3 Days. 2 Hours. 1 Bad Idea.
By Prerna Chandra ·
Three days into a new job, I sat my parents down and told them, with complete sincerity, that I was ready to get married and take on all the household work. Both. Voluntarily. In the same sentence.
If you know me, you know that marriage is a word that makes me cringe and household work happens in my life under one very specific condition: someone has to be pointing a gun at me. So when I offered both, without anyone asking, my parents did not celebrate my newfound maturity. They looked at each other in full panic.They were not overreacting.
Rewind with me two days, back to where this whole thing began.
· · ·
Day One
It is a Tuesday morning in May and I am standing in front of my mirror at 6:30 AM in a grey skirt, a white shirt, and the black heels I had been saving for a first impression. I had planned this outfit the night before. I had also, the night before, Googled the commute from Delhi to Gurgaon and seen the number forty minutes, which I accepted without question because I was twenty-two and optimistic and had never actually done this commute in my life.
I get into the cab feeling prepared. Dressed well, a rough idea of how I will introduce myself to the team, a mental note to seem confident but approachable. Forty minutes pass and I am still in the car. I look out the window. We are not close. Fine, I think, traffic happens. Sixty minutes pass. The city is crawling. My coffee is long finished. Eighty minutes in, my bladder, which apparently has a strong personal opinion about every glass of water I drank that morning, begins to make itself known in a way that I cannot ignore and cannot address because I am trapped in a moving vehicle on the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway with nowhere to go and nothing to do but sit very, very still and regret my hydration choices.
I arrived late, flustered, and exhausted from travel. Induction starts. People are speaking. I am nodding a lot but internally I am somewhere between jet-lagged and hollowed out. I retain almost nothing from those first few hours, which I feel only mildly guilty about because I genuinely could not have done better in that condition.
Then it is time to go home, and I walk to the cab pickup point and feel my stomach drop. It is chaos. Dozens of people I have never seen in my life, queues spilling in every direction, everyone talking over each other, nobody looking remotely troubled by any of this. These are people who have made peace with this commute. I have not yet been given the chance to make peace with it, and frankly, looking at this scene, I am not sure peace is available. At that point, I would have sold my kidney to be teleported home.
I get home at 9 PM. I do not eat. I go straight to bed with my shoes still near the door and my carefully planned outfit in a heap, and I sleep the sleep of someone whose body has simply spent everything it had.
Day Two
I wake up with renewed enthusiasm, that today will feel different, that this is simply what new beginnings look like before they become normal. I believe this with enough conviction to get dressed again.
The man sitting next to me is in his mid-forties, and within three minutes of leaving the pickup point his rants start. Detailed and passionate theory about everything wrong with Delhi’s roads, its urban planning, its government, its past, its present, and the future it should have had. He has clearly been waiting for an audience. I am, today, that audience. For two full hours, across the entire stretch from Delhi into Gurgaon, he talks without pause. I listen without choice. Somewhere near the toll, I think about saying, with complete respect sir, I understand your frustration and I share it, but neither of us is going to solve this today, so perhaps we could sit in silence for the remaining forty minutes. I say nothing. I stare out the window and I smile occasionally and I think about my coffee.
At the office, my manager takes me on a floor-by-floor introduction to what feels like every person in the building. I follow along with a fake smile that I have been holding so long that my jaw aches. I am lost. I am nodding. I am making the right sounds at the right moments. And then we turn a corner on the seventh floor and I see a maroon board with white coffee beans and the word Costa and I feel, for the first time all day, happy. My favourite cappuccino, subsidized. Inside, I am celebrating with a mini dance completely disproportionate to the situation, and I am aware of this, and I do not care, because it is the single genuinely good moment in an otherwise very long day and I am going to let myself indulge into it.
The journey home is the uncle again, picking up exactly where he left off, or possibly from the beginning, I cannot tell. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, my back starts hurting. A real, settled, insistent ache sitting in my lower spine. I am twenty-two years old and my back is behaving like someone who has been carrying something heavy for much longer than that.I get home and I sit my parents down and tell them I want to quit. They look at me, then at each other, and then they say, gently and without drama, that they support me either way. That if this is how I feel, I should trust it.
But I cannot trust it yet. Because I worked for this. Because people kept telling me how lucky I was to have it. So I do what any thoroughly confused person does in the age of mobile phones. I call everyone. Friends, family, cousins, former colleagues. And they all say the same thing in slightly different words: you are being ungrateful, give it time, people would kill to be where you are. By the end of the evening I have successfully talked myself out of the only clear thing I was feeling when I sat down.
“When you ask everyone what you should do, you collect everyone’s answer. The problem is that somewhere in all those answers, you lose the one voice that actually knew. Your Whispering Sage”
Day Three
I go back. The uncle is there with his rant playing the role of background music. I am there. The Gurgaon toll is there. Everything is exactly as it was, except that today, somewhere between the Delhi border and the office building, I stop arguing with myself and I start actually paying attention to what my body has been trying to tell me since Tuesday morning.I pay attention to my back, which is already aching and I have not even arrived yet. I pay attention to the exhaustion that no amount of sleep has touched since Day One. I pay attention to the fact that a subsidised coffee was my highlight yesterday. My body had been sending the same message since the first morning in that cab. I was just too busy collecting other people’s opinions to hear it.
By the time I get home that evening something has settled in me. A quiet, simple clarity that arrives when you finally stop fighting what you already know. I quit. It was the best decision I made that year.
· · ·
Those three days taught me, and what I keep coming back to whenever I find myself chasing something so hard that I forget to pause and check whether I still want it.
We are very good at building the story of a destination. The job title, the relationship, the city, the version of our life we decided we wanted at twenty-one and have been sprinting toward since. We put so much into getting there that arriving feels like it should be the answer. And then we arrive and our back hurts and our highlight is a coffee and we are offering to do household chores unprompted, and none of the logic that got us here can explain why we feel so completely wrong. Why do we have this lingering void that doesn’t seem to go in spite of all we have sacrificed and worked for.
The mind is patient and persuasive. It will line up every reason to stay, the company name, the salary, what your cousin thinks, how the decision looks from the outside. It will call your friends and present you with a consensus and say, see, everyone agrees, this is the rational thing to do.
But the body does not do consensus. It does not care about rationality. It just tells you the truth in the most direct language it has, a backache at twenty-two, an exhaustion that food cannot fix, a knot that forms every single time you think about getting back into that cab. It was never complaining. It was informing.The destination is one moment. You get there, you look around, and then you are already somewhere else, in a new present, with a body that is either at peace or quietly screaming. No achievement changes which one it is. The journey is where your body has been talking to you the entire time, in the commute that drains you before the day starts, in the Sunday evenings that sit heavier than they should, in the shoulders that tense the moment you think about tomorrow.
We just have to want to hear it. To pause and listen.
“I spent months chasing that job.I was so focused on getting there that I never once stopped to ask whether it actually aligned with me.”
My body knew on Day One.It took me three days, two hours of road wisdomI did not ask for, and one very good cappuccino to catch up.
Pause more. The answer is usually already there. You just have to be still enough to hear it.”
If you are somewhere right now that your mind keeps justifying and your body keeps quietly pushing back against, that is not ingratitude and it is not weakness. It might just be the earliest, most honest answer you have not yet allowed yourself to hear. Your body has been trying to tell you something since Day One. The question is only whether you are ready to listen.