal.

Movement, here, was rebellion.

Even now, traces of those rebellions linger. The weaving patterns of the Tangsa women carry motifs not found in any modern national flag, but they speak a deeper allegiance, to a time before the nation-state, when land belonged to memory and not to ministries.

But what of the other kind of migration? The forced one. The one etched in the nerves like a burn?

Myanmar, since the coup of 2021, has seen one of the most rapid escalations of displacement in the region. Over 2.6 million internally displaced people, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and an increasing spill-over into Indian border states, Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland (UNHCR, 2024). These are not statistical movements. These are lives collapsed into sacks and silence.

In Mizoram, I met a Chin refugee who had walked for days with a torn bag and a toddler. She told me: “I did not know I was crossing a country. I only knew I was following the birds.” The poetic weight of that sentence struck me. Her logic was not geopolitical; it was ecological. The same trees, the same birdsong, the same sun. To her, the border was not a boundary. It was a misunderstanding.

This is the tragedy of imposed lines, they assume people can unremember the land.

They cannot.

Even in exile, people return in dreams. In recipes. In prayers. Migration is not only physical dislocation, but mnemonic disorientation. What happens when your lullabies no longer match the grammar of your neighbours? What happens when your spices smell foreign in someone else’s wind?

And yet, people survive. They adapt. They translate.

Migration reshapes language. Words mutate. Accents dissolve. But some syllables resist erasure. In the border towns between India and Myanmar, it is not uncommon to hear four languages in a single conversation. Burmese, Hindi, Tangkhul, English. Even silence has an accent.

Language, like water, finds its own path when blocked.

This linguistic elasticity is not simply functional, it is intimate. Ngugi wa Thiong’o reminds us in Decolonising the Mind (1986) that the loss of one’s mother tongue is the loss of a world. In these sisterlands, however, people often learn to mother many tongues. They shift mid-sentence, mid-thought, holding the weight of multiple worlds in their mouths.

I, too, have learned to live in linguistic fluidity. My Hindi carries the cadence of the hills, softer consonants, slower vowels, shaped not by bloodline but by proximity. My English, a language taught in classrooms, arrived as a promise: of aspiration, of access, of a better future in a country like India. My Bengali, my mother tongue, is textured with borrowed memories, woven through stories exchanged at railway platforms, whispered in border towns and carried across verandas thick with the scent of unfamiliar spices. Though my mother was born in Uttar Pradesh, her roots trace back to Bengal, carried through generations before she even learned to read. My father is from Uttarakhand, but the Kumaoni language did not travel with him into our home. I juggle these tongues like seasons, few inherited, some chosen, others absorbed along the way. They do not form a ladder, but a constellation. Together, they shape how I mourn, how I greet, how I belong and how I dream.

Migration teaches you to listen differently. To read between tones. To understand that even a pause can carry an entire homeland.

But not all migrations are visible.

There are the quieter ones, interior, emotional, generational.

My grandmother, who never crossed an international border, carried the disquiet of migration within her bones. She never spoke much of the towns she had left behind, but she folded her saris with the precision of someone always preparing to move again. She salted mangoes obsessively, as if preserving time itself, not just fruit. Her life was one of constant resettling, from one rented house to another, each chosen not out of desire, but necessity. Her body migrated in place. And I, too, inherited that motion, the habit of scanning walls for cracks, of memorising exit doors before unpacking. Migration, after all, is not always departure. Sometimes, it is a lingering.

Even today, I find myself obsessively arranging objects before travel. Not because I need them, but because I fear losing meaning. The yellow dupatta from Itanagar, the notebook from a market in Tawang, the half-broken pair of anklets I never wore, they travel with me not for use, but for memory. They say: You were here once. You mattered.

This is why diasporas are so powerful, not just as communities, but as practices of remembrance. They keep alive what nations forget.

It would be dishonest to romanticise migration. It is often brutal, unjust and violent. But in the hands of women, it also becomes ritual. Nourishment. Resistance.

I think of the refugee kitchen I once dined in, where Mizo women feed Chin families rice and fermented bamboo shoots, even when they have little for themselves. I think of the border wedding I attended, where a bride wore a shawl stitched with the names of towns her family could no longer visit. I think of my mother, packing for our next move, whispering into a sari fold: “Take care of her.”

Migration leaves behind a trail of care, if you know where to look.

Perhaps the greatest myth of migration is that it ends.

But it does not.

Even when bodies settle, memories continue to move. They haunt cupboards. They resurface in children’s drawings. They reappear in songs we cannot trace back. In this sense, we are all migrants, across generations, identities, affiliations. We are all trying to return to a place we are not sure existed.

And maybe that is what sisterhood means across borders: not sameness, but shared memories. A recognition. A nod. A cup of tea poured without being asked.

A home found in the movement itself.

Part V: What We Keep in Our Hands

“Rituals are the formulas by which harmony is restored.”

– Mary Douglas

They never called them rituals. Not once. Not my grandmother, not my mother, not the women who came into our homes in the hills carrying sacks of fermented bamboo shoot or turmeric still crusted with mountain soil. They called them habits, customs, things we do. But I know better now. These were not habits, they were memory itself, preserved in motion.

In Arunachal Pradesh, I once watched a neighbour circle a bowl of rice thrice before offering it to her child. There was no ceremony to it, no aarti plate, no chant. Just her hand, the bowl, the quiet movement. It was an ordinary moment, easily missed. Yet it mirrored the same care with which my mother folded our woollen sweaters in winter and the way an aunt in Guwahati once sprinkled water before opening her prayer book. Across hills and homes, across states and borders, I noticed how these tiny gestures echoed each other, not in content, perhaps, but in cadence.

Such rituals often live in the body long after we forget where we learned them. They are, in anthropologist Veena Das’s words, “the descent of the extraordinary into the ordinary” (2007). They are the theory of survival turned domestic.

My mother never spoke of tradition. But every time she lit a small diya at dawn, even in the most cramped of temporary homes, she was holding time together. She did not explain it. She simply placed flame in air and let the silence wrap around it. I used to think it was superstition. Now, I see it was cartography. She was marking space, not on a map, but on the threshold of memory.

Ritual, in this way, becomes a means of remembering without speaking. A non-verbal archive. In homes like ours, transient, military, multilingual, where there was no fixed temple or ancestral courtyard, the archive was not made of stone. It was made of water sprinkled clockwise. Of salt kept in corners. Of mangoes pickled out of season.

Bengali homes are thick with ritual, yet my mother’s childhood in Uttar Pradesh diluted some of those seasonal rhythms. She did not move often, but what she carried with her were fragments, tastes, gestures, a turn of phrase and she built new rituals in their absence. My grandmother, too, moved house countless times, never quite settling. She learned to pray quietly, under her breath and never forgot to pack mustard oil in glass bottles wrapped in newspaper. Home, for her, was not where you lived. It was where you kept your bottles safe.

And so I inherited these practices, untethered from scripture, held together by muscle memory. In the hills, I saw others doing the same. A woman cleaning her kitchen floor with banana leaves. An elder humming during the harvest. In Myanmar, too, across the Chin, Kachin and Mon communities, rituals hold firm even under state oppression and cultural erasure. They serve as what scholar Michel de Certeau might call “tactics” of everyday life, unrecorded, often unrecognised, but deeply political acts (1984).

This resistance-through-ritual is rarely recognised in official histories, which prefer documents over hands. But in domestic spaces, especially women’s spaces, rituals preserve worlds that are otherwise written out of history. Mary Douglas argued that “rituals work because they mediate change” (1966). I think they also work because they create continuity when everything else dissolves.

As a child, I noticed that my mother cooked differently in each home we moved to. She adjusted ingredients, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of experimentation. But some things stayed: the way she stirred the dal clockwise, never anti-clockwise. The small heap of haldi she left untouched beside the knife on Tuesdays. These were not superstition. They were memory encoded in motion. They were the ways in which she marked that we belonged, even if just for a few months, in this space with peeling walls and unfamiliar neighbours.

In Myanmar, where military coups and civil unrest have fractured time and space repeatedly, people have often turned to ritual not for religion alone, but for repair. The lighting of candles during Thingyan, the water festival, is not merely celebration. It is a cleansing of grief, a reset, a temporal punctuation. In border towns like Tamu, where cultures blur and languages overlap, I saw rituals that were hybrids, part Buddhist, part animist, part familial intuition. They were quiet and generous. They asked for no audience.

One evening in Arunachal, our house help placed two sticks upright near the gate before sunset. I asked her why. She smiled and said it keeps the house anchored. “Anchored from what?” I asked. “From forgetting,” she replied. I never asked again.

These moments taught me that ritual is not always sacred. Sometimes it is simply stubborn. A way of insisting that the world can be gentle, if only for a while.

Feminist scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty have long pointed out that women’s knowledge often survives outside institutional frameworks (2003). In this way, ritual becomes pedagogy. Not the kind taught in classrooms, but the kind folded into rotis, whispered across thresholds, buried in the smell of sandalwood on a cold morning.

There is a certain epistemology in repetition. A knowledge that can only be accessed by doing, again and again, without guarantee of meaning. This is what I learned from the women who raised me, not in lectures, but in action.

Ritual also migrates. It adapts. In our family, we changed certain dates because school calendars would not permit holidays. We replaced coconut with peanuts once in a remote posting. And yet, the shape of the ritual held. As anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes, culture is not just preserved, it is produced in motion (Appadurai, 1996). And so rituals are not fossilised; they are alive, breathing, waiting to be picked up again.

Even now, when I move cities, I pack my glass bottles first. I place it gently between books, wrap it in cotton cloth. I do not use them often, but I need to know they are there. They are in my grandmother’s map, my mother’s gesture, my own unspoken grammars.

When I visited an old friend in another state of my country from Arunachal Pradesh, I noticed a line of salt placed on her windowsill. I asked her if it was for spirits. She said no. “It is for my mother, who told me salt is stronger than fear.” I said nothing. Some rituals do not require explanation.

We inherit many things, names, scars, expectations. But it is in rituals, I believe, that we inherit our ability to survive. They do not fix time. They bend it. And in that bending, we create space to breathe, to belong, to begin again.

Part VI: A Future Seen from the Hills

“To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, to draw closer, to find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of life.”

– James Thurber

Sunday mornings were for the mountains.

Not for temples or markets or the routines that fill the corners of weekdays. Just us, my father, my younger brother and I, climbing upward through the damp hush of the woods that wrapped Tenga Valley like a shawl. We hiked not because it was required or because there was some lesson at the summit, but because my father believed there were things one could only understand with the smell of pine needles in one’s lungs and the sound of silence thickening between footfalls.

We never talked much on those hikes. Our boots pressed into the softened earth as moss gave gently under our weight. The mountains, which seemed so distant and eternal from our kitchen window, became intimate companions. The air grew lighter. And from above, the world below, towns, tin roofs, traffic, looked impossibly small. As if someone had folded time in half and we were permitted a glimpse at its underside.

From up here, dreams felt less like fiction.

What is it about height that loosens the future from its stubborn ground? In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard reflects on the way verticality affects our imagination, how towers, attics and hills allow for “aerial vision” that lifts us from the body’s constraints (1994). I did not know then that I was participating in a philosophy of elevation. I only knew that every time we reached a clearing and stood still, something inside me settled.

Dreams, I have learned, are not always loud. Sometimes they come in the shape of mist pulling through cedar branches or in the hushed joy of watching your younger brother discover a fern that folds inward when touched. Sometimes, dreams are inherited. Other times, they are made from what we were not told we could want.

Up in the hills, the future appeared not as a plan, but as a possibility. A rhythm. An openness.

My father rarely spoke of dreams. But on one such morning, as we looked over a valley just beginning to green with the first stretch of spring, he said quietly, “From up here, the world can’t touch you. But you still have to go back to it.” It was the first time I understood that elevation was not escape, it was rehearsal. A way to imagine the return.

In critical theory, futurity is often aligned with rupture, a break from the past or a rejection of the present. But there are softer ways to think of the future. Scholar José Esteban Muñoz describes queer futurity as a “forward-dawning,” a reaching for something not-yet-here, shaped not only by hope but by disidentification with what is (2009). On those Sunday hikes, I think I first learned that dreaming does not require certainty. Only altitude. Only pause.

The mountains taught me that the future could be quiet and green and still unfinished. That it could belong to girls who did not know exactly where they came from and boys who learned wonder before they learned ambition. That dreaming was a skill, as muscle-bound and memory-driven as climbing.

Sometimes, the path upward was unclear. The trail would disappear beneath leaf fall or curve too gently to be certain. But we kept walking, trusting that the way would reveal itself in movement. This, too, became a lesson in futurity: that you do not always see the summit, but you walk toward it anyway. That uncertainty can still be sacred ground.

In the Mahayana Buddhist cosmology shared across Myanmar and parts of Northeast India, the idea of paramita or “perfection” includes the virtue of virya, effort, perseverance toward a future beyond suffering. This notion is not about speed or productivity but steady engagement with an unseen horizon (Harvey, 2000). My father did not name his philosophy in Sanskrit or Pali. He simply said, “We climb because the view reminds you who you are.”

The act of walking itself became a way of thinking. As feminist geographer Doreen Massey writes, space is not static; it is made through movement, through relation, through the routes we take (2005). My own relation to the future became shaped by those routes, the bends in the trail, the sudden clearing, the long silences. We made the path and the path made us.

It is easy to forget, in a world governed by digital urgency, that dreams can be slow. That they can emerge not from declarations but from repetition: the same stretch of road walked a hundred times, the same patch of sky watched from different altitudes.

As we climbed, I often wondered about the cities beyond the valleys. Myanmar lay just across the invisible border, its own hills repeating the patterns of ours. I used to imagine children there, waking up under a similar sky, wondering the same questions I held in my chest. Where do I go? What is mine to keep? What will the world look like when I grow into it?

There is a strange comfort in knowing that your dreams are not singular. That they hum across mountains and through histories you have not yet touched.

Years later, I would read about Zomia, a term coined by historian Willem van Schendel and expanded by James C. Scott to describe the highland regions of Southeast Asia that have resisted state control (Scott, 2009). These are places of refuge and refusal. Places where alternative futures have quietly grown like bamboo, bending but never breaking. I do not romanticise this resistance. But I understand now that those hills offered more than altitude. They offered choice. Even if temporary. Even if precarious.

From up there, where the fog sometimes swallowed the path and the wind whistled without need for direction, I learned the importance of pause. Of seeing before deciding. Of noticing that the sun does not always rise in haste.

My younger brother, then still so small, would often run ahead, disappearing behind ridges and reappearing breathless with wonder. “Look,” he would shout, pointing to wildflowers or glistening stones. He did not think about the future, not yet. But he taught me that wonder is its own form of vision. That perhaps the first step toward imagining a different world is to marvel at this one.

These memories are not relics. They are foundations. Each step, each scent of wet earth, each glance toward a widening sky is a fragment of the future I continue to build. A future not designed in blueprints or dictated by career trajectories, but composed in the syntax of breath, slope, shadow.

And in that Sunday ritual, a father, a daughter, a younger brother, there was a kind of utopia. Not the impossible kind, but the quiet version. A world made by walking.

Part VII: The Return, Unwritten

“I am not what I am. I am what I do with my hands.”

– Louise Bourgeois

There is a moment in every journey, just before the return, when time distorts. The world you left has kept moving, reshaped in your absence. And you, too, have become untranslatable in ways that language will struggle to bear.

I return not to a single home, but to the knowledge that I have none in the conventional sense. What I have instead is a quilt of borrowed textures: the moss-slick stones of Arunachal trails, the syntax of Bengali lullabies overheard but never memorised, the spicy tang of Rajasthani pickles sealed in glass jars like relics. What I have is memory not of one place, but of many kinds of leaving.

For years, I studied migration from the outside: push-pull factors, state borders, refugee maps. But I realise now that I was writing my own footnotes. Each house we moved into had to be softened, made liveable. Each exit had to be rehearsed. My body learned to belong briefly, intensely and then to let go. That was the ritual. That was the inheritance.

I carry with me the marks of this movement. Not wounds, though some were painful, but impressions, like the shadow of a pressed leaf. My dreams became multilingual, not out of virtue, but necessity. As Stuart Hall writes, “identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think…it is always in process and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (1990). I am still becoming. Still curating the fragments of who I was allowed to be.

This is the paradox of return: you arrive changed. And so the place you come back to must also become new.

What, then, is the end of a journey?

Perhaps it is not a landing, but a listening. I think of Gloria Anzaldúa’s idea of nepantla, the in-between space where transformation is possible (1987). I dwell here now. In nepantla. In the liminal hush between departure and belonging.

There are still boxes I have not unpacked. Scarves that smell of another climate. Letters written in a past version of myself. They are not burdens. They are proof that I lived in pieces and somehow made those pieces whole.

I do not wish to romanticise displacement. There is a cost. A tiredness. A tendency to mistrust comfort. But there is also a capacity, a wideness of heart that comes only from learning to translate yourself over and over again.

Now, as I study migration, I do so with reverence. I see in footnotes the footsteps of people who walked away from safety toward selfhood. I see in case studies the traces of mothers who carried their languages on their backs and taught them in kitchens that smelled like no one place. I see myself.

Unlearning is an act of resistance. I unlearn the need to settle. I unlearn the binaries of origin and arrival. I unlearn the story that a person must belong to one soil alone. Homi Bhabha speaks of the “third space,” a place of hybridity where cultural identity is not fixed but negotiated (1994). I live here now. I write from this third space. Not between countries, but between selves.

If you ask me where I am from, I will say: I am from what I carry. I am from what I rebuild.

And rebuild I do. Each piece of writing is an architecture of self. Each memory restored on the page is a map drawn not to find home, but to make one.

My past lives inside words. Inside the gentle way I pronounce certain vowels. Inside the inherited gestures, the way I fold my clothes, the way I press a kurta with hands that have never belonged fully to one tradition. These small acts are my permanence.

In the final pages of The Location of Culture, Bhabha reminds us that “the borderline becomes the place from which something begins its presencing” (1994). I do not see the border as a limit, but a threshold. A hinge on which my life swings open.

I now write from this hinge. From the unfinished edge.

Some days, I still long for the imagined home: the one that never shifted, never moved, where the wallpaper stayed the same and names were not mispronounced. But that longing has softened. I no longer chase it. Instead, I gather. I stitch. I compost the remnants into new ground.

Rebuilding is not only about what is lost. It is about what we dare to carry forward. What we allow to haunt us sweetly.

There are still dreams that take place in train stations. I dream in mixed languages. I greet in several tones. I mourn in inherited silences.

But above all, I write. And each word is an arrival.

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