My mother prays to feel lighter and more connected to herself. My father, a chemist by training, possesses a scientist’s aversion to religion, although even he eventually found his piety, as advancing age reminded him about the fragility of life. He and my mother went together on the pilgrimage to Mecca to experience hajj, their faith having hardened into something monumental, unbreakable by anything but death. For the two of them, Bangladeshi Muslims who immigrated to the United States after surviving the 1971 Liberation War, faith is solace.

For myself, I don’t believe in holy cities. No sacred journey will erase my sins or ascend me to an afterlife, for I don’t believe in sins, and I don’t believe in an afterlife.

At the age of ten, I taught myself to pray using a Xeroxed copy of an Islamic prayer book, but by my teenage years, I had come to despise the clothing restrictions, dietary restrictions, alcohol restrictions, separate entrances for women at certain masjids, having to pray behind men. I got to college and pork, booze, bikinis, and sex were all within my grasp, and I reveled in my freedom. My path would never involve rules devised by men hundreds of years ago.

Around this time, I also began to write—first theater and performance art, but soon short fiction and novels. I’ve always been drawn to write about the edges of places—where conflict lives, where oblivion looms just beyond the horizon. In my writing, Bangladesh is the site of revolution and return; the Qur’an finds its way in there, too, as a source of cosmic, vivid, violent and beautiful imagery. My characters emerged at the collision points of all my various worlds: Bangladeshi, American, Muslim, atheist, trans man, woman. My words traced northerly hills of Sylhet and Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh’s version of a resort town (no bikinis or booze allowed) on the Bay of Bengal, sites of revolution and return. Historically, the Sufi travelers settled these areas while teaching rice cultivation and spreading Islam, but I had never been. Even my mother hasn’t seen Bangladesh’s beaches in her lifetime.

To write the experience of war is a delicate act that requires balancing research with anecdotes and memories. I wanted to capture the minutiae of the living world, the curvature of roads, the way the city and the countryside smell. I decided I needed to visit the places I’d chosen as the backgrounds of my fiction. I needed to witness them for myself.

Modern-day pilgrimages for the middle class are more like complex itineraries, composed of bus and train schedules and hotel reservations. There’s no one left who can describe the ancient routes.

It’s March when I arrive, the languid month before April’s swelter. First, I want to visit Old Dhaka, an unwieldy composition of alleys, dusty paths, and storefronts. Hustlers from all walks of life sell their wares on the street—flower garlands for weddings, roasted peanuts, white bangles once made from ivory but now formed of cheap plastic. Along with my sister, aunt, and cousins, I drive to the entrance of Dhakeshwari, Dhaka’s oldest Hindu temple.

Incense and burning havan pyres cloud the air with sweet, dense smoke. I wonder for a moment if we’re being read as Muslim or American but in public centers of worship, everyone is concerned with themselves. No one looks at us twice.

At least four weddings are underway simultaneously. The attendees in each wedding party form islands on the stone floors, protective clusters around their particular bride and groom. I peek in between shoulders, standing just outside the circle. The priest recites so fast, I wonder how many weddings he’s already performed today. It’s remarkable. This plein air wedding venue is Dhaka’s version of city hall.

My characters emerged at the collision points of all my various worlds: Bangladeshi, American, Muslim, atheist, trans man, woman.

I can recite the Hindu mantra Asato Ma without trouble, something I learned while working and traveling in India a decade ago, but I have all but forgotten the surahs I learned as a child. Once, while visiting the Kali temple in Calcutta, I absentmindedly placed the prasad (a dessert, and an offering to Kali) next to the coffee I’d been drinking. A temple regular started shouting at me for my lack of graciousness toward the goddess. His anger made me realize how little I knew about being a believer. I had come seeking connection to myself, in search of a feminine power in communion with others. I didn’t identify as Hindu any more than I felt Muslim, however, and believers are often skeptical and suspicious of voyeurs.

My inner conflict—between Islam and the syncretic cultures of South Asia—is part of the psychic residue of Partition, when India and Pakistan emerged as divided nations. Years of discord erupted into violence, which led to the destruction of the Dhakeshwari temple, this temple, during the 1971 war with Pakistan. I know that history, and before we arrived I imagined skeletal architectural remains, haunted by the thousands of Hindus who were killed or forced into exile in India. Instead, what’s before me is a vivid reminder of the tenacity of life, ritual, and rebuilding.

As I tiptoe away from the wedding circle, I notice an incense holder studded with thousands of sticks of burning scent, enough to perfume the entire courtyard. At the foot of this altar, a woman rocks back and forth. She’s shrouded in a pink cotton sari, her head buried in her knee. What is for these families a site of celebration and marriage is for her a site of profound solitude. Her posture leaves no room for anyone else—she wants to remain invisible and undisturbed. I never see her face.

Following the roads of Bangladesh is like waking up from a recurring dream. What I’ve written fictively is suddenly real. Over the next two weeks, I travel by bus to the country’s borderlands, where identities overlap and shift. This is one of the beautiful, fraught things about South Asia: one country’s minority is another’s ruling class. When I stand on the Bangladesh side of the Jaflong River in Sylhet, I stare up at the Himalayan foothills on India’s side. Here, in our lowlands, Muslims make up the majority, but take a single boat ride to the Indian side, and the state of Meghalaya belongs to the Khasi.

I take notes to catalog the flora and fauna, the layout of homes, the clothes and crops in season. This journey takes me beyond research, beyond geography, even. The facts of my wandering become intricately woven threads in my story. March 26 is Independence Day, when Pakistan attacked Dhaka and the Liberation War began. March is also watermelon season. I impress these details on a scene in which women prisoners of war are fed watermelon hack open by a machete, the streaks of tracer bullets in the sky overhead bearing that same carnadine color.

When I finally reach the Bay of Bengal, I realize that I’ve only known these waters as three mythic words on a map. I’ve never been here before, I tell myself, over and over again. This is the definitive moment of any pilgrimage, the same sensation my mother described when she came home from her hajj: you’ve returned home to a place you’ve never been before. I walk with my sister through a forest of young Australian pines, planted ten years ago by villagers to protect their homes from monsoon. We walk through this living border until we reach the silver, choppy ocean. There are no swimmers, surfers, or sun-bathers on this stretch of beach. Yet all around us, children are busy collecting seashells. They collect piles and piles of cowries and nassa shells. As soon as they leave, we step our feet into the water and return this village of tiny, abandoned homes to the sea.