I was almost twenty the first time I walked out of a gate, alone, on a street in Pakistan, with no definitive purpose in mind. I didn’t have to go out. Like the Aboriginals who go on their walkabout in search of themselves, I ventured out to discover a new part of myself. It was a hot, breathless afternoon, one of the last few for me in Lahore. Tired of being cooped up in my clammy hostel room, I decided to just walk away, from the room, from my idleness, from what was to come.

I didn’t know where I was going; it wasn’t a planned liberation. After walking aimlessly for a few minutes, I halted in front of a small park. It was midafternoon and the park was completely deserted, as were the roads. The choking summer heat had forced everyone inside while it had compelled me to do the opposite. It wasn’t a lush park full of trees, but a small stretch of patchy green bathed in the afternoon sun – an island among the grey roads that surrounded it from all four. On one bend stood a solitary marble bench. It was too hot to sit on, so I settled onto the burnt grass beside it. What was I even doing here? I wondered. The blistering sun bore down on me, making the surroundings even more unwelcoming. But I just sat there in the open for everyone to see, a ‘respectable’ girl on display. My arms wrapped themselves around me – who was it that I needed protection from? There was not a soul around, and yet the emptiness made me wary.

Living a sheltered existence behind walls for almost two decades, it was natural to be guarded against the strange outdoors. I had grown up being constantly warned about the dangers that lurked on the streets, preying on women. But there I was, alone in a new city, away from my father’s protection and my mother’s worry. I found the thought liberating rather than forbidding. For the first time I had walked on a street alone and I had survived. Unlike Virginia Woolf’s purpose of buying a pencil that led her through the streets of London in her essay “Streets Haunting”, I have never had a similar pretext for escaping my home. I could never just walk on the streets, breathing in its inhabitants, basking in the freedom. It wasn’t something girls from my family did, and I complied.

*

My mother loves telling us stories of how she would cycle on the road and watch movies in the cinemas with her girlfriends in her youth, a liberty I never had. It’s hard for me to imagine her in bell bottoms and clothes so snug it was as if they had been sewed onto her, a string of dupatta hanging around her neck, navigating the streets of Multan. It’s hard for me to imagine a Pakistan where women could cycle on the roads alone. Perhaps she grew up in a small town and that made all the difference, or perhaps she grew up in safer times. But one thing is for certain, in terms of women’s mobility, Pakistan is far, far behind. In Karachi, women are almost nonexistent, especially in more affluent neighborhoods. Take a walk along the roads in areas like DHA. You wouldn’t come across a lot of women, walking to buy groceries, visiting a neighbor down the lane or walking their dogs.

I have rarely ever walked on the streets of Karachi. My childhood home was right next to a bustling road, with buses honking and rickshaws clattering by constantly. The black steel gate of my home was my boundary, never to be crossed. I would often stand behind it, one hand on the scorching metal, in the middle of the afternoon, imagining an existence beyond it. Sounds of laughter, snippets of conversations, the ting-a-ling of hawkers whizzing past would float inside.  My soul would swim with them while my feet would remain firmly planted inside, too afraid of the daunting outside.

Every morning, my father would stand with my sisters and me just inside the gate as we waited for our school bus, playing the part of the omniscient protector. I would watch as my male cousins would saunter out and my heart would constrict at my own stifling existence. I thought having the freedom to walk out of my gate and going down the lane for a cold bottle of Pepsi was the epitome of living, something I had seen my male cousins do most evenings. However, it wasn’t something girls did in Karachi, or rather girls from households that were considered respectable because of a stroke of economic fortune. Sarkay larkion ke liay nahin hain, my father would always say when I would badger him to let me walk down to the store.

And yet every day our cleaning lady, clad in a black burqa at the end of her workday, would walk in her worn out rubber soled slippers on the same streets I was forbidden to. At times I would see her hailing a rickshaw, when it would be too hot to walk, and she would return the next day, every day. I wondered: were the streets unsafe only for the young girls born into fortunate households? Did we just have the luxury of classifying walking on the roads as unsafe? Was owning a car, a luxury, stifling my existence? I wondered, was the danger self-imposed? Was the danger ever prevalent or had it been magnified in adult minds?

Such questions always confounded my naïve mind. I was one of the fortunate ones. Be grateful, my mother would say. But I couldn’t be, not when I felt caged. My afternoons were filled with reading Enid Blyton’s books. I would imagine myself running around the streets, just like those characters. Now that was living. At times, the walls of my room would close in on me and my heart would ache to be free of the staleness of the inside. I could not go out, but I could climb up, onto my roof. And so I did. But the roof was an ephemeral escape. I would look out on the life and scenes unfolding on the street below me, and find myself detached to my own surroundings, like an untethered balloon floating upwards. If I couldn’t walk on the road just outside of my home because it was not safe, how safe was I inside? Fear of the outside became my new companion and books became my refuge, a window into the world. I would wonder how it felt to live such an emancipated existence, where the parents weren’t watching your every move and controlling your actions like a despot. I longed to cross the black barrier that stood like a fortress in front of me, yet I never could. The danger of the outside had been ingrained, and I just accepted it as the years went by.

Women are mostly invisible in certain South Asian societies, particularly in the public sphere. You don’t often see them hanging out at the local pan shop, or loitering on the roads fist bumping each other. It’s an internalized concept that few of us object to. Though with  movements like ‘girls at dhabas’ and female oriented cycling groups, women are now seen occupying the footpaths and the streets of Karachi. But it’s still a rare sight. Women still feel safer walking in groups rather than alone. Being free alone is not yet an option for us. The few that do walk alone do so with caution and fear, not with the air of confidence seen in women in other countries.

On the streets of New York, London, Istanbul, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and many others women abundantly occupy the city streets. And so do we, the women, when we visit these cities. The first time I visited Malaysia, in early 2000’s, I was pleasantly shocked. Women were riding bikes, working at petrol stations, or just hanging around a street food vendor – being active members of the streets. My mind couldn’t fathom that women could be so free in a Muslim country. In Pakistan, because such things for women are considered unsuitable, they seldom do so for fear of being labelled as such. An image of a modestly dressed woman, riding a bike with her male companion sitting at the back, has stayed with me. Coming from a patriarchal society that continues to hold onto notions of how a man is supposed to behave and what is unsuitable for a woman, this image has reminded me that many of our fears are a social construct. The rules change when we leave our home soil and encounter women from other cultures engaging in acts that we have been brought up to view as wrong. Free from the restraints of society, I found myself actively walking on streets and feeling more at liberty in a foreign country as compared to my own. There was this strange joy that I encountered as my feet skidded on the concrete, my calves aching but my heart fluttering like a butterfly recently released from the confinement of its cocoon. And I could see the same joy reflected in the eyes of many Pakistani women that I encountered on my visit.

Yet back in Pakistan, especially in cities, it was back to the old reality. Fear of sexual assault, nonexistent footpaths, the threat of being labeled, all compounded to the dangers of taking to the streets. Streets are largely the domain of men, and women are instructed to be wary of the male gaze, the burden of sin still a women’s domain. A few years ago, social media was hyped with the news of the kidnapping of a young woman from one of the famous chai walas in Karachi. The narrative that came out was not one condemning the act and the perpetrator, but rather the intention of the woman who was hanging out so late at night. As always, it was the woman’s ‘fault’ for being in a place she ‘shouldn’t have been’, and thus as a punishment, all women were advised to take solace inside the walls of their home. It’s for our own good, the chant drummed on. Often when one feels like women in our society have finally been freed of their shackles, something happens and we are forced behind the walls, or we simply grow up and the fight leaves us. It did for me.

*

At eighteen, I left Karachi for university in Lahore. Exhilarated by my new freedom, the first thing I did was walk on the road with my girl gang. It didn’t matter to me that my college was in a rich affluent neighborhood; walking on the street was liberating. I felt in tune with my surroundings. I could smell the tube roses lining the footpath; I could stare back into the eyes of the strangers. The public space was opening up for me. We would walk, in groups, peeking inside manicured lawns, devouring food from roadside vendors. I loved getting lost inside the dense Lahore fog, screaming for my friends to wait up. It was all one big adventure; a chapter from an Enid Blyton book.

Why was I untroubled with the idea of promenading on the streets of Lahore? I have often questioned myself. Was it because the Lahore I came to know was in a relatively safer residential area, as compared to the Karachi I grew up in? Karachi was like a big dark cloud of insane traffic jams, burning tires and ethnic violence, all of it threatening to rain down on me. The part of Lahore I lived in was the complete opposite; it was calm and safe. Or was it because, away from adult supervision, I became less sensitive to the dangers on the streets, imagined or real. Or perhaps being in a new place made it easier to try new things. Just like on a vacation we become more inclined to try a new cuisine or take up a new activity, Lahore, too, became synonymous with a long vacation, thus it became easier to walk, roam and laugh on its streets.

In 2003 when the USA invaded Iraq, I was living the utopian ideology, thinking I could change the world, or at least how I lived in it. And to an extent I did. One day our International Relations teacher, a social activist, mobilized us and we took to the streets protesting the US invasion. Growing up in Karachi I had seen my share of protests, violent ones. I had seen tires burning, and had driven through groups of young boys beating cars with sticks. But this protest was different. While the protests in Karachi were male dominated, here in Lahore there was a mix of both genders, out on the streets, protesting against the American tyranny. And though our little protest wasn’t going to bring in international change, it was exhilarating. We shouted on, our veins popping out of our head. Get out, leave Iraq alone. In temperament, it wasn’t very different to the protesting youth of Karachi. The only difference I felt was that while my words were violent, their hands were violent. I felt alive, purposeful. I felt like I belonged and wasn’t just a silent spectator in my life. The boundary had been crossed. In one year I experienced more freedom than I had in my whole life up till then. The fear of walking on the road had been wiped. I finally belonged; I was in control, even if it was a transient change. And then I had to leave Lahore and the freedom it manifested in my life.

Back home in Karachi, everything changed. The streets were not for me; the danger started lurking again, making me vulnerable. I was alone, without the support of my friends. I no longer felt the urge to just loiter outside. The parental gaze returned. Giving up was a lot easier than putting up a fight, when you knew you would eventually lose.

It has been two decades to that afternoon of self-liberation. Today I am a mother of an eighteen-year-old daughter, and I hold the same fears my parents once did, being a product of their upbringing. Now I, too, am a proponent of the same chant, ‘the streets are not safe’. And I have built a protective cage around myself and my daughter. But what about the young girls that run along barefoot on the roads begging? What about the young women who move from home to home looking to make wages? How are the roads safe for them? Or is their safety not essential? I finally have an answer now. They simply do not have a choice, thus ironically, having more freedom to stake a claim on the streets. My class determines whether or not I walk outside. If my gender is restricting, my class has made it more so.

Things are changing for some women and yet staying the same for many others. For the time being, that college idealist has retreated and the mother has overtaken. I have become the same parent I used to criticize for being too protective. However, I am conscious of the fact that the definition of who a parent is needs to shift, from being the one who protects to being the one who fosters self assurance. And it’s up to all of us, not as daughters and sons, but as parents to bring about this change.