Alvi, in “Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan” describes the gifts of clothing she receives in England from Pakistani relatives, but does not feel entirely comfortable in them. She longs for “demin and corduroy”, worn in England, and is uncomfortable with her background, which she is not entirely familiar with, probably due to her mixed race, and feels she does not belong entirely in either country. In “Search for my Tongue”, Bhatt is living in America, and is anxious of forgetting her mother tongue, a strong link to her childhood, In India. She feels caught between her new life, and her roots which she may ‘lose’ because she is surrounded by foreign things. She uses the phrase “mother tongue” also to show her innermost roots and cultural identity, which she feels may “rot and die”, because of the limited opportunities to use it.
The girl, a young Moniza Alvi, talks of the beauty of the traditional clothing and accessories she is sent, and is drawn to the colours and designs, yet feels uncomfortable wearing them, as if she is not worthy of them. She contrasts the bright colours, and mirror work with the “cardigans from Marks and Spencer’s” requested by her aunts in Pakistan. She shows how she felt alienated from her culture by the “candy-striped glass bangles” snapped, drew blood”, showing how they could not fit in with her English lifestyle. Bhatt, as an English student, describes the difficulty of retaining her own culture and knowledge, while living in a very different one. She expresses the difficulty of knowing two languages, and how she found it awkward using a foreign tongue, yet holding onto the mother tongue, Gujarati, which “you could not use…together even if you thought that way”. Sujata Bhatt also uses negative imagery, describing her tongue rotting and dieing, “until you had to spit it out”.
In “Search for my Tongue” Bhatt later realises that the mother tongue will always be with her, as it comes out in her dreams, at night. This shows the difficulty of holding on to it during the day, in a foreign culture, but when she is alone her true roots and the language “grows back, a stump of a shoot” and “ties the other tongue in knots”. Alvi continues to compare the differences between her English life and Pakistani heritage. Despite her feelings that she “could never be as lovely as those clothes” she admires them, and is troubled to find that her “salwar kameez didn't impress the school friend”. She tries to recall the journey made by herself and her family, by boat, to England, but her knowledge of her birthright comes from “fifties' photographs” and a time and place she cannot remember.
Towards the end of Bhatt’s poem more striking imagery is used to show that despite having “two tongues in your mouth”, or speaking two languages, the innermost one will emerge, just when she felt she had lost it, “it blossoms out of my mouth”. Despite the cultural differences and problems of two languages, Bhatt feels that the true ethnicity emerges. “Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan” end in a less positive note, as Moniza Alvi even feels like an outsider in Pakistan as she imagines herself “no fixed nationality, staring through fretwork at the Shalimar Gardens”. She believes she cannot belong entirely to either culture, and the differences were particular apparent at this time in her life, when she was trying to find her identity and background, feeling isolated from other family members and disconnected to both the English and Pakistani ways of life.