This May, I went back to the park in Mohali where I grew up. Five years abroad, and I had imagined that run a hundred times — same loop, same neem trees, sunset light. The kind of homecoming you rehearse.
The park had other plans. Half the lights were off a full thirty minutes past sunset. The far corner of the loop, the one by the back gate, had a group of boys smoking and watching. Nothing happened. Nothing needed to happen — every woman reading this knows the calculation that starts anyway. Shorten the loop? Turn back at the halfway bench? Was the parking lot lit when I came in?
I have spent fifteen years building AI systems. I have lived in cities on three continents. And there I was, doing the same silent arithmetic my mother did, that my sister does, that we hand down like a family recipe nobody asked for.
Here is what was different that evening: I had Sakhi clipped to my shorts. Not because I expected trouble — because not expecting trouble is precisely when you want the system already running. My protectors could see my loop. The app knew this park, knew the hour, knew the lighting. One press away, if the arithmetic ever changed.
So I did not cut the run short. I finished the loop — both laps — and the ordinariness of that is the whole story. Not bravery. Not defiance. Just a woman finishing her run in her childhood park, the way it should never have required a company to make possible.
Every woman should be able to just go for a run. That is the product. Everything else is engineering.