“You’re very brave for coming here,” the white woman standing next to us keeps saying.
She is like many other professionals in Austin, a Californian transplant.
“It’s really not such a big deal,” I try to laugh, but it comes out jagged, like a shallow breath. I turn to look at my husband. He looks puzzled. He, too, is unsure what exactly I’m being congratulated for and why she keeps repeating that.
We are the only foreign people on this ranch. There’s a fire in the middle of a clearing, and as I face the flames, they burn brighter. The blaze lifts and reaches for the skies. The moon shines down on us in all its glory, giving each of us a tint of silver; the evening feels almost spiritual.
My husband, a man easily persuaded into activities he is unfamiliar with, looks at me with eyebrows slightly raised, silently sharing his concern for the evening I had planned. While I had signed us up for a “Full Moon Drum Circle,” this was not what drum circles were like in Lahore. I had expected a casual sing-along around a man with a ukulele, a crowd bringing along makeshift drums as they circled the bonfire, tea being the popular beverage of choice.
Instead, we are standing around the pit with everyone else, staring at flames and at a naked man running around. He had initially run around fully clothed, but as the evening progressed, the amount of clothing on his body had lessened.
Very thin and deathly pale, the man occasionally jerks his head towards us, narrows his eyes, and hisses. He then darts back around to resume his circumambulation.
“Animal!” he shouts as his body distorts; his chest heaves out. He throws his hands to face the skies, “I’m a wild animal! You’re a wild animal! We’re all wild animals!”
He continues this chant with multiple howls, each longer than the last. I wonder at the state of his lungs as he continues to scream, especially since the only time he stops to take a break is to smoke from his friend’s pipe.
“Should we keep chatting with the Californian woman who is clearly high on something?” my husband asks, “Or should we give up on this?”
I nod and agree to leave. It is also a humid night, and the mosquitoes have begun to feast on my bare legs. In my desperation to know the city I had just moved to and feel some sense of belonging, I had signed up for all kinds of random events. This had been one of them.
I had flown in recently from Pakistan, and I didn’t want the usual amount of time it took to adjust to a new place, as my parents had advised and reiterated.
“Beta, take your time—these things don’t happen overnight. New cities settle slowly,” they’d say, with that tinge of complacency I never wanted to hear again.
My parents had moved multiple times, so it made sense that they wanted to offer advice. However, I wanted my own quick pace. I was determined to fit in, make connections and live the life I had failed to build for myself in Pakistan.
***
I grew up bilingual. My first language was the one I learned to communicate with almost everyone I knew—friends, colleagues, teachers, extended relatives, and the like. It was the voice I used when introducing myself to new classmates or colleagues, presenting work to a teacher or an employer, or welcoming guests. It was measured. It was trained to keep certain feelings in check—a barrier to hold emotions and traits unfit for public display.
There was an invisible line between what I could say and what I should say. I learned early on how to stand still, how not to ask questions that couldn’t be answered with a smile and a head shake. I remember hiding my book under my bed whenever I heard footsteps in the hallway, afraid of how my most prized possessions would be confiscated.
“Yeh chakkar chalati rehti ho na tum larkon kay saath!”
My eleven-year-old self would gulp every time she was asked why she had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night at her grandparents.
With so many boys staying over, my body was assumed to be up to something indecent—even in the dark, even half-asleep.
It ached to travel down memory lane, and yet it helped release a long-misunderstood energy.
I look back and wonder at the stoicism I displayed as a child. I wish someone had told my younger self that it was okay to like reading, that it was also okay not to understand why there were so many extra rules, and that sometimes, it was okay to choose to break them.
For example, I wasn’t allowed to make many friends growing up. The friends I did make in school would drift away as they realized my household had no space for them. It was too strict, too many rules. In one way or the other, my friends would be termed a ‘bad influence’. I was always questioned about my pleas: Why did I want to act in a school play? Why did I want to go to a friend’s house? Why did those little girls want to hang out with you after school? What kind of life could those children possibly have away from their family?
In my parents’ eyes, anything beyond the bounds of family was a distraction at best, a betrayal at worst. Time spent elsewhere wasn’t living—it was wasting life. It became too difficult to explain or attempt to plan meetups around curfews and restrictions. It wasn’t sustainable. As a result, now as an adult, I have no childhood friends.
But, I have been able to make and have been blessed with many new relationships—ones I’ve learned how to nurture—ones I believe children should be allowed to claim for themselves.
But before I could learn that kind of closeness, there was another language—quieter, older—that shaped my understanding of connection. The language I spoke with my mother. It was unique to her—stable and comforting. She had the rare gift of listening without judgment and of offering sound advice that made sense. There was no other person I could talk to about things, to unpack all the things I wondered about, even the things I wanted for myself. Yet, she had her own ways of confronting the world—her defenses perhaps even sturdier than mine.
Our relationship was not emotional in the traditional sense. When I needed comfort, I rarely reached for her arms. But if I had a question about love, or found myself drawn to someone, it was her I turned to. Not for sentiment, but for wisdom. Not for warmth, but for clarity.
Over time, this shaped me into someone self-sufficient—someone who could sit alone with her own thoughts, and problems, sift through them, and often find her own answers.
While both these languages —public and maternal— served me well, they also remained unapologetically part of my linguistic being. But it was the one I spoke to my mother that followed me into adulthood. It shaped my internal dialogue—a little cold, not always kind to my own feelings and rarely indulgent, but steady, rational, and spacious enough to let complex thoughts unfold.
***
I didn’t, sadly, develop an understanding of the words my father spoke. While technically we used the same vocabulary, his language was emotionally foreign, with no point of entry, only locked doors. There was no key to his tone, no way to tell if what he said matched what he felt.
Living in Pakistan meant my father, like many other Desi fathers, believed they needed to ensure the ‘right’ standards of living for their families. The actual happiness of this family was, however, not taken into account. Order didn’t mean joy. It didn’t mean love. It meant control. Our feelings were irrelevant.
It was only imperative that the family followed a path and not ask too many questions, because nobody knew the answers–not even the fathers who had put themselves in charge.
Layer upon layer of rigid interpretation stacked onto patriarchs who tried to impose a structure using religious verses. This process slowly boxed men who had to hold onto this superimposed scripture as a way to make sense of their own hollowed selves. It was tragic in its own way.
Men were rarely taught to look inward. Empathy was seen as a woman’s burden, so they hardened and distanced themselves from developing mature emotional dialogue. This blocked their paths to a more genuine human experience, one where they could accept their own vulnerabilities and leave space for others. Instead, they became guardians of rules they didn’t understand, missing the chance to experience the full spectrum of life.
Had my father simply taken the time to stop and engage in two-way conversation, I might have understood where he was coming from. Had he just asked me how I felt, or why I was acting out, I might have listened. I might have even understood him. But he never did.
My relationship with my father remained comparable to my relationship with Desi society. Wary and at a distance, but unmistakably entangled. A kind of Stockholm Syndrome. I did my best to please him, trying to think over my words before they reached my lips. I even censored my thoughts in case any of them triggered his anger.
There was no telling which of his three forms of anger I’d face: days of silence, confiscating my electronic devices, or forbidding me from leaving the house.
This was not to say that he was not also a good father. Relationships are complicated, and I focus too heavily on the negatives to emphasize a certain cultural aspect that should be dismantled or even eradicated.
This is not a unique experience. While Mr. Bennet’s aloofness is not mirrored by many Pakistani men, it is a truth universally acknowledged that many do not entirely know, or care, what it is like to be a woman. There is a very strict ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide, whereby conflict is woven into the very structure of society.
Exercising my impertinent curiosity, I tried to cross that line the only way I knew how: quietly, but rebelliously. It was imperative that I find my own way.
So, for one of my initial acts, I wondered what it was like to be a man on a social smoke break? I lit my first cigarette, coughing hard as the smoke stung my throat, then frantically searched for a mint to mask the smell.
It was an experiment. A question. I didn’t want the cigarette, I wanted the space around it. I wanted access. The way men seemed to gather in clouds of smoke, leaning in, talking in shorthand. But those circles were never built with me in mind. I could hover near the edge, but the conversation was never mine to enter.
In those moments of exclusion, I began to seek answers elsewhere—not in cigarettes, but in scripture.
As a curious teenager, I read through many of the texts prescribed by the religion and culture we followed as a family. While my parents were pleased, I had something to keep me busy at home, what they did not account for was the manner in which my brain developed. I began to ask questions—not out loud at first, but always in my head.
I was fifteen years old but blissfully unaware of the filter I was viewed through by the men in my family, and would occasionally debate on multiple religious subjects with strangers online, trying to make sense of the contradictions around me. I became addicted to Twitter and would indulge in arguments for hours upon hours.
Why were so many women engaged in professional and scholarly pursuit around the world, yet still treated like second-class thinkers in their own homes? Surely, if we recognize all humans are born equal, and we have the capacity to applaud inventions happening in far-off corners of the world, we could and should welcome the development of local talent when it is ours.
As a young woman, I was, of course, talking about myself.
So I began looking elsewhere, searching for a means to break through—rooms where I didn’t feel like an intruder. And when I couldn’t find any entry points, I had to face a truth I didn’t want to accept: some things remain out of reach, not because you aren’t trying hard enough, but because they were never yours to hold. They just weren’t built with a handle on your side.
That’s when my pursuit of a third language, neither maternal nor inherited, neither feminine nor masculine, began to shift. It became less about mastering fluency and more about making peace with the limits of understanding. It was more about deciding whether this was even a form of communication I wanted to adopt.
Some understandings simply remain incomplete.
***
“You could be smart enough to get into the best universities in the world,” I was told after I had received acceptance letters from a few good names in academia. “But that would compromise your integrity – why don’t you just wait until you’re married? You can ask your husband.”
“Why would I be compromising anything?” I persevered, “It is higher education.”
The answers and explanations never made sense to me. I was told to listen. To be patient. To wait. That I would understand later.
But as I grew older, I began noticing that this attitude and logic were applied to everything. My reading habits were proving disruptive because I asked too many questions.
My driving to run errands became suspicious attempts to sneak out.
Once I realized the suspicion was already there, I decided I might as well make the most of it.
The structure was clear: a strict dictatorial hierarchy where the man of the house was treated as a near-divine authority. There were very specific rules to keep one constantly on edge, scared to fall into sin over the slightest ‘mistake’. Be sure to stand straight, but not too confidently. Speak gently, but not too much, so as not to invite malintent. Sitting too comfortably as you sat down to eat, back grazing against the chair, was pride—all offences to the Almighty.
These rules had a catch. Although the average household member could be reminded of their place in hell over a moral slip, there wasn’t any accountability attached to the man who provided for his family. These men were immune from judgment, shielded by their role as financial providers. Their ego was a necessity to protect what was ‘theirs’.
I remember being so shocked that women were told they could be exempt from fasting during the holy month if they needed to taste food before serving it to their husbands! Just in case it wasn’t to his liking, it was distasteful, and to avoid a disappointment that might turn into violence. How could I accept this reasoning? I imagined a woman breaking her fast, sipping lentil broth, whispering a quiet prayer that her husband wouldn’t slam the bowl across the room. It made my blood boil.
Piety and religious rules weren’t about God. They were not measured by faith or religiosity. It was measured by how well a woman could predict and preempt a man’s anger before it arrived.
I could never fit into these rigid boxes.
This was not a language I could envision being a part of.
To speak it would mean to be in agreement with their established structure.
And later in my early twenties, I saw a revival in the way I approached religion. I shifted and detached from all cult-like strongholds.
This is, however, not a pity rant. Nor do I dismiss the importance of believing in higher powers to keep oneself sane. Faith, after all, can be an anchor. But these beliefs were being used to police rather than uplift, in my eyes, they had lost their sanctity.
I had been a devout Muslim before, but I started to realize that my piety was only praised when it served the men in my family or men I might one day potentially be wedded to.
***
I grew up with more privilege than most people. It was still, however, a claustrophobic existence, one where walking on eggshells was the norm. Unlike my friends, I didn’t call up a parent and ask for help if something went wrong. I would figure out a solution myself, too scared to have more social freedoms revoked, more rules, more guilt that I was being problematic.
I was resolutely against the idea of settling down with a man. Instead, I looked forward to joining the pack of women who had found their way out of their familial chains, for better or for worse. Women who had found jobs in other cities and lived with their friends in shared apartments, girls who had won scholarships abroad. To manifest such an existence and be like those women I admired, I joined a secret writing program and submitted an article every week, being published in international papers without my father knowing. I imagined my byline in bookstores one day, dreaming of becoming a best-selling author.
By working secretly for months for an online magazine, I managed to save up money for my imminent, fantastical departure. With banks requiring a father’s identity card and signature to open an account, I had to creatively craft ways to extract the documents I needed without anyone finding out. The week my cheque book was due to arrive home, I woke up at six every morning to intercept the postman. If anyone else saw it first, everything would fall apart, and my secret would be revealed.
How could I have known then that no amount of physical distance would be enough to truly escape?
***
As a design student in Lahore, I remember how one fateful day, my mother had a migraine and couldn’t drive me to the bus stop. This wasn’t out of the ordinary. Migraines visited my mother frequently. She would retreat into her darkened bedroom with a warm compress and spend the day in bed.
My father took on this solemn duty instead, driving through the streets, cutting across the neighbourhood. It was not unusual for me to be dropped off instead of being told to walk – while we lived in a nicer part of the city, a girl walking by herself in public was not an image my family subscribed to just yet.
The roads were alive that morning. Laundry set out to dry flapped from balconies. A grandmother sat sipping her tea, two chickens clucking inside a wire cage, a mother rocking an infant in distress from the lack of air conditioning, waving a piece of cardboard to push back the heat. Cars snaked their way through the chaos, drivers leaning on their horns like punctuation. It made me think that although car-centric cities were the norm, it was still the people who dictated the land. They took up space, and claimed their corners of the world with stubbornness, through everyday rituals where life flourished rebelliously.
My own rebellion that day, however, would be unfeelingly thwarted. Despite the knowledge that my father detested any time I exhibited an interest in feminine beauty products, I had put on a decidedly pink shade of lipstick for class. Not a loud colour—just enough to feel like I was choosing something. That small decision sealed the verdict.
The entire way to the bus stop turned into a continuously relentless and humiliating monologue. His voice was flat, cold. Tinting my lips could only mean I was looking to attract unwanted male attention, and thereby scarring my character. He said I had made myself vulgar. That I had already invited the kind of gaze no daughter should ever welcome. This, he said, was why he had wanted me to stay home in the first place; he continued by blaming my mother for insisting that I attend a co-ed institute. It didn’t matter that it was one of the best universities in Pakistan. That my presence there was a liability. A countdown to inevitable ruin. A breeding ground for mistakes.
He blamed her for letting me go. For letting me be.
I now realize it was verbal and emotional abuse.
In his version of my future, my actions meant: I would never find love. I would never receive a marriage proposal. Worst of all, the stress of my existence, my decision to be seen, would become the reason other people’s lives unravelled. His marriage, even, was on the line because of me, and would crumble if I did not mend my ways.
By the time my bus honked to signal its arrival, its sound cutting through his tirade, my cheap mascara had already streaked inky fine lines across my cheeks. Despite my tightly wound headscarf and baggy clothing, I had been too noticeable, too much. For that, I was told that I might incur the wrath of God Himself. Even God might not forgive me.
All that—because I wore lipstick.
***
Even when no words were exchanged, the atmosphere of judgment lingered. The home itself seemed to carry the echoes.
Many of my evenings were spent with my mother in the kitchen, both of us unable to hold a conversation to dispel the tension that consumed us. The air filled with dense moisture as the monsoon rains came crashing against our windows, drowning out the sound of our own thoughts. The freshly cooked rotis were witnesses to our exhaustion, their inflated selves taking up space where we were afraid to do so. I learned from my mother the importance of establishing one’s presence. Not in words. Not in declarations. But in staying. In continuing. This was not an intentional lesson.
“Life’s not fair”, she’d always tell me, especially when I whined about something unjust. “You either accept it and move on, or you revel in the past and let life pass you by.”
I did not believe a child had to suffer through an unfair life to be taught that the world was not easy to navigate. Her philosophy, however, dictated how I was brought up. She took everything thrown at her with a certain stoicism, accepting her circumstances and ‘making do’ with what she had. But because she was spread out to accommodate everyone’s needs, she simply allowed, by consequence, others to walk over her.
While I could see her patterns, she had a harder time identifying them herself. It was, after many years of giving and receiving minimal returns, that she was able to break free. It was not easy living with the grief of your broken expectations.
My essay has turned rather cynical. I didn’t mean it to be so.
I have been lucky to find a friend in my mother. Most often than not, mothers chose to learn and adapted to the masculine codex instead of creating space for their own canon.
The boundaries that divided the realm of these languages didn’t just affect the space they inhabited, nor was it only the physical declarations that shaped the society, it was also in their solid, concrete existence. Whether it be in the form of a bank account that the country dictated must carry my father’s signature, or in the obstruction of my basic bodily autonomy.
It was very difficult to be happy.
It was easy to dehumanize the man seemingly responsible for so much anger, and yet humanity proved itself to be more complicated than it has ever been.
Who was to blame in a cultural tyranny?
In a way, we do actualize the thoughts we think. And we need to take more responsibility for them. To be self-aware in an environment where developing independent thought processes are shunned means that the people who have the slightest of power must exercise it.
Had I not chosen to work, and had my mother never taken the stance to help me, I would not have been sitting here writing this article. I would have continued the cycle, resenting the man I would be married to and telling my kids life can never be fair.
Maybe that’s where the masculine failed—not in its presence, but in its refusal to change shape.
***
As a young adult, I was constantly obsessed with the idea of running away. Not just the family, the house, but the city too. I applied for jobs in Karachi just to put distance between myself and Lahore. I sent college applications to universities I had pinned my hopes on like lifeboats. I filled in internship forms and joined design retreat groups to find a way to reach a level of autonomy where I would be happy. As the acceptances rolled in one after the other, I let myself dream– I imagined friends, a place of my own, possibly even a partner I would want to share my life with.
One of my favourite visualizations was a small living room leading out onto an Art Deco wrought iron balcony, which overlooked other buildings and people around me. The walls were covered in a floral print, almost leaking its colours onto the teal tables and sofa, all of it engulfed in rays of sun washing through a pair of French doors.
All of this, however, came shattering down.
“When you get married you can do whatever you want”, he said to me, “Of course, only if your husband agrees.”
Words I never let out of my head. Words that hurt me to this day.
Ours is a culture cloaked by the presence of a religious darkness, one where humanity was routinely sidelined in the name of religion. Even though the religious interpretation they defended insisted on the importance of human rights, justice, mercy, and human dignity—those values rarely made it to the ground level. Instead, what trickled down into our families quietly warped love into control, disrupted the lives of those simply trying to exist. It taught us that survival was obedience, and anything beyond that was rebellion.
Learning to control the car opened many avenues and helped me discover the city and my own reactions to it, to know the city on my own terms. Studying architecture might have been the official excuse, but it helped me discover places I would never have otherwise been privy to.
The abandoned bungalow ten minutes down the street from my house, nestled in between wildflowers and thorny shrubs. It became a safe haven where I spent many evenings.
Occasionally, I dared to call up a secret friend for a late-night venture, and we’d sneak there, just sit. Talk. Eat snacks. We laughed a lot and were so loud. It felt like freedom. We let the silence stretch out like a blanket, just grateful to be in a space where no one was watching.
One day on the way to university, I passed a small concrete plain sculpture that caught my attention, so I stopped. I don’t know why I noticed it, but I followed its line of sight into the alleyways nearby—and stumbled into an unexpected world. A maze of alleyways where I stumbled on vernacular translations for adaptive reuse: old arches kept intact but framed with steel gates; brickwork preserved but painted over. These older houses were converted into modern villas.
My wanderings through alleyways revealed more than structures—they echoed a forgotten labour, a quieter history etched into walls. That’s why I visited the Masjid Wazir Khan. I had read that when it was being conserved, the restoration involved many women and girls digging at the base of the mosque, sweating under the hot Lahore sun, uncovering older foundations, and revealing its history.
The actual construction of the mosque back in the seventeenth century was handled by an all-male team labouring away under orders of the architect in charge.
Centuries later, it was women who preserved what men once built.
It makes you wonder—what would survive if no one tended to it?
Families. Institutions. Chores. All of it rested on those expected to care without being credited.
I started building my own map of the city. Favourite tea spots and cafes. My own schedule: skipping days at the university for hours at a bookstore. Driving to commercial construction sites just to sit and stare at their work.
My story. I was finally beginning to take control of my narrative.
***
I cannot admit to having understood this language of control any better than when I first started trying. My senses overwhelmingly reject the rationality offered by many to justify actions that cause more harm than good.
For some, locking a child in their room for having done something wrong was appropriate discipline. For others, the mere fact of a woman speaking to a man was enough to blame and label her as dishonourable–in some cases, even subjecting her to a lifetime of shaming.
Sometimes, no explanation was needed at all.
I was never interested in having a boyfriend as I was growing up, and yet, many times I was punished for having one. I was told it was in my best interest to stay away from haram relationships. In their world, this was passed as disciplining your child quite fairly. In mine, it was an abuse of power.
As a twenty-year-old, I was finally able to spend time with a male cousin, not scared of being accused of leading him on, only because he had married the love of his life.
“Tum unki shaadi kharab karogi!”
My father repeatedly insisted that he knew what was best for me. But did he ever know what would make me a happy person? Or was happiness—mine and his—just a language he never learned to speak?
While I did not agree with the idea that adults couldn’t change, I wondered if there was something fundamentally different about the way he and I evolved in entirely different directions.
“You know what women unmarried over the age of 25 are called?” He told me one day, shortly after my twenty-fifth birthday, “They’re called leftover women.”
Most of my father’s ideas about my life stressed me out, to the extent that my thyroid developed an autoimmune disease–a quiet response to an environment constantly on edge. Comments like these were easy to ignore. It would be just another added thing that I would need to argue my way through, just like I had done countless times over the years.
I remember the time he sent me an outdated article from some American newspaper, which warned of the West’s regret, not having their women marry before the stark old age I was now. While I do not remember the article itself, I recall the argument was that women there were racing after “worldly” things and had allowed their biological clocks to expire. He thought he was giving me perspective. I wanted to point out the irony – while the ‘West’ might be famous for its money-oriented rat race, our country was obsessively expecting every woman to become pregnant as soon as they married.
I attempted to argue somewhat with his point of view, to push back. To question. But a conversation with my father was rarely a two-sided affair. He dismissed me with a shake of his head and a smile, commenting on how my young, malleable brain had been brainwashed by all the English novels I had read.
That’s how the codex worked. It discredited. It patronized and insisted it was all for your own good.
***
So, I found a man.
The story of how we met has been kept vague on purpose, to keep our families in the dark. I tell everyone that I met him through friends, and that is the narrative I will stick to for this essay.
On a cold December afternoon in Lahore, we met for coffee. He was flying back to the States the next day, starting a new job in a new city after having finished college. Neither of us had any intentions of pursuing romantic relationships. We had our fun conversations and then left it at that. I went home to explain why I had been randomly out of the house.
But for some reason, we stayed in touch quite regularly, slowly realizing there was something there, something took root. Fast forward a couple of years, we decided we wanted to get married and told our families.
Coincidentally, neither of our families believed in marrying for love.
My father had picked out a handful of eligible bachelors from his circle of friends, all men I had grown up with and had seen through their various stages of life. Had I been interested in any of them, I would have expressed it. My preferences were not, however, taken into consideration, and I was set up on countless family-friendly ‘dates’ where I was meant to judge if the person sitting in front of me would make for a good partner.
So, it was no surprise when my father, originally ecstatic to realize I was in fact interested in men and could be persuaded to marry the right man, was now enraged to discover my years of friendship with someone whom I was not in any way related to. Predictably, my methods were met with emotional blackmail and some swearing, all of which I took in wholeheartedly.
“I should have died before I saw such a day”, he said.
This type of drama was the theme of these conversations.
We went through cold, wordless days, passively angry days, actively angry days, reciting the holy book and reminding women of their place days, and more.
I announced that I would never marry if I could not wed the man I had chosen.
After long rounds of debate, a wedding took place. And eventually, I moved out of my father’s home.
Standing at the airport for a final farewell before I would fly to the States with my husband, I looked to see if my father had finally found a soft spot for me. A final gesture. A small reconciliation. He offered none. Just cold distance, he chose to remain angry for a petty argument we’d had hours before my final rukhsati.
I picked up my luggage and made my way through the glass doors that separated the travellers from their loved ones behind. The magnitude of my departure weighed on me–I was not only leaving behind my parents, I was letting go of an entire chapter. Leaving the only life I had known.
Starting over was daunting, but starting over without a place to return to was something else. Having no one and nowhere to fall back on wasn’t just daunting—it was paralyzing.
My heart sank.
I have not flown back ever since.
I often wonder if he regrets anything.
***
Now, as an independent woman with a happy life of her own, I could reason with the girl I was. I could explain to her the kind of man my father had become. Not because of his nature, but because of his containment.
Living in Pakistan had boxed him in too. He was shaped by the same system he enforced. He never stopped complaining of our rebelliousness, but my anger had now softened and taken the form of a reverential sympathy.
The grievances faced when anyone tried to make their mark or carve out a life were innumerable. Failure didn’t just halt personal growth. It felt like your own personal growth; your own future betrayed you. So, you turned to gatekeeping and barricading everyone else’s. Chances dissolved, and hoarding control became the norm.
My father had dreams that never left the ground; he had let them go. His refrain was always that his life would have been vastly different without children. When asked why he chose the family road, he was speechless. He had been given a template, a script to follow. There had never been a choice.
Sadly, many Pakistani men followed an unchosen script–the masculine codex. When their future failed them, they denied the opportunity to anyone else in the family. It became a cycle of inherited deprivation—power expressed through withholding, not giving. Not the kind of generational wealth one hopes to be born into. A legacy of deprivation mistaken for authority.
Their language, fueled by fantasies of personal economic prosperity, stunted dreams, and a borrowed sense of grandeur, had them imagining themselves as Godfathers of a very minuscule kin. But I no longer desired to understand that language. I have stopped even hearing it. What I wanted was a different syntax altogether—one not built on fear or inheritance, not transactional, an empathetic language, my own.
Yet, the deciphering of this third language, the codex that held the secrets to the desi masculine, proved to be a difficult mission.
***
Home.
There were plenty of sayings and traditions about it.
“There’s no place like home” was a popular one. True in many ways. There really will never be any other place like the one you grew up in. But people did not always have fond memories to look back on.
But if you’re lucky, you got to build a better one.
What we lacked were traditions to comfort those who never found a home. Those who had to leave it behind. And especially those who had to extract themselves from painful circumstances to build a new one. Needing to forget homes that bruised more than they held. As a woman, I dreamt of building a home where I could encourage my past selves to live in. Maybe one of them wanted to play dress up and dance. There were art residency forms on the table, and the only thing stopping her from applying was whether she truly wanted to go. Nobody was going to read through her journals, or criticize the way she needed to make a story out of everything.
A home for my future selves to grow in. A home where all my different selves who didn’t have it all figured out, but were in the process of doing so could be at peace.
As an architect, my thoughts would run wild with all the possibilities I could imagine for an ideal home. I wondered if I could afford to buy an abandoned warehouse in a bustling, energetic city. Somewhere full of energy, space and light. A place to experiment with design and discover the ways my hands crafted objects. A place where I have access to life and people, but also have the luxury of retreating into a safe haven of my own. A home not to escape from, but to return to. The fact that I had to leave home to experience any sense of autonomy stayed with me. It made me wonder if this was what living in Pakistan meant. Was the country slowly pushing its people away, waiting to be hollowed out from the inside?
The truth is it wasn’t all that bad. This generation knew more about how to care for one another than those before. While family dynamics weren’t as tight or interdependent as they once had been, there were new thematic communities–loose collectives of people creating space for others to simply exist. Finding them wasn’t easy, especially when most young people couldn’t leave home without being tracked like fugitives, but I had found pockets of safety: group chats, monthly meetups, conversations that looped through art, history, theory, love. For a little while, they had reminded me that humans weren’t made to be miserable. That this self-inflicted tyranny—the one we’d normalized—was unnatural, and brutal to everyone. But the problem with these groups was the inconsistency with which people categorized “looking after” someone.
Had I been given a choice, I would have stayed and enjoyed building an independent life in an environment that was familiar to me. A life where I was an active member of society, contributing to its shape. But that chance was never really offered. It felt as if this basic human right was stolen.
Was my country’s foundation slowly coming apart? Unlike the physical structures we fought to preserve like the Masjid Wazir Khan restoration mentioned earlier, there seemed to be no effort to adapt the emotional architecture for a new generation. No plans for revival. No inclusive redesign. No space for all the kinds of people who wanted to call it their home.
It felt like a far-fetched dream to hope otherwise. The bones of this house had decayed, and an immense amount of resources were now required to repair everything that had perished.
Many women who crafted their lives for themselves away from controlling societies continued to feel a guilt tugging at their freedom. If the men around them weren’t criticizing their uncovered strands of hair on display, then surely the women themselves should hold their desires responsible, policing themselves. They audit their own joy. They question their reflection, they imagine the voice of shame and guilt.
It took me a long time, years and an intentional unlearning, to carve out an inner voice. Longer still before I let it speak out loud.
***
But even as I tried to build this imagined sanctuary, I could not forget the truths I had buried so early—truths my body remembered long before I could find the language.
It brought a strange peace to finally bring to the surface the young girl who was often touched by the security guard in charge of ‘protecting’ the houses on their street, not understanding why it happened and what it meant. She did not have the language for what happened, she didn’t have enough words, her instant recoil was enough for her to know it was wrong.
If I could go back, I would hold her close. But what frightened me more was knowing it hadn’t stopped. That other children were still learning shame through the same silences. Will my vocalization be able to save any other souls?
***
How did one dismantle a belief system so rooted into a culture that people were on the brink of a painful asphyxiation? There were days I had felt that way too, when my younger self would not have the courage to vocalize her thoughts, scared of the backlash and exhaustion that usually followed any criticism I had of the culture my parents enforced.
My father told me, “If you can’t do something in front of your parents, then you shouldn’t be doing it at all.”
I gave up on hobbies I enjoyed, books I wanted to read, TV shows I wanted to watch. I was scared of picking up a pencil or even drafting a story in case someone might read it and get me into trouble.
And yet, I heard my father lie to his parents countless times about the places he would go to, or the people he would meet. When confronted with this paradox, he told me he had to do certain things to protect his family. I did not understand why going out for dinner and returning late at night was something that would threaten his relationships. I vowed to not turn out to be the same. I turned out far worse. My father does not know my life at all.
I never received a satisfying answer to solve my dilemma. I realized that power dynamics seeped through all the layers mentioned above—family, faith, language— and wreaked havoc on those who had the most to lose.
A dictator could order men to chain their daughters to their beds until it was time for them to marry, effectively creating a servile population, warning them of grave consequences should they disobey. Those men had two options – they could band together and decide to take their lives into their own hands, risk punishment, or they could give into a tradition that could sever father-daughter relationships for decades to come. I do not need to tell the reader what course of action was more probable.
God will be on your side, but your father might not be.
This was not always because the father harboured hatred for his kin. It was the weight of society that pushed him towards quiet submission. He would accept living with regret and loneliness because that has been the template passed down to him. There was no fire to keep one’s relationships from diminishing, to nourish those connections that outlast all others. This refusal to accept other ways of living that might foster friendlier relations, greater trust and a greater love. A home where “why” would be answered with care and not interpreted as a threat to be buried away.
Let our inability to picture other truths not hinder us from seeking them. Even if we’re tired. Even if we have given up. The things that mattered throughout our lives were the same things that we have constantly fought for.
That demand we fight for them.
They never come easy.
I just might have to tear off my clothing and join the man running around the fire. I think I finally understand why he kept howling at the moon.
Not because he’s lost his mind.
But because he’s done asking to be understood.
