On Ordinary Affairs With Freedom

Freedom, I have realized, is a scam. It is sold to us in glittery travel packages, in promises of independent lives in new cities, in stories of friends who perpetually hop across borders with stamped passports, but none of it seems quite real.

Travelling and living alone in Pakistan does go to your head. It comes with its own wonder-drug supplements, the most prominent of which is the nearly nonexistent social responsibility that comes with knowing very few people in a new town. My days in Lahore were often wrapped up in work, but the nights and weekends were for adventures. One Saturday was a quick hike, by a hidden gem of a lake a few hours from the city. Before that, a weekend in Islamabad had offered a fantastic retreat. Another escapade involved a last-minute hop on a band of expats going strawberry picking. These aren’t the kind of unforgettable trips you come back from having made lifelong friends, but rather those you carve out of bustling city lives, either for a break or a change of scenery. To me, it was incomparable to Karachi’s sweaty, oppressive air with persistent parental checks and concerns.

Add all this to being able to rediscover “home” with a fresh perspective. I had never been as familiar with street smells as I became in Lahore, venturing out on foot more often than I had in Karachi. I was interacting with strangers effortlessly and exploring new parts of the city on a whim. As the temperature rose, so did my affection for the city. Notions of how “home” restricted me were pleasantly frittering away.

As a woman, especially, this is liberating to learn. You realize how futile many of your internalized fears are, and how scares are just that — scares. Rickshaw walas become your friends and you get hooked on their daily supplies of conversation. Soon enough, you run the risk of romanticizing everything, and if you’re lucky, this state of mind sticks around for a while.

If not, then you quickly recognize the delusion you nearly fell for. That you can go trekking in the heart of Punjab, but still can’t explain how you rarely walked around your own neighborhood in Karachi because it didn’t feel “safe”. That you can sit at a roadside tea shop in another city, sipping cup after cup, even though you’d never do it down your own road back home. That the intoxication of some semblance of freedom—the lack of accountability, the smugness of being a woman all on your own—means little when there are still exceptions to where this freedom can be exercised. That even in new, seemingly liberating spaces, there are nagging reminders: the number of women on the streets, the double-thinking while travelling alone, and most pronounced of them all, the constant comparison with home.

Soon, you grow unsettled again, unconvinced.

Our world is obsessed with measuring freedom by mobility, but mobility means nothing if not synced with the spaces in our minds. Going away somewhere may provide an easier breathing space, but it is too painless a test of autonomy.

My experience, I soon understood, could only be half-realized if I couldn’t merge my affair with freedom with my understanding of home. My thoughts rippled with the commentary of internalized, invisible gazes, as well as the occasional moment of relief for not having to attend to them. But it was a cop-out; I had picked up and relocated to a space where I wasn’t obligated to concern myself with these expectations and self-regulations. It wasn’t the same thing at all.

Travelling and living alone may lull us into a sense of autonomy, but they only tell half the story. In our brief interactions with escape, we can convince ourselves that what once stifled us no longer exists. But in reality, just because we suddenly have to make different, easier choices, and because we can afford to forget about the tougher ones, doesn’t mean they have disappeared. Home may seem distant from the vantage point of studying in a new country, or briefly living in a gloriously liberal town, or being on vacation, but it doesn’t really leave. Wherever on the planet we are, it follows us around, gripping our mind with all its suffocating reminders, upending our mirages incessantly.

 

Sadia Khatri is an undergrad in media studies, visual culture and astronomy. Her work has been published in various publications, and she is amongst the founding team of Open Letters, an upcoming non-profit literary society in Pakistan. She tweets @sadiakhatri.

Artwork: “The Half Empty Swing” by Ahsan Masood.