Cosmetic Freedom

Nazish* is a position holder and currently working as a post-graduate student at one of the top hospitals of the country. Her husband and his mother take every penny of her stipend and she has no say in how it is spent. She gets kicked, beaten and threatened just because she gave a hundred rupee note to her niece when she visited.

Khadija* has an eight-year old son and a four-year old daughter. When her daughter was born, her in-laws, in consent with her husband, took her daughter and gave her in care of her mother-in-law just because she was working as a receptionist to make the ends meet.

Is it really independence when on one hand we go out to earn our own bread and on the other hand can not protest when our babies are mercilessly taken away? Does wearing western-attire and smoking like men make us more independent? Does freedom not entail freedom of mind, speech and mannerism? Do we see that around us? But we do see ‘cosmetic freedom’ everywhere. What else do you call four middle-age women all dressed in jeans, sitting in a nice zamzama restaurant, inhaling only via a cigarette, but guess what? When they leave, you see four empty packets of challia in the ashtray.

While it may seem so, I have nothing against western-outfits, nothing against women smoking either (ok, maybe slightly), but what I intend to say is that the freedom never gets deeper than this. Even when women are working, taking decisions for big-corps and banks, working long hours, driving to and from work, traveling abroad, maybe even trying beer, the independence of thought hardly ever emerges.

One might ask how I define independence when I condemn both working and non-working women. Is working a sign of independence? Not necessarily, if you ask me. A mother of a toddler can quit her job and decide to raise her kids and still be called independent. A supermodel can start taking hijaab and will also be independent. A chartered accountant who declines an offer to work abroad and instead move with her aging parents in a small town will still be called independent.

Independence is not linked with action, but rather the thought that produces the action. The courage that motivates an individual, either man or woman, to take the stand and say that I would do as I think is the right thing to do and I would not bent low or keep quite to be more ‘acceptable’ to the rest of you. Independence is the strength to accept all that entails to stand ones ground. Independence is when everyone else calls you insane; you continue, just because in your heart you know you are right.

Independence would be when Khadija stands up against her husband and in-laws to say ‘I would not take this anymore’, when she takes charge of her life and fight for her daughter and yet not give-up on her job. Independence would be when one of the ladies standup to say, ‘listen, I think all of us are killing ourselves with all this smoke and if we were really this cool, we would be wise-enough to cut-it-down’. Independence would be when Nazish gains enough courage to say that ‘if I earn, ‘I have some, if not all, the right over the money that I get and the way it’s spent.’

Do we see this kind of ‘freedom’ around us? This should be the face of enlightened Pakistan. Instead, we see more and more aunties dawning sleeveless, aping each other in jewelry, makeup and accessories and calling themselves ‘mature’, ‘independent’, with a ‘style of own’. Aren’t we only cosmetically-free, then?

*Names have been changed to protect privacy.