It was a book called Flaneuse by Lauren Elkin that led me to associate walking with leisure and adventure. I had heard the word “flaneur” before, which meant male wanderer, loiterer, loafer or aloof observer of urban society. But to think of a woman walking, wandering, loitering, while transgressing the safety of her domestic life, was, to me, a different matter – a revolutionary act in itself.

Is a flaneuse a good woman or a bad one? The more I pondered this question, the more questions it threw up. Elkin, in her book, has written mainly about European women on the streets, who live vastly different lives from the women of the country to which I belong. Notwithstanding this difference, I still wondered whether a woman could walk freely on the streets of India.

The title of another book on women loitering starts with the question “Why loiter?”, which is also the title of the book. The authors, Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade, try to answer this question in the book, searching for the answers primarily on the streets of Mumbai, one of India’s largest cosmopolitan cities. What stands out, however, is the question of why women are not walking enough....

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