"What's a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?"

*Disclaimer * : The following tirade has been initiated purely in the interests of venting and is not intended to pass judgment, ridicule and demean any social or income group, even though in practice it does all three. The writer maintains that she is not bitchy, proud or prejudiced but has been forced by the circumstances narrated to act all three for the time being.

What indeed!

I do not know what it is about men in this country that reheeeeeealllly makes it a constant-every waking minute of every bloody day - God awful - swallow arsenic to avoid eye contact - struggle to merely ‘be’ a girl. And yes! I fully recognize that this is a very old rant, met by a consistently nonplussed audience silently murmuring ‘So what, men are ass holes, deal with it woman’ clause. Believe me boys, we deal with it, but that is beside the point for now. For now, the focus of my frustration shall be recollection and narration, which goes something like this:

A new job means new adjustments and new people, both of which I get…within reason. The organization I now work for happens to be a large one and is ill-located, if one is to evoke the defense that a young, twenty something girl driving and parking at the opposite end of Davis Road, walking across the road met by a daily deluge of cat calls is justifiable: it isn’t…but that in no way means it isn’t annoying. My new job allows me to be creative, as part of my work portfolio, in short, all I am required to do is come up with ideas for talk shows, dramas, sitcoms and special events. I discover I am good at this job, quite good. It has been two weeks working here, I still don’t have my employee cards but my boss at Karachi has already offered me a promotion after my three-month trial period. I also realize that this amounts to bragging, and I shall fold on that account. I have never been particularly motivated…at anything, but apparently I still manage to appear so to my employers ‘tis a blessing indeed’, but this time it is different I am finally proud in some measure of something I feel I am capable of doing. This could very well be a direct result of my afore-mentioned bullshit prowess, I seldom talk to people at the workplace, but when I talk about work…I can do it well and at great length.

This is inevitably the point where I should mention that my colleagues are both men and during our orientation I was foolish enough to have deemed it necessary to prove myself rather too quickly. This seems to have rubbed off the wrong way. Today, I walked in to work an hour late, having called the HR manager informing him about the need to wait at NADRA offices to re-issue my original ID card, which I was told I required for my documents to be processed. I was given permission and as I met my colleagues I was told that - considering I was late - I ought to drive them to Bari Studios, Multan Road somewhere ahead of Samanabad.

I tried to inform them -as politely as I could- that driving around the outskirts of Lahore was not really part of my job description and that ‘technically’ my team was meant to observe a recording session the day before when both of them neglected to show up for work. I was informed that since I was the only one who had a car and I “shouldn’t set a bad example by being prissy and neglecting to do my job just because I was a girl”, in short that I should compromise. At this point I tried to evoke the “I don’t get paid till June, my car runs on petrol and I want to avoid driving in Samanabad” defense. This was met with a “Bibi, Rs 200 ki to baat he, aap fikar na Karen mein de doon ga aap ko, Gaari chalaane ki baat rahi to woh mein chalaa leta hoon”.

I cannot accurately decipher how much I regret the fact that I lack the ability to slap people down on impulse. I told the man that I wasn’t taking his money and I really think we should call HR to confirm a vehicle for the trip, at this point he threatened to report my ‘princess’ act to the our Lahore in-charge.

This is the point where I got stupid.

I think it was the ‘princess’ thing that got to me and I mean really got to me. I have met women who manage to make the princess label work to their advantage in the workplace and make it a point of principle to complain about tea, air-conditioning, their seat placement and everything that could possibly come in between. I try very hard not to be one of those, I bring my lunch so I don’t have to ask the staff to run around and get me anything, I even pick up my daily bottle of mandatory IV in Coke on my way to work and the only time I bother someone is when my computer decides to remind me it has a personality, which I find myself incapable of corresponding with. I am definitely not one of those women. I do not know if this sounds vain and I no longer particularly care if it does (even though my hint of an exclusion clause negates the latter) but I find it a constant itch being stared down by truck drivers and rickshaw people. Also this attitude appears to have no class or income distinction, I have been solicited by many-a-manner of person in my office for lunch or with simple random requests like “Would you like to sit in row#3, the AC is cooler there?” Fortunately I have limited experience with pick-up lines, but I find that the supposed sensation of being flattered that I have heard is supposed to follow is distinctly absent. I also find it hard enough to ‘politely decline’ considering that all I end up doing is mentioning “Aren’t all the AC’s the same size, and they are all working why would row#3 be any cooler than mine?”…until which point the expression on the solicitors face registers and I ‘get it’. I can’t for the life of me understand why women crave this sort of attention.

Anyway, coming back to my rant, I decided to drive my colleagues on a road to hell, in terms of both derivative and destination. The journey involved my colleague singing cheap Indian love songs (which I would normally be singing along to under entirely different circumstances) and making comments about how ‘touchy’ women have become. At the point where he mentioned that he may need to take driving lessons to hike up his standards to meet ‘Maria bibi’s’ I seriously considered stopping the car and asking him to step out. But it occurred to me I had no idea where I was and even less of an idea of where I was going so I was stuck. Once we got to the studios and everyone had marveled, pointed at and commented over the girl, who was unwilling to laugh along at their putrid humor or sit and share ‘actress jokes’, shooting began and I met two other colleagues who I considered better company. There’s no business like show business, point taken. By five in the evening I insisted we return to work, because I was not driving in the dark with these two men in my car in a place I don’t know (I obviously did not say this, I just acted like a petulant uncompromising little girl insisting we go back) and was met with a series of rolling eyes. Regardless, they consented and as I was driving back the colleague in perpetual question deigned to make a comment which finally managed to evoke a suitable response from my person. He said that English medium girls from a particular ‘class’ who thought themselves ‘pretty’ often found it ‘hard to work hard’.

I have yet to bite back officially but I will probably end trying to avoid the issue again just to avoid it getting dirty. I wish I wasn’t so scared of things getting dirty. However this one incident has brought to light several things, the first being that no matter how hard I try to pretend that social classes don’t exist and indeed, thrive, in this country branding people under social classes doesn’t negate it from being any less than a caste system. And within that caste system there are very few inroads for connection to be found, especially for women. I refuse to apologize for being educated or ‘pretty’ if that is the indentation people need to use to put me down.

I also refuse to allow middle class morals entirely brand my being.

I believe I just used the word ‘middle class’…funny, I thought that was supposed to be me.