We all loved someone. And we can and often do love many. Not necessarily in the same way. Not with the same intensity, not with the same expectations, and certainly not with the same ending. There is the love we grow into, the love we are ordered into, the love that surprises us, the love that teaches us, the love that wounds us, and sometimes the love that simply notices something in us that had been waiting, quietly, to be noticed. None of these cancels the other. Perhaps this is one of the things we are least prepared to admit about ourselves, especially as we grow older. We like our emotional histories tidy. One great love. One betrayal. One loss. One lesson. Closure neatly placed at the end, like the final full stop in a well-edited paragraph.
Life is rarely so cooperative. Once someone has been deeply known, they do not simply become a stranger again. Yet neither does having known someone give us a permanent claim upon them or upon ourselves. What was shared can remain true without becoming a claim on the future. I have been thinking about this through the theatre, perhaps because theatre taught me something about endings long before life did.
Once upon a time, I was a theatre practitioner. I wrote, directed and trained actor-activists, often for causes I cared about deeply. I have lived many lives in one life, and theatre was one of them. It is no longer what I do, but something from those years has stayed with me: the instinct to put difficult questions into a room and make people sit with them.
During the Musharraf years, I adapted Tagore's Totay ki Aala Taleem into political satire. The parrot was to receive a great education from Baadshah Salamat, and we knew exactly what kind of education that was. At other times, I used Majaz's Awaara in theatre pieces presented at national and international conferences, including work around sexuality and reproductive health. I have used shadow theatre to speak about rape and abuse. I once wrote a play as a letter to an unborn son, asking what kind of man he might become: a rapist, a harasser, a bystander, an ally, a feminist. Theatre allowed us to ask questions that ordinary conversation often avoided.
Love is another such question. We have endless literature about how to fall in love. Songs, novels, films, poetry, psychology, philosophy humanity has spent centuries trying to understand attraction, longing, jealousy, devotion and heartbreak. But where are the rules for leaving? How do we leave without turning the other person into a monster and ourselves into fools? How do we accept that something mattered and still accept that it cannot continue? How do we acknowledge love without converting it into entitlement?
Perhaps the old vocabulary of Zee-Haal-e-Miskin—the language of separation, bewilderment and hijran feels familiar precisely because the predicament is not old at all. Since early adulthood, I don't recall becoming less impressed by sophistication. If anything, life has made me more careful about it. Intelligence is not integrity. Charm is not emotional safety. Education does not guarantee kindness. And manipulation does not require an impressive accent, a degree or an impressive CV. This matters to me as a feminist. I have spent decades working on violence against women and girls. I have seen what power can do when it is exercised without accountability. I am not interested in romanticising harmful behaviour merely because the person displaying it is intelligent, charismatic or emotionally compelling.
But feminism has also taught me something else: discernment. Not every painful withdrawal is coercive control. Not every disappointing ending is abuse. Not every man who changes his mind is a villain. Adults can change their minds. They can change their hearts. Men can. Women can.
The question is what we do with that reality. Watch what happens after a boundary, not merely what was said before it. A person's response to another person's no can tell us more than a hundred beautiful declarations of affection .And yet setting a boundary is not the same as issuing a moral verdict. A boundary does not need to arrive carrying shame in its suitcase.
Sometimes agency is simply the ability to say: this mattered to me, and it still cannot continue. Sometimes dignity means accepting another person's boundary without turning it into a verdict on our worth. And sometimes it means setting our own without humiliating the person we are leaving behind. This becomes complicated for women because we are rarely permitted the full range of our emotional lives.
Society is perfectly comfortable with an older woman being wise. It is comfortable with her being experienced, accomplished, maternal, resilient, useful, even inspirational. But let her admit that another mind interests her. Let her say she enjoyed being intellectually noticed. Let her acknowledge that a conversation awakened something.
Suddenly people become nervous. Attention is translated into sexuality. Curiosity becomes foolishness. Emotional complexity becomes loss of dignity. Why? Women do not stop being human at forty, fifty or sixty. The heart does not consult the birth certificate before becoming interested. Neither does the mind. And perhaps this is where my own history enters not as confession, and not as evidence against anyone, but as the ordinary complication of having lived a long life.
Feminism can teach discernment: not every painful withdrawal is coercive control, not every disappointing ending is abuse, and people have the right to change their minds and their hearts.
I love my husband. Perhaps that is the part of this story that troubles me most as a feminist. I was ordered into that marriage. I learnt to love a man who failed, in important ways, to acknowledge my presence. He may have loved me in the terms available to him, yet I was left carrying the consequences of that love. I was expected to understand, accommodate, endure and, somehow, remain grateful for the arrangement. And then there was not even a final goodbye. Sometimes I ask myself: does loving him, despite everything he did to me, make me perniciously patriarchal? I don't think so. Patriarchy may teach a woman to excuse a man's behaviour, to make herself smaller, to call endurance virtue, to confuse sacrifice with love. But love itself is not proof of political surrender. I can love a man and still name the ways in which he failed me. I can understand something about him without absolving him. I can refuse to turn him into a monster without turning myself into the woman who must explain away every wound. Perhaps this is another kind of feminist agency: refusing to let even feminism dictate whom I am permitted to love, or what I am permitted to feel after the fact.
Love is not acquittal. And grief is not testimony for the defence. That absence matters. It has probably contributed to my tendency to reconstruct motives, intellectualise behaviour and give people the benefit of the doubt long after the evidence has become uncomfortable.
Sometimes that is wisdom. Sometimes it is simply exhaustion in a properly built wardrobe. And then life, being life, does not necessarily become emotionally empty because one relationship has ended. We can love again. We can be moved again. We can be intellectually awakened by someone else. We can be surprised by our own capacity to feel something we thought belonged to an earlier version of ourselves. This does not diminish the person we loved before. It does not betray a dead spouse. It does not make a woman frivolous.
Nor does every later feeling need to become a relationship. This, perhaps, is one of the harder lessons of adulthood: a feeling can be real without requiring a future. I could spend years asking why someone departed, why someone withdrew, why someone could not give what I needed, why a door opened only to close again. I don't want that life. Closure may not be understanding. It may be the point at which we stop demanding an explanation before allowing ourselves to move.
There is another question here, one that has followed me through my feminist work: what happens when a woman is no longer willing to measure her worth by whether a particular man chooses her? For centuries, women are valued through roles. Wife. Mother. Daughter. Caregiver. Professional. Activist. The dependable one. The useful one. The one who understands. The one who makes room. But who are we when nobody is asking us to perform a role? What does it mean simply to be a woman who notices, desires, thinks, remembers, enjoys, refuses, grieves and sometimes gets things gloriously wrong? What is dignity? Ego management?
I don't know. Perhaps dignity is not the absence of emotional mess. Perhaps it is the decision not to make another human being responsible for cleaning it up. I have loved. I have been loved imperfectly. I have loved imperfectly. I have lost. I have survived. And I may love again not because I am waiting for someone to complete the unfinished sentence, but because being alive means remaining capable of surprise.
The theatre taught me that the fourth wall is an illusion. The audience watches the actors, believing itself safely outside the story. But occasionally an actor turns and looks directly at them. The arrangement changes. The distance disappears. And suddenly everyone in the room is implicated. Perhaps that is what happens with love too. We imagine we are observers. We analyse other people's marriages, separations, betrayals, desires and mistakes. Then one day the stage turns, and we find ourselves standing under the light. There is no audience to answer now. There is only the woman who misbehaved on the stage, deciding where to go next.
Ab kya karein? Kya hona chahiye?
Perhaps we begin by telling the truth. We all loved someone. And we can and do love many. Some stay. Some leave. Some die. Some become memories. Some remain unanswered questions. And some simply teach us that the heart, despite everything we have been told about age, dignity and proper behaviour, is not a machine designed for closure. Perhaps it is designed for living.
چوں شمع سوزاں چوں ذرہ حیراں ز مہر آں مہ بگشتم آخر
نہ نیند نیناں نہ انگ چیناں نہ آپ آوے نہ بھیجے پتیاں