The Bird That Ignored the Border—and What It Reveals

The bird flew from Bangladesh to India without papers.

I watched it from our train window at the border, crossing the line that exists only in human imagination. The same sky, the same soil, the same river running underneath—but suddenly different laws, different currencies, different possibilities for the people on either side.

This is when I understood: borders are stories we tell ourselves about separation.

The moment of recognition came during the three-hour wait for passport control. Families separated by an invisible line, speaking the same language, sharing the same history, but carrying different colored documents that determined their worth in the global economy.

What makes one side “here” and the other “there” except our collective agreement to pretend the difference exists?

The farmer working the field doesn’t see the border. The rain doesn’t stop at customs. The wind carries the same seeds across boundaries that divide communities who’ve shared the same land for centuries.

But put humans in charge of organizing space, and suddenly we need walls, guards, documents to prove our right to exist in places where our ancestors lived for generations.

Standing at that checkpoint, watching families say goodbye because of invisible lines drawn by long-dead politicians, I understood that every border is arbitrary. They follow rivers sometimes, mountain ranges occasionally, but mostly they follow the logic of conquest, the accidents of history, the economic interests of whoever had the most weapons when the maps were drawn.

The same earth exists on both sides of every border. The only difference is the story we’ve agreed to tell about why those sides must remain separate.

What if borders say more about the limits of human imagination than the limits of human territory?