Published: 11:48 PM, 18 September 2026
The Zenana We Carry
Shamma Zoharin
A ‘zenana’ is the secluded inner section of a house, usually belonging to Muslim families in the Indian subcontinent, reserved for the women of the household. I first came across this word in Sultana’s Dream.
The transformation of the zenana is diabolical. It has been a hundred and twenty-one years since Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream danced on the nerves of insecure men and their receding hairlines, and while I cannot seem to find a house with a zenana in Bangladesh anymore, it seems there is no true escape from it.
My zenana is a pretend cage inside my mind that I made up at the age of nine, built with the sweet bricks of love from Maa and Baba’s words: Be safe. Hurry back home. Don’t talk to boys.
My zenana materialises every time I walk back home in the dead of night, every time I clutch the homemade pepper spray in my bag, every time I shrink into myself on the bus. I think a lot. I think about what the bus conductor might be thinking about the way I am dressed, whether my orna covers enough of the fading wings painted on the Nirvana shirt stretched across my chest, and what my mother might say if she knew that I stayed back on campus until 6 pm to chat with a friend about life and the silly things that made our day. I think that if Begum Rokeya were alive today, she would be ecstatic to see me attend university without a preacher blocking my way, and angry that I must think so deeply about the safest route home every single day.
Why so much thinking? Why isn’t the physical erosion of the zenana enough to dismantle the seemingly intangible fortress I have grown inside my mind?
The zenana hasn’t disappeared. It has moved inside you and me, its halls lined with unbridled shame, whispering phrases like ‘she should have been more careful’ beneath the gaze of a harrowing headline. Even if I do end up dead, somewhere mangled on the street, the only thing this zenana can blame is the Nirvana shirt on my back—too pretty for a man to pass up on an unremarkably warm summer day next to the bay.
But I am not yet dead. I have money in my bank account from the job I give six hours of my day to. I study with women like me, and I tug at the corners of my Nirvana T-shirt so this man’s eyes stop their attempts to decipher the meaning behind the wings across my chest.
Ladyland’s utopia is a distant, almost childish dream that I desperately wish I could graze with my fingertips. And yet, there isn’t a car attached to these wings that I could drive up into the clouds to escape this suffocating zenana.
