Between one decade, a marriage, two continental shifts, and three cats, we have lived together and grown together; in other cities but not this one. We have wound up here - in Lahore - a city that often feels hostile, where there is nothing that is ours and nothing of our friendship to show for it. Instead, we find shelter with each other and within each other in very private spaces; Y's room or M's house. While working on this series, we aimed to take ownership of our friendship via the city, and in doing so, to somehow also take ownership of the city via our friendship.

Our process began by unraveling our relationship as strands of memory, of experience, of moment, of love, and of home. When we plotted these markers onto the map of Lahore, “a parrot lives here!” became the marker for the palace of old queens inside the Lahore Fort, “the geese all hate me,” became the marker for Model Town Park that spans acres in an elite neighborhood from the pre-Partition era. In reminiscing and reveling in our year spent in Lahore, we mapped out the places where we had been together, where we had laughed together, spaces that left a lasting mark. There were not very many.

Like cartographers, we set about finding patterns in the chaotic smattering of markers. We found that our joint excursions into the city often led us to spaces clustered around our home bases, or parallel to them. Our Google location data, on the other hand, showed us traversing a greater expanse of the city individually. We overlapped our individual maps on top of the map inscribed with our friendship, coming up with new points of incidence where we may have trudged alone, but never together.

The simple act of following each other into public spaces reserved for running errands became an exercise in the slow claiming of these spaces, and subsequently the city. Shadowing each other while carrying out mundane tasks we needed to run across the city became an act of comfort, in defiance of our discomfort in those very spaces before. Our home in one another let us explore these areas on our own terms, developing new pockets of intimacy within old spaces, the documentation of which eventually culminated in our photo series.

Once, when arriving at our destination, we would merely fulfill our original purpose: buying marble for M’s new interior project, or getting Y’s passport photo taken for an application. But eventually, we began to foray the surrounding neighborhoods, intuitively exploring and documenting. These interactive negotiations with the city became part of a bigger archival process of engagement with Lahore.

By shifting our legitimized access to the city - running errands - to a more private and emotive excursion into the urban landscape, our map-making exercises led us to a unique language with which to explore the city. In RA Bazaar, we found a park we cannot wait to take A to; at Ichra, we stood on a pedestrian bridge atop one of the busiest roads in the city to watch a pink sunset.

This ongoing piece has allowed us to weave our friendship into the fabric of an often unkind city, and we are excited to continue to discover even more of it. By canvasing the map, we have captured new spaces, explored the city, and explored our dosti – reinvigorated, with Lahore as our new backdrop.

This photo essay has previously appeared in the anthology Yaari: An Anthology on Friendship by Women and Queer Folx (Yoda Press).