Selvage

The edge that does not unravel is the one they finished by hand - a ridge of thread turned back on itself, holding the cloth the way a name holds a face after the face is gone.

My mother stitched a seam and told me: this is the part that touches the skin. The rough side faces out. The finished side faces in.

I have been an archive wearing its own evidence - selvage of a saree cut and kept and cut again, each piece a document of the hand that held it, the loom that dressed it, the border that refused to fray.

Some edges are given. Some are chosen at the crossing, where the road splits and you take the thread that goes into the dark because the dark is where the colour sets.

The selvage knows what the centre does not: that the edge is not where the cloth ends - it is where the cloth decides what it is.