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What It Means to Walk Around a City Without Purpose
My mamma’s constant trips around town influenced me to wander despite the potential dangers
My mother is a homemaker. Growing up, I saw my mamma bend over backwards, stumble forward, and squirm sideways to allow no comfort to escape her family. My father, my grandmother, and I could barely measure up to her meticulous love. My mamma never spared a breath to pat herself on the back for work she considered her duty. “Your baba brings the bucks. I hold it all together,” was her matriarchal pride. She allowed me to help her. Sometimes. I could do the dishes or dust the windowsills, but venturing outdoors to bring home household items was a task that no one dared take away from her.
Making numerous trips to fetch groceries or medicines or whatever the hour needed punctuated much of her daily life. I once asked her why her multiple trips could not be condensed into one visit to the store. Would she forget all her needs in one round? Was my mamma losing her memory? She never had any one solid answer. Over the years, I have come to realize that those engineered trips were her way of claiming a life outside the private walls of homemaking. A bottle of liquid Dettol or a jar of Horlicks were reasons for stepping out. My mamma loved her walks, but to walk without purpose rarely occurred to her.
We, as women, through everyday acts, big and small, take up space and sculpt new ones to free ourselves. I have spent most of my adult life in big metropolises where men have crowded every nook and corner. It is simpler than spotting Waldo, but Indian women barely occupy Indian cities like their male counterparts do. It is a bitter joke that stings when the laughs die out. So, when I walk without a purpose, strolling across promenades or unevenly galloping through busy streets, I am claiming my city. It is so simple, yet it eludes so many of us who have interiorized a broken grammar of risk and safety, so much so that the pleasure of cruising outdoors for pure leisure feels like some achievement. An odd albeit carefully invented notion of safety drives that logic.
Consider this Reuters report revealing that nearly 80% of Indian women face public harassment in cities. The threat of danger is no lie, but what our society…
