Her mother doesn’t like it when she speaks of flying kites and singing in the rain. She doesn’t like it when she opens her palms and blows her eyelash away (making a wish, always making a wish before blowing it into the currents) or when she stares into people’s eyes and forgets to nod. She says it reminds her of the women who traveled with white bangles gleaming under the sun, smoking through yellow cellophane and spitting into the sand; girls from big cities don’t walk under the shadow of streetlamps and stigma alone. They walk with eyes trained on them, with their dignity on their sleeves. Their family’s dignity. Like being born with tender flesh makes them a liability.
The notion of public space being specifically public for one gender isn’t a new concept in the South Asian context. Women are meant for enclosed spaces, for their wings to be clipped and their bodies to be nailed into wooden slabs like frogs prepped for a dissection. Because freedom for women is always bad. Because it makes them claw at their cages and makes them greedy for more. And greed is a sin, then by the same logic, so is freedom.
So women who let their hair breeze through the summer are bad. Women who show their opposition to normality are worse. Women who sit in parks and laugh- well, no words could possibly claim the severity of the crime they have committed.
So we punish them. We call after them and strip them of their respect, for women in the public sphere have brought this upon themselves. A simple countermeasure- gotta keep the whole world clean. Can’t have too many girls asking for simple things like jobs and freedom, now can we? That would simply disintegrate the social fabric and bring our nation to a steady and rapid descent (really, it would. It truly would. Ask anyone.)
In the end, it all begs the questions: why? Why treat your boys any different than treating your girls? Why strip them of their freedom and confine them to a square box that never changes colour? Why expect them to be silent about it? Why hold back their creativity and brilliance and stifle their voices? Is it so difficult to go back to the time when women would roam Mall road on their bicycles, perfectly content with the small luxuries of life, enjoying the world they had been born into? Let them sit in the sun and bask in that morning light, or in a wooden seat that groans under them as they sip their teas and take in the sounds of the city around them.
That is all they ask for.
