eeling alienated does that. It makes you question your existence; makes you feel unsafe and somehow less human.

It is easy to drum your fingers, speak of everything and nothing and then casually dismiss the violation by saying “Oh well, every freedom has a cost,” while sipping your green tea.

What’s difficult is engaging with the complex interplay of power and subjugation that unfolds on the road. And not just on the road, it’s what happens when you’re in a woman’s body and you decide to go to the park or the bus stand or catch your breath under the amaltas trees on a scorching afternoon. Go to any public space and before you can even blink, the realisation settles in: you are unwanted.

I commute to work on a bike taxi every day. The ride takes 40 minutes to an hour. Yes, it is economical (that’s why I do it). As to whether it is safe, well it varies from ride to ride. Little is known about the vetting process of these ride-hailing companies. I’ve had the kindest of captains get me to my destination and there have been rides by the end of which conversation devolved to expletives.

The problem with statements like “every freedom has a cost” is that they are inaccurate at best and harmful at worst in that they serve as a justification (or normalisation) for spatial gate-keeping. This disproportionately impacts people who do not have a choice. Being strange has little to do with street harassment just like ‘fitting in’ — or whatever that means — has proven to be a flimsy defence against jeers, remarks and catcalls.

The elephant in the room is: if women are taxpaying citizens just like men, why is their safety not ensured in public spaces? Why does Lahore sometimes feel as if it has a boot on our throats?

That’s what it felt like that day. I was running late to work so I plucked out a chequered shirt and the first pair of pants that fell out of my closet. As usual, I hailed a cab using an online app, my collar stained with coffee I had spilt in the hurry.

The captain arrived. I said my greetings and plopped on the bike, sitting astride (the safe way). It was a sweltering monsoon noon with no breeze. It felt like a cloud of humidity was enveloping the neighbourhood. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt the hot air against my cheeks. At the same time, my fingers were busy untangling my earphones.

When I opened my eyes, I saw him. I saw him before I heard him:. an elderly man, sporting a white beard, clad in a pink shalwar kamees whizzed past us on Ghazi Road.

Then, he made it a point to turn around and yell the words, “Pehlay dupatta toe pehen lo [Go wear a dupatta first]” at us before speeding off. With that one sentence, my whole day began to unravel. “Did you hear that?” asked the captain, turning around. I nodded.

As a child, I once read a stanza by poet Akbar Allahabadi. The poem narrates the poet’s confrontation with some ‘unveiled’ women in the bazaar. The poet made it his business to inquire why they were not veiled.

To my child’s brain (and to the horror of my parents), it appeared that the women had responded with wry spontaneity. “Kehnay lagin keh aql pay mardon ki parr gya [They replied, our veil fell on your intellect/ perception],” laments the poet.

It was much later that I picked up on the satire that laced these words. The poem taught me a thing or two. First, picking on women in public spaces has apparently been a tradition. Over a hundred years have passed but that has not changed.

Second, this is happening because of ‘ghairat-i-qaumi.’ Ghairat-i-qaumi, or the honour of the nation, is what’s pressing down on us. It is a phenomenon in abstraction; performative, if you may, but that does not mean it can be willed away.

What caused this man to turn around and tell me how to dress? What makes me conspicuous? Would I be any less of a target if I sat with my legs crossed, tipping the bike to a side? In my head, I dove pointlessly into a chasm of time — from Victorian India, an epoch marked with the codification of gender and social roles by the sahibs that were, to contemporary Lahore where a man saw it fit to recommend a change of clothes because I was out on the street.

Was it just me? Am I the weirdo? I asked a few friends and gathered that men on bikes do not usually advise other commuters on their wardrobe choices. The fact that this lone mascot for presumed ghairat-i-qaumi had decided to extend the courtesy only to me bothered me like a blip that would make its presence felt under the skin whenever touched, like a whisper, across space and time, that entwines me and this man in threads we both cannot extricate ourselves from.

We were both out of place and we both did not belong, I reasoned retrospectively. I had as much a claim over my surroundings as he did, I told myself. While his rigidity echoed back to the Victorian era, displacing him in the present; I, as a woman on a motorbike in Lahore, was already displaced; as much a ‘spectacle’ in the public imagination as any.

The important question here is which one of us had a choice. The problem is when I’m going about my day that is all I wish to do. I am conspicuous against my will and I am turned into a spectacle involuntarily.

The disgruntled holier-than-thou man I encountered on the road could just keep it to himself by going about his day but he chose to thrust us both into this Allahabadi-esque situation for which micro-aggression seems to be too flighty a word.

Perhaps, the way French philosopher Foucault looks at the way bodies are disciplined and broken down to become docile can be extended to public spaces as well. Maybe that would explain it or maybe it is ghairat-i-qaumi, wrapped in a new dupatta.

Whatever it is, I wish that, like the women in Akbar’s imagination, I had a witty comeback too. I wish I could ask him to get me a dupatta, for getting a freebie out of the experience would have made the nuisance partially bearable.

I wish I could retort with anything, even if it were to ask him to dye his moustache a flaming shade of red. I wish I were anything other than a deer in headlights when told that I didn’t belong there.

The writer is a staff member