“One evening I was lounging in an easy chair in my bedroom and thinking lazily of the condition of Indian womanhood. I am not sure whether I dozed off or not. But, as far as I remember, I was wide awake.
Sultana’s Dream by Begum Rokeya
From around the 1800s, the pen became more than a functional tool for women, to make and break lives with their words. In 1905, Begum Rokeya wrote a story that I only read more than a whole century later. Similar to the pen, the story of how this story could come to be is of very practical importance to me. In that lounging, there is not just time for leisure, but a restful space, cleared from the clamour of her domestic life. A certain luxury to loiter inside one’s own mind and then be able to narrate it. Virgina Woolf’s said that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” which are two very important material things. A room is indeed critical, because a woman could write all the same even otherwise, but if it had to bring her money, it had to be written in solitude, with the environment only afforded to men of privilege at the time. So for a woman to rent, build or create in some way a room and space, she is also claiming time to do so. The time to rest or be walk around without having to account for every minute to something or somebody else.
Woolf said that the minimum requirements in her time were 500 pounds a year and a lock on the door, the bare material necessities to be able to build a world of one’s own, but she did not quite quantify time, maybe it is obvious, or that it’s too intimate for discussion? Time is certainly not a given, not then (excepting the rich nobility, but even then, time was defined by cultured activities) and not even now. I have been hovering over this time and time again – what does it mean to make time our own as women expected to cut chunks of our day for the family, the workplace, friends and our very own self. I struggle with this because, the romantic notion finding time completely denies the stubborn, linear tick-tocks of life. I have an income and a lock on my door, if I want it, but seemingly not the time. The other day my family told me that I am always working. But at work, I was told that I can take on more and then I tell myself that I am not working nearly as much as I could. It may be that I am not efficient and I overthink, but if I were to think about adding children, housework and socialising to this mix, I will have to chop and compartmentalise; that is treat time as physical and make lego blocks of it (which I refuse to do).
This contradiction is what I find misleading, the lines we draw around in our day to restrict our activities within a frame, the slots in our agenda, the colourful lines on our calendar, the yess and nos, the constant give and take, negotiations in relationships and institutions. It is a lie I tell myself that if I really wanted it, I can find time. But this is something that is sold to us, a responsibility shifted from this larger family, society, institution, state onto us, onto the woman. It flattens domestic and care labour and the classed and gendered reality that rooms were, and are never homogeneously let out. Sultana’s lounging and writing was a political act because it implied a claim of space and time that wasn’t a norm then. I like to think that that when I claim time now, I am doing the same.
It also means that we need to smudge the lines in our agendas and planners and calendars to be kind and tender in our claiming of our time. Writing, or any creative endeavour for that matter needs boredom and idleness, an unstructured time to wander around in our thoughts. Money will buy us a room and a lock, and the lock will keep noise and people out, but it is the time, the hours that are ours, preferably not always quantified that will let the words emerge. As my own time-keeper, I want to adjust my own hands to defy the lifestyles that have warped our collective time.
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