In the summer of 2022, I finally returned to Delhi.
Two years earlier, in 2020, my Nani Maa had passed away. Her death was not caused by COVID-19, but the pandemic kept me in the United States. I mourned her from thousands of miles away through phone calls, video screens, and stories my family shared across time zones. Grief stretched across continents. That way, grieving becomes harder. I could not hug my mother. I could not sit with my family. I could not say goodbye in the ways I had imagined I would.
When I finally walked into her home, everything felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
The dining table was still there. The kitchen still carried that apron she wore. Her photo with my Nana Papa still lined the walls. But every room also carried her absence.
Grief had not become quieter in the two years since she died. If anything, it had settled differently into each of us. We had learned how to continue living, but not how to stop missing her. Everyone in my family did whatever she felt alive in our lives.
A few days before I was scheduled to fly back to the United States, my mother opened her wardrobe. She got some Nani Maa sarees.
My mom gently unfolded one saree after another.
Cottons she had worn almost every day.
Silks she reserved for festivals.
Soft borders worn smooth after decades of use.
Without looking up, my mother simply said, Take a few of these Nani Maa's sarees with you.
She wasn’t asking me to pack clothes. She was asking me not to leave home behind. The first thing I did was smell them so that I could feel Nani Maa closer to me. I was in my memories.
I folded several sarees into my suitcase without knowing what I would do with them. I only knew that leaving them in Delhi felt harder than carrying them across an ocean.
Before my flight, I stopped at a neighborhood tailor. I still do not know why I did that.
He spread one saree across his large wooden table. He carefully traced the faded border with his fingertips before looking at me and saying, "How about a kurta? We could make two from one saree."
His question wasn’t simply about altering a garment. I took it as if he was asking me whether I was ready to let memory take on another form.
I hesitated at first.
Later, I nodded.
That was the first of my Nani Maa’s sarees that became a kurta.
Since then, I have transformed several dozens.
People often ask me why.
Some assume it is because I appreciate sustainable fashion.
Others think it is because I love Indian textiles.
Neither answer is wrong.
Neither answer comes close.
Every time I wear one of those kurtas in the United States, I feel a little less far away from my grandmother. A little less far away from my family. A little less far away from Delhi.
Yes, a fabric cannot erase distance, but it changes how I carry it.
For a long time, I thought I was simply preserving memories.
Only later did I realize I was creating an archive.
When people hear the word archive, they often imagine climate-controlled rooms, carefully labeled boxes, and fragile documents protected from touch.
My archive refuses that definition.
It gets wrinkles. It softens after every tender wash.
It accompanies me into writing center consultations, graduate seminars, conference presentations, and long afternoons spent writing.
It changes because I continue living in it.
Rather than preserving memory of my Nani Maa by keeping her sarees untouched, I preserve my memory with her by allowing her sarees to move with me.
That realization also changed how I think about my work as a writing center scholar. Writing centers have taught me that writing is never merely text. Every draft enters the consultation carrying writers’ histories, languages, relationships, and ways of knowing that are often invisible on the page. Revision is not supposed to erase those histories. It should help writers discover new ways of carrying them forward.
My Nani Maa’s sarees taught me that lesson before I ever encountered writing center theory.
Transforming a saree into a kurta is an act of revision. The pleats disappear into something else. The pallu becomes sleeves. The silhouette changes. Yet the garment continues telling the same story in a different form. That, to me, is what meaningful revision looks like. The same is true of my writing.
As a global anglophone writer from India, I move constantly between English, Punjabi, and Hindi; between Delhi, Darmstadt, and the places I have been living in the United States; between family stories and academic theory. I often find myself translating, not because one language is insufficient, but because each language carries ways of knowing that the other cannot fully hold. My writing, like my kurtas, is shaped through transformation rather than replacement.
Living as an immigrant and wearing a kurta has also changed how I understand global rhetorics. Before moving to the United States, I thought rhetoric lived primarily in speeches, essays, and classrooms. Now I see rhetoric in material things. Objects persuade. I learned that:
Clothing tells stories. Fabric carries culture. Every time I wear one of my Nani Maa’s kurtas to teach, tutor, or present at a conference, someone asks about it. The conversation usually begins with the fabric. It rarely ends there.
Soon we are talking about Indian textiles, migration, multilingualism, family histories, and what it means to build an academic life while carrying another home within you.
The kurta becomes more than clothing.
It becomes a performance of global rhetoric. It represents a culture without reducing it to a costume. It reminds me that cultural representation is not only something I research. It is something I inhabit.
As immigrants, many of us become archivists without realizing it.
We preserve recipes.
Languages.
Jewelry.
Photographs.
Voice notes.
Clothing.
Not because we are unwilling to move forward, but because migration teaches us that memory often needs material companions.
For me, my Nani Maa’s sarees became those companions.
Today, when I button one of those kurtas before walking into a writing center, a classroom, or a conference room, I carry more than fabric.
I carry the woman who first taught me what care looked like.
I carry my family, who entrusted me with pieces of her life.
I carry Delhi, even when I am thousands of miles away.
Most importantly, I carry a reminder of the kind of scholar I want to be.
One who believes that writing, like cloth, holds histories.
One who understands that revision should never require erasure.
One who recognizes that archives are not only preserved in libraries.
Sometimes, the most enduring archives are stitched into the things we wear, quietly accompanying us as we write ourselves into new places without leaving the old ones behind.