It took three months, three arguments and the promise of a suitcase full of American shopping before my family agreed to let me go. The fact that I was forty-two years old, a university lecturer, a published academic and the person paying half the household bills did not matter. And that was why, when the invitation arrived in June, I held on to it for weeks, trying to decide how to break the news to my family that they would need to survive without me for a week or two.

We are delighted to invite you to present your paper at the Annual Conference on Migration, Gender and Contemporary Literature at Bellweather College, Pennsylvania…

I read the email twice in my office at the university, then printed it out because good news, like visas and property deeds, seemed more legitimate on paper. Then one night, after much deliberation about how to approach it, I simply placed it on my husband’s dinner plate.

“Pennsylvania?” he asked, reading the printout.

“America.”

“I know where Pennsylvania is.”

My daughter Zara looked up from her phone. “Ammi’s going to America?”

“I've been invited to a conference.”

“Can you bring me New Balance shoes?”

My son appeared from nowhere. “AirPods.”

“I’m presenting a paper.”

“AirPods Pro.”

My husband picked up the invitation again. “For how long?”

“One week.”

“A whole week?” His pitch was so high that I wondered if I had said a year instead of a week.

“Just one week. Seven days. That’s all.”

He gave me the look he reserved for children when they were being over-smart.

“What about your classes?”

“They’ll give me conference leave. I’m sure someone can cover for me.”

“Your mother's medical appointment?”

“Bhai Jan will have to take her.”

“Zara’s tuition?”

I was prepared for the inquisition, but this was getting out of hand. I took a deep breath. “You can take her for a change, and if not, she’s seventeen. She can go by herself.”

Zara looked simultaneously offended and excited. “Yes, yes, I can go myself. I can take the car. Rahim Bhai lets me practice driving…”

“I will have to take her,” the husband said with a sigh so profound that anyone listening would assume he had to take her on his back. He frowned and leaned forward, his hands on the table, as if he had just found a solution to world peace. “Do you know what you should do?”

“Book my flight?”

He looked at me with the weary patience of a man who thought he was the only adult in the room. “You should present on Zoom.” He leaned back and smiled with such satisfaction that I was tempted to slap it off his face. “These days everyone is online.”

I looked at him. Really looked at him; and wondered if he could see me at all. Thirteen years of commuting to Karachi University in buses, a PhD completed between pregnancies, papers drafted mostly between eleven at night and four in the morning. No time for myself at all amidst all the teaching, marking, my mother’s various medical appointments, the children’s pick-ups and drop-offs, servant and in-law dramas. All those years of turning down conferences, or attending as a disembodied square on a screen because flights were too expensive, children were too young, visas were too difficult, somebody had an exam, somebody had a fever, somebody needed dinner. And now an American university wanted me there - in person. They were willing to pay my fare; willing to arrange the visa. And he wanted me to stuff myself back into a small box on a screen just so he wouldn’t be troubled to take the children to tuition.

“No,” I said, getting up so suddenly from the table that my glass tumbled. Water spilt everywhere, but I did nothing to wipe it. “I’m going,” I announced.

Then, seeing the horrified expression on my family’s faces, as if I was having some sort of psychotic episode, I sat back down. “I mean, I have to go. My university won’t like it if I turn down such an opportunity.” They still looked doubtful, so I added, “I could lose my job.” This wasn’t strictly true.

At this, my husband pressed his lips together. “Do you want me to talk to your Chair? I'll tell him you don’t want to go…”

“No!” Again, it came out too quickly, too loudly. I bit my tongue to hold my anger as his forehead creased. I softened my voice and forced a smile. “I mean, it’s only for a week.”

“Is Pennsylvania near an outlet mall?” Zara asked, leaning across the table.

And that was how negotiations began.

*

By September, my family had accepted that I was going, maybe because my trip was their trip to an American shopping centre. A family WhatsApp group appeared: AMMI’S AMERICA LIST.

Zara messages were in all caps: BLACK NOT NAVY. PLEASE DON’T DO THAT THING WHERE YOU SAY THEY LOOK THE SAME, followed by screenshots of the trainers.

Ali sent a link to AirPods. My husband wanted hair loss vitamins and other medicines to add to his ever-growing bedside pharmacy. My mother wanted a Macy’s handbag.

“You have twelve handbags,” I argued when she showed me the photo on the Macy’s website.

“American handbag ki baat aur hai,” she replied. “All these are made in China. Not the same thing.”

“Mummy, do you really want to support a capitalist society that's aiding a genocide…”

“And you want to go there?” she cut me off.

“I’m going there to present my research…” I replied. “Not the same thing.”

“Don't bring it then.” She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t want anything from you,” she snapped, and shuffled out of the room. Two minutes later, she sent me a photograph of the handbag she wanted.

By the time I was ready to leave, half my suitcase was empty by instruction.

“You’ll need the space,” Zara warned as I packed.

“What about my things?”

All four of them laughed.

*

Two days before my flight, I went to the salon for threading. Eyebrows. Upper lip. Home. That was the plan. Instead, the salon owner stood behind me examining my reflection as though I had brought her something in need of dire restoration.

“Your hair is falling out.”

“I know.”

“And too many white roots.”

“I know.”

“Very bad.” She lifted a section between two fingers, then met my eyes in the mirror. “We have a treatment. I can give you a discount.”

A discount on my self-worth, I thought.

“No, thank you.”

“And you should definitely do colour before Amreeka.”

I looked at myself in the mirror. Grey at the roots. Thin strands dangling below my shoulders. The same hair I had worn in one version or another for most of my adult life. “Cut it,” I said.

The woman blinked. “What?”

“My hair. Cut it.”

“Trimming?”

“No, cut it all off.”

She laughed, then stopped. “You’re serious.”

I nodded. She lifted the length away from my neck. “This much?”

“Shorter.”

“Why?” She flipped my parting from one side to the other. “Better you take my treatment. It will take years to grow back at your age.”

At your age landed exactly where she intended it to. But I wanted to get rid of everything weighing me down before I travelled.

“Cut it,” I repeated. Reluctantly, she picked up the scissors but remained motionless, as if waiting.

“Cut it all off.”

As the first lock fell onto the cape, something in my stomach unclenched. By the end, I felt lighter. I had finally made a decision that was my own.

*

When I came home, my mother started; her hand flew to her mouth. The children gasped.

“What have you done?” my mother cried, clutching her head in her hands as if I had killed someone.

“Cut my hair, that’s all.”

My mother walked around me as though inspecting damage on a car after an accident. “Your father would have hated this.”

My father had believed a woman’s hair was her beauty. My mother had oiled mine into a thick plait every Sunday until I was old enough to object. My husband also thought hair was a woman’s grace. My children had once used my long plait as a rope, tugging whenever they wanted my attention. Everyone had always loved my long hair. Perhaps that’s why cutting it felt so good.

Zara stared at me. “Oh my God, Ammi. You look like…”

“What? Just say it. A headmistress?”

“Kind of gay.”

*

Somewhere over the Atlantic, while my family slept six thousand miles away, I opened my battered copy of Eat, Pray, Love. I first read Elizabeth Gilbert in college and still believed I would become the sort of woman who travelled around the world and had adventure. And then wrote about them; and got paid for it, too.

My family could want something from me and not have it immediately. He could be mildly annoyed. He could even, God forbid, look for the socks himself.

At least here I could read her without anyone judging me. There were some pleasures a woman in my position was expected to have outgrown, along with Mills & Boon and putting sugar in her chai. Besides, I knew the arguments: white woman; Western privilege; spiritual tourism - the irritating ease with which certain women could arrive in other people’s countries, find themselves and leave with a book deal. I had probably made some of those arguments myself, possibly at a conference. Perhaps I just loved the audacity of a woman who could simply go somewhere to think about how unsatisfactory her life was. No permission needed. No packed lunches to think about. No elderly mothers ringing about their bowels.

I sighed. Gilbert had a whole year. I had seven miserable days; plus seventeen messages and counting, reminding me about trainers. Yet, squeezed between an obese man who kept snoring and a wrinkled old granny in a sari who kept hiccupping, I looked around the darkened cabin and felt something close to exhilaration. Nobody here knew me. Nobody knew that my mother always needed help with her constipation, that my husband liked his tea lukewarm with just the right temperature of milk or that my son would eat eggs only if the yolk remained runny. Nobody wanted anything from me here.

I smiled at the thought that for the next few days I would have a hotel room to myself; a room of one’s own; a bed nobody else would climb into; a bathroom nobody would knock on because there was no water downstairs, or because they couldn’t find their bloody socks or schoolbooks. I would finally be able to work on the novel I was carrying around in my head.

And I would get to see America in the flesh, not just on Friends. Have supersize meals. Go to the museums. The big bookshops and libraries where I could read and write in peace. Suddenly, I realised I was making a list of things that I wanted. I settled into a rhythm between the alternating orchestra of snoring and hiccupping and opened Gilbert again. At thirty thousand feet, safely beyond the reach of my colleagues and their politics, I allowed myself my own small Eat, Pray, Read.

*

At immigration, an extremely bored-looking officer asked in a dull, monotonous tone, “Purpose of your visit?”

“Academic conference.”

The officer looked at my passport. “Where?”

“Bellweather, Pennsylvania.”

He looked up. “Bellweather?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“There’s a conference.”

“In Bellweather?”

We both seemed equally surprised.

“What’s it about?” he asked, frowning.

“Migration and identity in post-colonial women’s fiction.”

He scratched his head. “What do you do back home?”

“I teach.”

“Where?”

“Karachi University.”

He looked at my visa, then at me and typed something into his computer. I was beginning to get nervous. I’d read recently of some professors who had been banned from entering the empire because they had criticised the genocide.

“But you’re a writer?”

Could I really call myself a writer if the novel I wanted to write was just in my head? Did writing boring papers that only five people read qualify me as one?

“I’ve published a book,” I answered, quickly squashing my overthinking.

“What’s that about?” he asked without looking up from his computer.

There were few questions I dreaded more. “Women write… ers…” I trailed off on the last syllable, unsure if that was the right answer to be let in. Inside, I thought, I’ve come so far; at least let me have a bagel.

“Like women’s rights and stuff?” Something in his face relaxed.

My book was not about women’s rights. But even I, who hardly watched the news, knew that America justified most of its wars by proclaiming it was saving Brown women from Brown men. And so I nodded shamelessly.

He smiled and stamped my passport. “Enjoy Pennsylvania.”

*

The conference hotel was full of academics wearing canvas tote bags and expressions of permanent concern. The lobby notice board announced panels on borders, gender, displacement, decolonisation, postcoloniality and the politics of global literature. I felt immediately at home.

At registration, a young woman with purple hair greeted me. “Hi! How are you?”

“I’m fine, thank you. How are you?”

“Awesome!”

She said it with such enthusiasm that I wondered what great things had happened to her that morning. I soon found out that everyone here spoke with caffeinated levels of positivity.

She picked out my badge.

“Pronouns?”

“Sorry?”

“For the badge.”

“Oh. She. Her.”

She added the sticker beneath my name.

DR SANA RAZA

KARACHI UNIVERSITY

SHE/HER

Underneath, in smaller letters:

PANEL: WHO GETS TO TELL THE STORY?

She held it out to me, and I stared.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes.”

I put it around my neck. For the first time in years, nobody had introduced me as someone’s wife or someone’s mother. Just my name. My title. Me. I sent a photograph to the family WhatsApp group.

Zara replied first: SLAY

Ali: AIRPODS

My husband: Had breakfast?

I reread it, softening a little.

Then my mother texted: Hair too short. You look like a man.

My hand flew automatically to my head, and I tried to smooth out the unruly little tufts sticking up.

“I love your look,” Purple Hair said, as she handed me the conference pack.

“Really?” I asked, but she had already turned away.

I smiled. America, I decided, liked me. Over the next twenty-four hours, America continued to like me.

“Where are you visiting from?”

“Pakistan? Oh my God, amazing!”

“It’s so great to meet you!”

“Have a good one!”

Strangers smiled at me in the corridors and asked how my day was going. A woman in the lift told me she loved my glasses and got out before I could ask her name. Someone wished me a great day but walked away when I tried to ask him about his. By lunchtime I had begun to suspect that none of it meant anything.

In the afternoon I presented my paper. I spoke for twenty minutes about the way immigrant writers, especially women writers, were expected to perform identity for Western audiences. How certain bodies arrived already carrying stories other people had written for them. How a Brown woman could write about desire, money, boredom, ambition, jealousy, bad marriages, good marriages, mothers, daughters, anything at all, and still be asked: But what does this tell us about Pakistan? People nodded. Some took notes. During questions, a professor from Boston told me my argument was “urgent.” Another called it “important.” A graduate student asked whether the paper was part of a book. I walked out of the room feeling six inches taller. This, I thought. This was why I had come.

By six o’clock, I was starving. The lobby was filling up with academics who appeared to have been released simultaneously from their rooms. They stood in little circles, nursing overpriced drinks with the specific anxiety of people who had just been publicly agreed with. I glanced at the food menu and recoiled at the prices. One sandwich, alone, would make a noticeable dent in the family shopping budget, yet my stomach was already growling loudly enough to join the conversation.

I wove through groups of men and women clutching folders and nodding gravely at one another. Everyone looked terribly serious, as though every passing remark might alter the course of human thought. I caught fragments as I passed: urgent, important, interrogate, decolonise. A man I recognised from the afternoon panel had trapped a woman beside a pillar and was enthusiastically mansplaining her thesis back to her.

I spotted Purple Hair behind the registration desk. “Please, can you tell me, is there anywhere around here I can get something to eat?”

“There’s a diner a few blocks down. Doreen’s,” she said with the same alarming enthusiasm. “Best fried chicken in Bellweather!”

“Thank you.”

“Of course! Have an awesome night!”

I was beginning to feel slightly nauseous from all the positivity. I came from a country where grumbling was practically a national pastime. So I stepped out into the cold and pulled on my husband’s enormous overcoat. We had decided it would be a waste to buy one just for me.

I walked back into town, past the church steeple and the shuttered petrol station, towards the diner with the buzzing neon sign I’d noticed from the shuttle window that afternoon. Outside the diner, I caught my reflection in the glass. Short hair hidden beneath the cap. Thick glasses. Enormous coat. Hands buried in the sleeves. I looked nothing like the woman in my wedding photographs.

But it wasn’t the hair or the hideous coat, which made me look vaguely homeless, that caught my attention. It was my expression. Something around the eyes cancelled out everything else. I looked like someone who was free; someone answerable, for at least one week, to nobody. The thought made me smile. Then the door swung open and took my reflection with it.

Inside, it smelled of fried chicken and ketchup. A handful of booths, a long counter and a pie case lit up like a small shrine. I sat at the counter because I liked the idea of not needing a table built for two.

The woman behind it was tall and heavy, with silver threaded through her braids. She stood with her hands on her hips, a no-nonsense look on her face. She was the first Black woman I had seen all day who was not being discussed on a panel. Her badge said DOREEN.

“What're we doing?” she said, wiping her hands on her apron.

“I wish I knew.”

She stopped wiping. “Dinner or life?”

“Either would be useful.”

She let out such a loud laugh that I immediately looked around to check if people were staring at us. She leaned her elbows on the counter and planted herself there as if the building had been constructed around her.

“Life, you're on your own,” she said. “Dinner, get the fried chicken.” Her voice was deep and unhurried; the words rolled out slowly, as if she expected the world to wait until she was finished.

I nodded. She turned to shout my order through the little opening behind her, and that was when she noticed the conference badge I had forgotten to take off.

“Bellweather College?” she said.

“Yes.” The word came out too quickly. Then, because it felt strange to say it plainly and not have it doubted, I added, “I’m speaking at a conference there.”

Doreen gave me a look that said this was not remotely astonishing. I suddenly wanted to tell her more. “I’m also writing a novel.” It came out sounding almost like a question.

“Is that right?” She leaned towards me, interested. “What’s it about?”

“A woman who spends twenty years being everyone’s answer to everything.” For once, I didn’t reach for the sanded-down version.

Doreen laughed. Again, that deep, throaty, real laugh from somewhere deep in her chest. “That’s most women I know.”

I laughed too.

When Doreen turned away, I took out my notebook. I had carried it across the world and never opened it. I looked at the blank page; then a sentence came; and another.

I didn’t stop to cross anything out. I didn’t wonder if it was good. I wasn’t thinking about who would read it or whether it would become anything. I was simply writing.

By the time Doreen placed my order in front of me, I was half a page in. “What are you writing?” she asked, nodding at the notebook.

“I don’t know yet.” For the first time in months, not knowing felt like a possibility.

She gave me a long look. “I hope that woman starts asking her own damn questions.” She winked, turned to the counter behind her and picked up a coupon. She scribbled something across it in biro and slid it beside my plate. “Don’t let it get cold.” Then she moved on to serve the next customer.

I looked down. 20% OFF. And below it, in her tidy little scrawl: WRITER’S DISCOUNT.

Writer? Me?

I leaned back against the stool’s short back, gripped the pen and took a deep breath. I had written a book. I had held the finished book in my hands. I had seen my name printed on its cover. I had travelled halfway across the world to speak about it. Yet it always sounded as if it was someone else who had done all that.

The sound of Ammi or Beti or Begum somehow always erased the words professor or writer beside my name. Sometimes even my own name didn’t feel like my own. Doctor. Professor. Neither had ever quite attached itself to me. Writer, the word I actually wanted, had never been offered. But here I was, sitting in a small, dim diner halfway across the world, holding a little coupon that said I was a writer.

I ran my finger over the word. Writer. For one embarrassingly Gilbertish moment, I felt myself expanding into it. Then my phone lit up.

BLACK NOT NAVY

For a second I had no idea what that meant. Then I remembered the list folded into the side pocket of my suitcase.

I looked at the message, then at my notebook. A woman who spends twenty years being everyone’s answer to everything. The phone buzzed again.

This time my husband was asking: Where are my socks??

My thumb moved towards the screen. I thought of my husband waiting for my reply. And then, with a small shock, I realised he could. He could wait.

My family could want something from me and not have it immediately. He could be mildly annoyed. He could even, God forbid, look for the socks himself.

A slow smile spread across my face. When I looked up, Doreen was watching me from the far end of the counter. She winked as I placed the phone face down on the counter.

Immediately, guilt rose, but I made myself look at the coupon again. Then I looked at the sentence in my notebook. A woman who spends twenty years being everyone’s answer to everything. I drew a line through it. Underneath, I wrote: Once upon a time there was a woman who questioned everything. Some people called her a feminist; others, a killjoy.

The phone buzzed again. This time I sent a voice note: “Not now. I’m writing!”

Two blue ticks appeared almost immediately. I waited for the inevitable response but, to my surprise, the family chat fell silent. And then... a thumbs-up.

I stared at it. All these years, I had thought they wouldn’t let me go. It had never occurred to me that I might be the one holding on.

I put the phone on the counter, thinking that I had finally learned to say no without lying about my own needs. And no one had died.

Beside it lay Doreen’s coupon. WRITER’S DISCOUNT. I smiled, picked up my pen and wrote: Eat, Pray, Write.

Sabyn Javeri is a writer, visual artist and academic whose work explores gender, migration, memory and the lived experiences of women across cultures. She teaches at NYU Abu Dhabi and the University of Oxford.