Dear Diary,
I found out what it was like to be a woman when I was ten. My best friend’s mother owned her own beauty salon and on some days after school and summer camp, we’d grab lemon-yellow popsicles and crayons and head on over to the parlor to hang out while her mum worked. Lolling around on zebra-striped couches and watching the hot pink interior of the salon got too boring for us at certain points. We’d smash crayon heads into the couch, trying to drown out the monotony of black and white, throw our Popsicle sticks on the mean old manicurist who shot us death glares, or stared out the window watching the summer sky turn to dusk. Day-after-day, ladies would walk and talk about the same old things (weddings, kitty parties, soap operas, designers), smile plastered on smiles, and go on with their endless twittering. I couldn’t understand why nobody wanted to talk about Ninja Turtles and whether or not Michelangelo would’ve liked to know he’s got a cartoon character named after him. I couldn’t understand why those ladies didn’t go outside and play, or watch a movie, or read a book. Why would anyone waste three to four to five hours in one place just to make herself look pretty?
I found the answer in a salon chair. There was a rather large salon chair that would swivel around and make creaky noises as we played on it. I was too small for it. My best friend and I always felt too small and confused in that hot pink adult world, but that chair made us shrink even more. Our sneaker-clad feet couldn’t even reach the floor, the feet that did touch the floor wore sandals, khussas, chapals and stilettos. One day a bride came in to get dolled up. She wore a crisp cotton top and jeans, had a plethora of curly hair like an aura around her, a hooked nose and a book in her hand whose title was a word too big for me to understand. She smiled at me in my disheveled shorts and t-shirt, with my messy mop of hair squirming around in a chair that was too big for me. I watched as she got ready, fascinated by this lady unlike all the others, who walked in caked with makeup, that looked so normal. They took had her put on an opulent, gold spangled dress, did up her makeup, straightened her hair and pulled it back, hooked a nose-ring into her hooked nose, and then covered her head. They gave her stilettos to wear.
I looked down at my sneakers then, and I realized that they might someday grow into stilettos. I realized that when my feet reached the floor, they would be subject to pedicures and other things to hone them into a perpetual state of daintiness. They wouldn’t hold scars and burns and blisters from a life of running outside, but would be pale from being indoors, with indents of heel straps having dug into them….
It is nighttime and I am at a dhaba (outdoor cafe, found in South Asia). I am gazing at the men around me, shifting from one to another, particularly at their feet, at their neon green nike sneakers and burnt umber flip flops and I wonder how worn their soles are...They smoke and sip tea, their voices rumbling, the night air ruffling through black hair and swaying the creaking tables, the plastic chairs settled precariously over stones and uneven ground. The scent of tea lilts through the air, the waiters here hover over these men, casting us furtive glances as they pass us.
My friends and I have been here for the past hour. They are playing Parcheesi; the sound of rolling dice is followed by an issuing of protests after every three minutes. This is not the first time I have come here, but this is the first I have a book besides my cup of tea. It’s “Why Loiter?” by Shilpa Phadke. I have an assignment due this week and the one light bulb the dhaba has installed provides the light I need for the numerous annotations and post-its I’ve stuck through the pages. My friends have allowed me to study for the past half hour, but they have promised that if I don’t join them in the game soon, they will snatch my books and feed them to the wild dogs in the neighboring parking lot. I smile, highlighting a paragraph and scrawling in a note, thinking of books whizzing through the night air.
It occurs to me after a while that this is appropriate, that this fits into my on-going project of wandering through and loitering in public spaces. That though this dhaba is in a relatively privileged area of Karachi, we are accessing a public space and as women that means something. It means breaking the boundaries that our parents drew between us and the rest of the world. It means engaging in the risks of the city, traversing the cityscape in spite of the possibility of groping/ molestation/ rape. Mum and dad always spoke of the dangers of the night. I don’t feel fear, here. The whole thing feels so completely ordinary, it’s like this space is an extension of my own house, of my roof where we all hang out and smoke and play games through the night.
I ponder over whether or not this constitutes flânerie. I am observing all these boys, close to my age, lounge around. I think of the politics of loitering. There are many layers of privateness and publicness blurring together here. This is a make-shift café set up in an empty plot, private property that would not have been accessible to the lower-class males who work here. And my friends are here, girls who should not be at dhabas because of the threats they represent. Although, hanging out at dhabas has been normalized by the #Girlsatdhabas community, it is still seen as a male enclave, where women ordinarily are not allowed to go because it is seen as a space of ill-repute where drugs, alcohol and salacious behavior is imagined to accompany the tea. It all comes from this perception of public spaces as being threatening for women.
And I then I think of this book, and of the #Whyloiter #Girlsatdhabas campaigns. And how useful they have been, that they carved out this space for us, here, no matter how small it is. They have propagated a narrative of risk and fun instead of respectability, actively countering hegemonic discourses of respectability and fear surrounding women in public and specifically urban spaces.
I think of how they have said that “risk taking is often considered acceptable, even desirable masculine behaviour. For women, on the other hand, it is not only seen as unfeminine, but as potentially the behaviour of a ‘loose’ woman.” And I remember a male student at a debate at my university. How he argued that these spaces, dhabas, at night become places where women’s honor is at risk, that he had seen for himself the dishonorable things that have happened there. And then I remember that a friend had called him out on it, his insistence on preserving women’s respectability and then engaging in behaviors he would brand immoral if done by women.
I think of how by turning the safety argument on its head” they have argued for women to gain “access to public space as citizens” there is no need for a discourse of “greater surveillance or protectionism (however well meaning)” but is centered on “the right to take risks.” These narratives constitute a counter-public discourse, demonstrating the inter-connectivity of discursive and physical spaces. I have seen through these wanderings the gendered spatiality. that is born of the forms of spatial control placed on the female body that disallows the freedom of engaging with the landscape of the city.
And then I think of the bride and her stillettos, how we’re trained to be less mobile, slowly as we grow into women. How soccer games at parks, with our scraped knees and dirty clothes, become lunches at exclusive cafes. I think of how I am made to sit in that same salon chair now and be made up for hours before prom, or a wedding, or a party. How this is expected feminine behavior. These are the rules. You have to get pretty and sit pretty.
And then I look around me, at my friends and their wild hair and make-up free faces, arguing over whose turn it is, and I am glad that we are breaking the rules, that we are defining and imagining womanhood on our own. And then I look down at my shoes, purple ballet flats worn from all the travelling. And I smile.
-H.
