A Letter To Society:“Leisure is not a liability, it is freedom.”

Dear Society,

You often reveal yourself in the smallest of moments. The other day, at a family gathering, your presence arrived not as a lecture but as a single word — liability. It slipped casually into the room, wrapped in a conversation about kitty parties, but it carried the weight of centuries. In that instant, I felt the sting of how easily you reduce women’s choices, joys, and spaces of freedom into burdens. Such a loaded word. It struck me not just as a judgment of those gatherings but also as a judgment of lives like mine — single, choosing a different rhythm, not always easy, but mine. If joy, leisure, or autonomy is branded as liability, then something is deeply broken in the way we understand a woman’s life. 

It was late afternoon on Rakshabandhan. The rain had been falling since morning, and outside the house the monsoon was still playing. Inside, our living room filled with family — mostly women, two of our brothers-in-law, and children running around in their own little worlds. The air was soft with stories: old memories, recent happenings, laughter. Then, as it often happens in family circles, the talk turned to something ordinary — kitty parties.

Most women in the room stayed quiet, offering polite nods to keep the peace. I listened for a while. It’s always better to read the room before stepping into fire. The mood was clear: strong disapproval of kitties.

Growing up, I had often heard about kitty parties. I never had much of an opinion. But that afternoon, something stirred inside me. No, I’ve never attended one, and I don’t know the full details of what happens there — but I do know what they mean. For many women, these gatherings are a chance to step out of their roles, their endless duties, and simply be. A space for laughter, for friendship, for a little financial security through rotational savings. I found that idea not frivolous but rather beautiful.

The conversation, however, quickly hardened. My cousin, an elder I’ve grown up around, dismissed it outright:“Kitty parties are for women who have nothing to do in life. We have too many liabilities.”

The word hit me like a stone: liabilities.

In that moment, I felt a deep sadness for her. Words, after all, are mirrors of the inner being. It wasn’t that she had a problem with kitty parties or the women who attended them — but perhaps that somewhere inside, she longed for such a space herself. A space to be held, to laugh, to exist without the constant weight of obligation. To call one’s own life a liability is not just a phrase — it is a wound. And I knew then this wasn’t a discussion anymore. The shift in her body, her breath, her rising temperature told me: this was a debate, edged with aggression. I let it go.

Yet her words stayed with me. They made me wonder: how many women live their lives as if they are debts to be managed? How many measure themselves by sacrifice, until joy becomes suspicious, even shameful?

That one word — “liability” — landed heavier than anything else said that afternoon. It was not just a casual remark. It was a mirror into how deeply women have been taught to measure themselves: not by freedom, not by joy, not by autonomy, but by sacrifice and duty.

All my life, I have seen women swallow their laughter, bury their aches, and wear silence like an ornament — all in the name of family, respectability, and duty. As if being the messiah of the household would one day secure them a seat in heaven, while in reality, it condemned them to a living hell of suppressed emotions. Worse, this suppression didn’t stay locked within. It spilled out as harshness toward other women — those who dared to claim even a fraction of autonomy over their time, money, or happiness. This is how patriarchy survives: not only through men, but through women turning into gatekeepers of each other’s freedom.

So I ask — why does the joy of another woman bother us so much? Why does a small act, like going out with friends or choosing laughter over sacrifice, trigger such disapproval? What is it that we are really resenting — her joy, or our own unlived lives?

And here lies the deeper irony. What my cousin dismissed as “kitty parties for women with nothing else to do” were never frivolous indulgences. In fact, kitty parties in India were born out of necessity. In the years after independence, when women had little financial independence and no access to formal credit, they created their own rotating savings clubs. These gatherings were survival strategies — spaces where women pooled money, supported each other, built trust, and yes, also found joy. They were emotional lifelines wrapped in laughter and companionship. To reduce them to liabilities is to erase the quiet, radical work of women who carved out freedom where none was offered.

You reduced them to chatter. To idle gossip. To women wasting time. But did you ever pause to look deeper? Kitty parties were not born out of boredom. They were born out of necessity.

After Partition, when families were uprooted and wealth was lost, women had to find ways to hold their households together. They created these gatherings not just to laugh, but to pool resources. Each woman contributed, each month — a rotating fund, a small safety net in a time when banks were inaccessible, jobs were scarce, and women’s financial agency was close to nothing. These circles became women-run banks before banks were even open to them.

But money was only half the story. The other half was solidarity. A room where women could take off the mask of endless duty. A space where someone’s laughter, someone’s sorrow, someone’s courage could ripple into another’s. For many, these were the only hours in a month where they could breathe as themselves — not just as someone’s wife, someone’s mother, someone’s daughter-in-law.

And yet, look at where we stand today. In that Rakshabandhan living room, I heard my cousin call such spaces “a liability.” Do you see the irony, Society? What was once survival, strength, and sisterhood has now been twisted — not by men alone, but by women themselves — into something shameful. What she condemned as “a liability” was in truth one of the few lifelines women ever gave to each other.

Society, I remember that Rakshabandhan afternoon when the word kitty party stirred the air in my parents’ living room. My cousin’s voice carried such sharpness, such disdain — “it’s for women who have nothing to do, we have too many liabilities in our lives.” Her words were not just words. I could see it in her breath, in her tightening body, in the heat rising beneath her skin. It was not the women of the kitty she was fighting; it was the mirror they held up to her.

That moment made me realize: envy grows where joy has been denied. Women who have carried sacrifice like armor often cannot bear to see another woman lay hers down. And so, joy is mocked, leisure is condemned, freedom is ridiculed — not because these things are wrong, but because they feel out of reach.

Patriarchy is cunning, society. It has made women its own gatekeepers. It teaches us to laugh at each other’s laughter, to shame each other’s choices, to guard the walls of duty more fiercely than men ever ask us to. What we think of as “opinion” is often only the echo of a system speaking through us.

But I ask you, society: if women stopped mocking each other’s small joys, if instead we held space for them — to laugh, to dress up, to meet, to simply be — would we not begin to loosen those chains, one link at a time?

Society, how quickly you forget that freedom is not a liability, but the very lifeline of a meaningful existence. You have trained women to see their worth only in sacrifice, in exhaustion, in giving until there is nothing left. And so when a woman dares to step outside that script — to laugh loudly, to gather with friends, to carve out hours that are hers alone — you label it wasteful, shallow, indulgent.

But look closely: those very kitty parties you dismiss were never only about gossip or cards. They were vaults of survival. Women created rotating funds when banks would not see them. They created networks of trust when society only gave them isolation. They created spaces of laughter when the rest of their lives demanded silence. What you call frivolous was in fact an underground economy of resilience.

And yet, you never call men’s leisure a liability. You never trivialize their golf courses, their clubs, their addas, their late-night “meetings” that are as much about bonding as business. You protect their spaces because you have decided their joy is legitimate, while women’s joy is suspect.

Society, I tell you this: leisure is not weakness. It is power reclaimed. It is the proof that women’s lives cannot be caged only in duty. To gather, to play, to share — these are not luxuries. They are the quiet revolutions of survival.

Society loves to belittle women’s spaces — but it does so differently depending on class. Middle-class kitty parties are mocked as frivolous gossip. Elite kitty circles are judged as shallow indulgence. In both cases, the judgment hides a deeper truth: women, whether middle-class or elite, are carving out an escape from the patriarchy that surrounds them.

For the middle class, kitties began as necessity — shared money, shared strength, survival. For the elite, they became a different kind of necessity — not for money, but for breathing space, to step outside the demands of “perfect” families, appearances, and elite patriarchal control.

And yet, both are ridiculed. Why? Perhaps because they show us a freedom we ourselves are missing. Perhaps because, rather than facing our own dissatisfaction, it feels easier to point at another woman and say she is wasting her life.

If I belonged to such a family where financial ease existed, I too would still sit in these circles. Because money is not the only hunger women have — we also hunger for laughter, companionship, and spaces where no one is measuring us by duty.

So, dear society, perhaps it is time to pause and reflect. The word “liability” that was so casually used in that family gathering is not just a word — it is a mirror of how you view women’s lives. You measure them by duty, by sacrifice, by their willingness to disappear for the sake of others. And yet, whenever they carve out even the smallest space for joy, laughter, or companionship, you dismiss it as frivolous.

Kitty parties — whether in the middle-class homes where they began as survival strategies, or in elite circles where women carve out respite from another kind of patriarchy — have always been more than “gossip.” They have been schools of solidarity, micro-banks of survival, sanctuaries of laughter, and reminders that women are not just daughters, wives, or mothers, but beings with desires of their own. To reduce them to “liabilities” is not only unfair — it is cruel.

And in today’s modern, fast-paced world, such spaces are even more vital. Not only do they provide financial support, but they offer the emotional and mental nourishment that women are so often denied. They are a reminder that community, care, and joy are not luxuries — they are necessities.

What if, instead of ridiculing, we could see these spaces as acts of quiet rebellion, as lifelines, as testimony to women’s resilience and creativity? What if, instead of policing each other’s choices, women could hold space for each other’s joys? Perhaps then, society, you would see that freedom is not a liability. It is life itself. Love, Afrah