Some years ago I went on a trip to a southern district of Tamil Nadu with research in mind. At least that was what I told anyone who wanted to know why I was going there.

What I found was a different kind of definition for freedom.

At a little town by the ocean, where the waves could rise as high as the houses when the winds churned the waters, it seemed nothing could hold anyone back. The sea was your backyard and if anyone crowded in on you, the sea would help you flee.

But nothing had prepared me for what that little seaside town also showed me. A glimpse of a community caught in a time warp whose rules of purdah were almost medieval.

“What do you do with your time?” I asked one of the girls I met there.

She showed me her work basket. She made flowers of silk. “I give my flowers to people who come here. People like you. They take it to the world out there.”

I had no words to answer her. There was a weight of hopeless desires and unexpressed dreams in that simple statement. She was a young girl. She studied me with the same curiosity as I studied her.

Freedom wears the colours of a chameleon. For her, the very thought that I could choose where I wanted to go, whom to be with and in a mode of dress that I picked for myself, rather than what was prescribed, represented the acme of liberty.

If I were to ask a girl of her age elsewhere what freedom meant to her, by this I mean personal freedom, I am sure the answer would be something else.

In the book Consequences of Love by Sulaiman Addonia, a young man, Naser, who lives in Jeddah, feels the oppressive regime close in on him. It is as if the very act of breathing is regulated by the religious police. Then Naser falls in love with a woman whom he hasn’t seen or heard; all he has is a pair of pink shoes that helps him pick her out from the rest of the women in identical black abayas. Falling in love becomes both escape and freedom for him.

Like my friend and her silk flowers, Naser and his pink- shoed love, the meaning of freedom can emerge in the quaintest of forms. Nevertheless, it doesn’t make it any less significant or valorous.

Anita Nair/ DNA-Daily News & Analysis Source: 3D Syndication