There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with distance. It is the exhaustion of being watched, of being touched without consent, of being made to feel like a trespasser in a space you have every right to occupy. I felt it last week on a bus to Lahore — and I have felt it almost every time I have traveled since.
The bus was packed, as it usually is. I was one of only two women on board, surrounded by men on every side. The man beside me was holding two mobile phones. He turned one off and angled its dark screen toward me, not subtly, but deliberately, using it as a mirror to watch me. I glanced at him. He looked away, unbothered. Around me, seven or eight mirrors lined the bus, and from the corner of my eye I kept catching reflections — eyes that lingered too long, gazes that felt like hands. I covered my face. It was the only thing I could do.
Then the man behind me began to touch me from under the seat. I turned around and asked, "What is your problem?" My voice came out steadier than I felt. He said nothing. No one around us said anything either. And I sat there, frozen, counting the stops until I could get off. I went straight to work after that. I smiled, I answered emails, and I got through the day. But something heavy stayed with me — the particular weight of having been violated in public, in plain sight, with complete indifference from everyone around you.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with distance; it is the exhaustion of being watched and made to feel like a trespasser in a space you have every right to occupy. I have been living in a hostel for five years now, which means I have been navigating public transport alone for five years. It has never been easy. But what troubled me most that evening was not the harassment itself — it was how unsurprised I was. How quickly I moved through it. As though this were simply part of the journey — because, for most women in this country, it is.
A study by Aurat Foundation, conducted in collaboration with UN Women and the Punjab government, found that nine out of ten women experience harassment on public buses in Lahore. Nine out of ten. The number is staggering until you board a bus and realise you already knew it in your bones.
Modern Life, Hidden Control, And The Quiet Acts Of Defiance That Restore Meaning
Growing up, I was never allowed to travel alone. There was always an uncle, a cousin, a brother, someone whose presence was supposed to keep me safe. When I asked my mother why I couldn't move freely the way the boys in our family did, she would say, "It's not appropriate for a girl," or simply, "It's not safe." I used to think she was being overprotective. Now I understand she was describing a reality she had lived herself.
The first time I told my father I planned to travel alone, he didn't speak to me for two or three days. No argument, no explanation — just silence, as though I had crossed a line that didn't need to be spoken aloud to be real. I went anyway. That first solo journey was both freeing and quietly devastating, because it proved what I had hoped wasn't true: that the world my mother had warned me about was exactly as she described it.
What strikes me now is how much of this we carry without naming it. The way we instinctively choose seats near other women. The way we avoid eye contact but stay alert. The way we rehearse what we will say if something happens, even as we hope nothing will. There is even a law against it — Section 509 of the Pakistan Penal Code criminalises sexual harassment in public spaces, including on buses. And yet, on that bus, not one person intervened. A law exists on paper while the reality plays out in plain sight, every single day.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex that women are conditioned into a kind of perpetual otherness — always defined in relation to men, always navigating spaces built around male comfort. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own speaks to something similar: the quiet but relentless struggle women face simply to claim space for themselves.
We are taught, from very early on, to make ourselves smaller. To dress carefully, speak carefully, move carefully. To treat public space as something borrowed rather than something that belongs to us too. And the cruelest part is how seamlessly this conditioning takes hold — so much so that when something happens, our first instinct is often not outrage but recalibration. How do I get through this? How do I get home safely?
Maya Angelou once said, "I will not have my life narrowed down." I return to that line often. Because every time I board a bus, I am making a small, stubborn claim to a life that is not narrowed down — not by fear, not by harassment, not by a world that would rather I stay home. The freedom to exist in public without being made to feel like an intrusion is not something women should have to fight for. But here we are, still fighting.
