Growing up in Lahore, Pakistan, I was, as Sara Suleri says, never without the company of women. Group existence has always been my norm. But like many Pakistani female millennials who have moved abroad for higher education, the excitement over the adventure is soon replaced by the luxury of being on one’s own—an independence nestled in solitude instead of retaliation. When I moved to New York for my PhD, I was most excited about enjoying my own company without shame or fear.
In Pakistan, birds of a feather tend to stick together in public spaces, partly because we are raised to prioritize communal living, but also because it is the most prudent choice when it comes to safety. In New York, I relished going to museums and restaurants alone, enjoying life at my own pace, and cherishing company when I have it rather than seeking it out of necessity. Millions of people in romanticised metropolitan capitals dine alone, with books like Rosenbloom’s Alone Time written to cater to such audiences (and perhaps to recruit more loners). As a devoted follower of this cult, I even chose a career that encourages it: anthropology, the work of an observer in the room, the proverbial ‘fly on the wall’, someone who can enter and exit unnoticed. No wonder we are (sometimes) disliked.
This very career led me to Peshawar where I would need to learn how to ‘do’ everyday life alone. There for my fieldwork on internal displacement and Pashtun women’s modes of resistance and survival, my biggest dilemma after securing safe accommodation was food, (my guesthouse did not have a functioning kitchen, nor do I ever have the desire to cook even if my survival depends on it). Therefore, my second biggest dilemma was figuring out how to dine alone.
While I associated dining alone with excess of taste, be it culinary or sartorial, dining alone in Peshawar felt like an exercise in restraint.
In New York, this had been a pleasure, a small daily ritual of claiming space for myself. In Lahore, it never qualified as an event, as I was never without friends. In Peshawar, the same act felt layered with negotiations: of safety and visibility, of choosing places where my presence would not become an event. What set it apart most sharply from other cities was that I had to be more mindful of how I dressed, which manifested into covering my head. This became a daily reminder that solitude in public has very visible markers. While I associated dining alone with excess of taste, be it culinary or sartorial, dining alone in Peshawar felt like an exercise in restraint.
Meals were no longer just about taste or sustenance; they became moments in which I had to think about where I could sit, how long I could stay and whether I would be allowed the quiet anonymity that dining alone had once promised me. While prominent metropolitan cities of Pakistan such as Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad are assumed to be more open to women dining alone, bolstered by the recent increase in upscale cafes, Peshawar rarely figures in that cultural imagination.
Peshawar: The oldest city in the subcontinent and a haven of migrants and refugees since time immemorial. Now framed as a capital of contention and crisis, its name headlining most newspapers for the wrong reasons, signifying a safe distance and simultaneously a legitimate proximity to the orchestrated heart of darkness of colonialism. In simpler words, a city associated with the ghost of terrorism past, present and even future.
But people live there. Around 2.5 million people wake up in this city, do work, pick up their kids from school, do their laundry, love and resent each other and go to sleep. On a loop. That’s what I kept reminding myself on my way to Peshawar as an ‘anthropologist/ethnographer,’ a role I had much romanticised. In my fourth year of PhD, it was high time I started my fieldwork.
My first solo meal was obviously at the historical culinary institution in the heart of University Town: Jan’s Deli. Existing for the last 50 years or even more, Jan’s now boasts an eponymous conglomerate, including a pharmacy, a grocery store, a bakery and a café, all on the same block. I was almost giddy about going to Peshawar’s first deli, eager for the novelty of a good cappuccino made with Illy beans. In my initial enthusiasm, I once ordered coffee from a random spot on Food Panda and was startled when it arrived sloshing in a sealed plastic bag, like takeaway that had lost its dignity in transit.
Jan’s menu is a force in itself, sprawling and ambitious, a meeting point between the nostalgia of Lahore’s Café Zouk and Rina’s Kitchenette’s vibrancy. It became my working spot for many days, a place where I could eat alone, type away at my laptop, and feel temporarily at home. The problem was that Jan’s is also a family magnet. By afternoon, the space would be filled with large lunch groups, often doctors and trainees from the teaching hospitals nearby. At night, dinner parties claimed whole sections of the café.
While sitting there my mind used to take me back to Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, especially the chapter where while dining alone she inadvertently eavesdrops on fellow diners’ conversations. The true work of an anthropologist, if you ask me! I found myself doing the same, just because sound moves differently when you are alone. Fragments of conversations would drift toward me and without meaning to, I began assembling an informal map of everyday life in Peshawar. In those moments I became a kind of ‘table ethnographer’, like an armchair philosopher, in purpose and function.
As a solo diner, though, holding on to a table at Jan’s for more than 1.5 hours felt like quietly testing the limits of hospitality. Once, when space was short, another young woman asked if she could share my table. She was friendly and easy to talk to, and I found myself enjoying the conversation. Still, it reminded me that I could not blend into the background here, that solitude in Peshawar was rarely free from recognition.
When Jan’s became too crowded for me, I began moving further into the city towards Cantt, where another version of Peshawar and its cafés awaited me.
In Peshawar’s Cantonment area, dining alone takes on a particular texture, one framed by safety, class and the rare possibility of solitude for women, mirroring the burgeoning café-scapes of Pakistan’s metropolitan cities. The Cantt is home to a handful of spaces that echo an international, urban café culture with franchises like Tim Hortons, Islamabad transplants like Burning Brownie and a boba place. These are sleek, air-conditioned outposts with polished interiors and steep menus, cool’ in their cosmopolitan appeal, but undeniably expensive. Yet, it is here—among the clinking of porcelain cups and the low hum of conversation—that I see the highest concentration of women in public: reading alone over a cappuccino, bent over laptops or SAT/GMAT books in quiet industry, or gathered in animated groups. They are an exception to the city’s broader rhythm, and for me, these cafés have become something close to a refuge—one of the few places where I can eat or work alone without the prickling awareness of being too visible. Even the expectation of constant head-covering is relaxed here, adding to the sense of relief these spaces offer. In Peshawar, solitude for women does not come cheap; it is mediated by price points, English-language menus, and the invisible security these spaces buy.
But such spaces also bring their own particularities. At Burning Brownie, after a few visits, a waiter began bringing me free coffee, especially once he learned I was not from Peshawar. It was a gesture steeped in melmastia, the Pashtunwali code of hospitality, warm and generous in its intention. Yet its regularity left me uneasy. I began to feel an unspoken obligation to order more, to somehow balance the ledger of kindness. And more than that, I realised I could not be invisible here. In New York, I could slip into a café and be just another person with a book or a laptop, anonymous and unremarkable. In Peshawar, even in these cosmopolitan enclaves, I am noticed, remembered, placed in the mental geography of the staff and patrons alike.
The very spaces that made solitude possible also reminded me that in this city, solitude was never entirely anonymous. And anonymity, I soon realised, was not the only thing I had to forfeit. Café solitude also came with a hefty price tag. After weeks of Jan’s cappuccinos and Cantt’s polished coffeehouses, I began to feel the weight of their expense. Reading Asako Yuzuki’s novel Butter at the time sharpened this awareness: a novel that lingers on the entanglement of women’s appetites with patriarchy, it reminded me how eating is never just eating. One scene stayed with me, of a woman slipping out at three in the morning to eat ramen alone, her hunger transformed into a quiet act of resistance. In Peshawar, my own appetite for dining alone was bound less to rebellion than to calculation. I told myself that solo dining could not be confined to air-conditioned cafés, that surely there were other places where I could eat alone without paying for imported beans and cosmopolitan ambience.
Here the economics shifted, but the rules of visibility remained. One of the problems as a female solo diner in Peshawar visiting local restaurants was the walk of shame to the ‘family area’. Proper desi cuisine restaurants with no inclination of posturing as overpriced cafés had the usual jali or netted partition wall, sometimes replaced by a mobile canvas divider, marking an uncrossable border.
These family sections are not unique to Peshawar; they exist across Pakistani restaurants. Yet here, without a support network or anonymity, I felt their weight more directly. Men could come in groups or alone to dine in the regular space, but women, whether alone or in groups, were sequestered to the area reserved for families of a traditional composition. Which meant the real demarcation was not about family structure, but about gender. Beyond the obvious problem of gendered space surveillance, my biggest gripe was having to sit alone in an area where everyone else belonged to a unit. In such a space it was hard to romanticise my solitude or focus on the meatiness of the pulao, which, in fairness, was worth a sonnet or two.
The real demarcation was not about family structure, but about gender. Beyond the obvious problem of gendered space surveillance, my biggest gripe was having to sit alone in an area where everyone else belonged to a unit. In such a space it was hard to romanticise my solitude or focus on the meatiness of the pulao, which, in fairness, was worth a sonnet or two.
Trying to find a place that was both affordable and comfortable made me see how dining in Peshawar is never just about the food. It is a social map, drawn by class lines and gendered boundaries, where every meal requires a negotiation of comfort, cost, and the right to occupy space.
In recent years, I have found myself increasingly drawn to ‘women centric’ novels and books—a shift that seems almost inevitable when you are a woman entering your thirties much to the chagrin of family and society. Writers like Deborah Levy and Asako Yuzuki have offered luminous meditations on solitude and selfhood, yet their vantage points are rooted in contexts where being alone in public is unremarkable, even aspirational. In the Global South, solitude takes on a different texture.
If dining alone in Lahore or Karachi offers conditional acceptance, in Peshawar it demanded a more deliberate negotiation—one that sharpened my sense of how class, gender and geography converge at the table. Peshawar is more than a backdrop for hyper-masculinised food vlogs branding it ‘dangerous’ over shots of bloody meat sizzling beside traffic. It is a city where solitude resists simplification, not marked by danger or defiance, but by the quiet, daily negotiations through which women carve space for themselves.
All photographs courtesy of the author.
Zainab Najeeb is an anthropologist-in-training.
