There was a boy in my class in our primary school. I remember his sharp eyes and dark complexion. I remember that he had two elder sisters, and that he was known to pick up fights with other children. Once, in the schoolyard, he threw a frisbee that (accidentally) hit my face near the eye, leaving the area swollen for a week. His name was Azeem.

Every morning when my mother dropped me off at the school gate, she would stay there for a little while to chat with the other mothers. They would talk about this and that, laugh, and sometimes whisper. Azeem’s mother was never seen with them. "She stays at home… She wears a headscarf," we were told once.

I never saw her but I would think about her as a woman with a headscarf. It was through Azeem that I came to know about Pakistan for the first time. However, it was in late April 2013 that I got to actually see the country with my own eyes.

Twenty-three at the time, I went to Lahore for two weeks. My first time outside Europe, the city overwhelmed me. Every step I took in those streets bound me to a new, exciting mix of impressions, of things my eyes had never seen before.

What attracted me in particular was the colourful dupattas and clothes women had on. I saw these in streets, in bazaars packed with people; I saw these on women in the backseats of bikes and rickshaws, with their lose ends fluttering in the air. Once I saw a dupatta on a woman on a motorbike; I liked it so much that I tried to memorise it, hoping to find one like that for myself.

I envied women for their clothes. Their dupattas and matching shalwar qameezes seemed so original, one combination more beautiful than the other.

It wasn’t just the colours and the beauty of it that fascinated me; rather, it was the idea of having a wide piece of cloth with me. Something simple and useful. I saw old women in the heat of a crowded bazar wiping off the sweat from their foreheads with the ends of their dupattas. I saw groups of young girls shielding their noses and mouths from the pollution when making their way through the knots of traffic. Children’s hands were cleaned from the dust with it. The heads of babies disappeared under their mothers’ dupattas, protected from the dazzling sun.

In a way, there was a sense of protection -- and privacy -- in the use of the piece of cloth, as if it were a home you could carry with you out on the streets. However, when I had a dupatta on/for myself I had mixed feelings about it. I loved the comfort and freedom of the wide cut shalwar and qameez but, in the smoggy heat of Lahori summer, the dupatta seemed to be preventing my poor head from breathing. I felt my skull itching with sweat, the hair in my neck becoming wet under it. Often I was dying to get rid of it. But walking in the streets without it, my sense of unease was even stronger.

In general I felt awkward enough for the visible inappropriateness of the way I carried myself around. I was not used to guarding my eyes, my arms and legs and blonde hair; my body was used to having more space to it. Without a dupatta, I felt exposed to the gaze around.

Gradually I came to adapt, or even own, dupatta as something of myself, my own portable home in a foreign world. It gave me the comfort of being in a wide web of other colourful spots appearing and disappearing in Lahore.

Soon I was back in Germany. After I unpacked my bag, I unfolded my shalwar qameez and dupatta and hung them in my closet. Back to my routine, dark blue pullovers and black tights replaced the colourful pieces.

This is just a fragment of my first visit to Pakistan. There is still a lot to tell, from that visit, and the visit afterwards in July 2016, when I saw more of the people, the place(s) and the country. Going to and coming back from other places is like exiting and (re)entering ourselves, being aware of the cages, visible and invisible.