A woman’s life is often spent between two doors, neither fully open nor fully closed. Until society grants unconditional belonging, a woman’s true home remains her dignity, her faith, and her unacknowledged strength.
Farhat Jabeen
Some questions linger, echoing through our lives like a gentle whisper that refuses to fade. “Where is a girl’s true home?” This is a simple query, yet one that unravels centuries of unspoken truths.
From her tender years, she is imbued with a subtle lesson: her parents’ home is maayka, a place to cherish, but not to claim as her own forever. She is showered with love, yet subtly prepared for departure. As she learns kindness and patience, she is also schooled in adjustment: to soften her voice, shrink her dreams, and sacrifice in silence. The very traits celebrated in her brothers are gently curbed in her; her desires are seen as an inconvenience to be managed.
Marriage promises her a home of her own. She enters it with hope, humility, and effort, learning new routines, reshaping herself once again. Yet, she soon discovers that belonging here, too, is conditional. She is often reminded, subtly or plainly, that she comes from another home, and is rarely treated like a daughter. At her parental home, she is referred to as paraya – an outsider. At her in-laws, where she is often treated like a nokrani – a servant – she never attains the status of a daughter.
Where, then, is her true home?
It is a painful reality that at their in-laws’, many married women are treated decently only as long as they tirelessly devote themselves to domestic chores, often at the cost of their own health. They are considered “ideal” only if they exhaust themselves in service. Not only in Kashmir, but everywhere, women are in search not only of identity but of space. Throughout their lives, what haunts them is the question: which home do they truly belong to? In truth, they often have no home of their own.
Enough literature has been written on this subject, yet stories like Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own still fail to open everyone’s eyes.
Over time, even her childhood home changes. Her visits are timed; her opinions measured. “Now you are married,” she is told. And so she stands between two doors: one that no longer fully opens, and another that never entirely closes.
Where, then, is her home?
Perhaps it is not a place at all, but the quiet moments she creates, holding families together, absorbing pain so others may rest. Perhaps it is within herself: stitched together from patience, resilience, and unnoticed strength. And perhaps the sorrow many women carry – the thought that only the grave offers unconditional rest – is not bitterness, but inherited grief.
If a woman spends her life always arriving yet never fully settling, then home must be something more than walls. Maybe it is her dignity, her faith, her ability to love without losing herself. Or perhaps her true home is still waiting to be built – a world where women are not temporary members of any household, where belonging is not earned through sacrifice but granted simply for being human.
Until then, she carries her home within her, quietly and courageously, hoping that one day the world will finally learn to accept her and call her its own.
In Kashmir, countless women have fallen prey to domestic violence, harassment, and torture. Many have later preferred death over a dishonoured life. Yet, nobody has truly learned the lesson. The world knows of Habba Khatoon. Her life, too, was filled with torment. Everyone knows she was never happy with her in-laws, yet none brought change to our society, even after hearing her plaintive poetry:
“Warven seeth waar ches nou,
Chaar kar myoun maalineo ho…”
No one understood the message she left for us.
To conclude, perhaps a girl’s true home is not a place, but a sense of belonging, within herself. When she learns to silence the whispers of “adjust” and “sacrifice,” and instead listens to the beat of her own heart, that is when she finds her sanctuary. Her true home is where her spirit feels unshackled, her voice is heard, and her dreams are validated.
Until then, let us keep asking, keep seeking, and keep creating spaces where girls feel at home in their own skin.
The writer is a teacher at SRM Welkin, Sopore
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