Sometimes I wonder whether women like us can still be invited to a coffee conversation, simply to discuss Ariel, disagree about a poem, or laugh at something gloriously absurd. But let me pause here for a moment. First, let me tell you about Sylvia, and the girl who learnt to pronounce “Pulitzer” in 1982. The prize and her name were being discussed in our little drawing room in Islamabad. My father was an established writer and scholar, and the room was often full of literary giants talking about nearly everything under the sun. That, I understood, was literature: a conversation that happened in a room, among people who seemed to belong in it.
I was a teenager then, and I was surviving. There was abuse. Around that time I began reading Sylvia, and I began writing English poems for The Muslim. I was also, for a very personal reason, hating all male writers, so I decided I would not study English literature and would not sit the CSS exam. My father always wanted it for me, as middle-class educationists finally do, having recognised the power of the civil service. Tumhari angrezi buri nahin hai” (“Your English is not bad”), he would say, and from a critic that was huge. I chose medicine, so that I could at least help those who are harmed.
The Pulitzer went to The Collected Poems, the first Pulitzer Prize for Poetry awarded posthumously. I thought: hi, Sylvia. I had met her posthumously too, in a way. I was buried alive. After the CSEA I faced, I believed I was already dead. I did not know that more abuse and violence were still to come, that destiny was determined to introduce me to a number of varieties of it. But Sylvia stayed with me, and I settled with her.
Every October, Sylvia returns to us in borrowed lines. The quotable Sylvia is shared, admired, and remembered. But was she liked while she lived? The Bell Jar appeared in January 1963 under a pseudonym, weeks before her death. It is easier to admire Sylvia than to live with what we call her madness, especially when the madness stays safely inside poems. In September I wrote that Plath was heard: diagnosed, treated and discharged. What remained unaddressed was the question of how the life she lived figured in the suffering she described. [https://www.thefridaytimes.com/12-Sep-2026/empathy-turns-verdict] The idea of Sylvia was always easier to love than Sylvia.
So what happens when an ageing woman, who happens to be a doctor, a healer, writes about love, vulnerability and disclosures? Not confesses: writes, with her bleeding heart, in a hybrid, disorderly form that refuses to sit still as either fact or fiction. How many times have I found that the idea of me is better than me? I know it from the other side too. I chose medicine so that I could help the abused. Later, when I disclosed my own wounds, that choice became a reason for people to expect me to know better. Knowing the anatomy of trauma, I have learnt, does not make anyone immune to it. [https://www.thefridaytimes.com/21-Sep-2026/doctor-mental-health-trauma-courage-spea]
I have sat with rape survivors who said, “Ab ghar jana hai, investigation baad mein kar lein, bachon ko khana dena hai, maa baap ko dekhna hai” (“I have to go home now. Do the investigation later. I have to feed the children. I have to see my parents.”). Home first, justice later. I have my own such memories, and I bounced back for the same logics: parents, siblings, children and the honour tax. Some looked at me with pity, some called it bravery, and none could quite feel it with me. Such women face sexual violence, then emotional violence, then the quiet violence of class.
The idea of Sylvia was always easier to love than Sylvia.
We will not produce what she produced, I told myself. Then I stopped. Maybe I am in self-deprecation mode. Maybe I am underselling myself. Maybe I am more like Sylvia than I admit. She knew what happens when a woman finally speaks: “And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”
I know those rusty words. I know the shock of hearing them spoken aloud, and the absurdity of expecting tenderness in return. An intellectual well-wisher once told me I was so wounded that even flowers hurt when thrown at me. Perhaps they were right. Others advised me to be happy, to try humour. As if I had neither. I have my wit, my laughter, my moments of happiness; I have my wounds, too. Must one cancel the other? Must a woman be either healed or broken, cheerful or miserable, before she can be understood? And why must every contradiction in a woman become evidence against her? A woman bares her wound, and the world reaches for its little instruments of judgement.
So I learnt to be clever, to lace my hurt with wit, to make a joke before anyone else could make one at my expense. Better to be called cynical than sentimental, sharp than needy, amusing than wounded. Sylvia might have understood the joke. Sometimes I wonder whether women like us can still be invited to a coffee conversation, simply to discuss Ariel, disagree about a poem, or laugh at something gloriously absurd. Not to be assessed, rescued, or advised to cheer up, but to be met as minds, as women with wit and curiosity, as people capable of joy and hurt in the same breath. Must we first prove ourselves sufficiently healed to be good company? The joke, after all, is on the woman who believes she can speak plainly and still be loved.
I have been asking the wrong question: not whether a woman can be loved despite her wounds, but why she must first make a case for being loved at all. The argument I should have made is stronger than the apology that came before it. Survival is a different kind of genius, and no one awards it a prize. The women who stay, who feed the children, who go back to work, who write anyway, are not lesser for it. Nor should survival become another demand imposed on women who have already endured too much. Sometimes staying is a choice; sometimes the world has left a woman with very few alternatives.
Somewhere tonight a woman will say ab ghar jana hai, and she will go home and feed the children. Tomorrow she may tell the truth again, unfiltered, at the risk of being misunderstood. The pain is real, the vulnerability is real, and the price is real. Still she chooses. Still she has the courage to love and leave. She does not love as a bargain, or withdraw her love simply because it is not returned. She leaves because love cannot be demanded, and dignity cannot depend on persuading someone to love us back.
What hurts is that nobody wants to live with a wound, or love a wound. We share the beautiful quotation about the crack through which the light enters; we celebrate vulnerability when it has become poetry, wisdom, something safely framed and attributed. But when a living woman brings us her unhealed self, we want the mask: be happy, be normal. We want her light without asking what it has cost her to keep burning. Perhaps that is what Sylvia still has to teach us. Not how to turn pain into into poetry, but how to stop demanding that women make their pain beautiful before we agree to listen.
“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.”