What if the most radical thing you can do is leave by nine?

Last Friday a friend asked me why I always left dinners early, and I gave her the easy answer: long day, long drive, you know how it is. The real answer is longer and I didn’t think she had the time, standing there with her coat half on and her Uber already three minutes away.
The real answer is that I like being home before the city changes shifts. There’s a particular hour in Gurgaon, somewhere around nine, when the malls start emptying and the bars start filling, and I have simply never wanted to be the kind of person walking into the second thing instead of out of the first. Not because I’m scared of it. Because it has never once looked like something I wanted.

I used to apologise for this. I’d soften it, oh, I’m just tired, oh, early start tomorrow, as if wanting to be home with my tea and a book by ten needed a better excuse than the truth, which is that I genuinely prefer it. Somewhere along the way I decided comfortable shoes and an early night were things to be slightly embarrassed about in a city that runs on heels and 10 pm reservations. I don’t think that anymore.

What I’ve found, three years into living here properly, is that the version of Gurgaon nobody puts on a moodboard is also the better one. It’s the long, slow conversations with my friends on the drive back from work, the kind you can’t have over loud music. It’s choosing flats not because I can’t walk in heels but because I’d rather actually feel the ground.
I’m not writing this to convince anyone to leave the party early. I’m writing it because I spent a long time thinking my way of living here was the smaller version of a bigger life, and I don’t believe that anymore. Some of us just build our glamour out of quieter things.

So tell me- what’s the thing you stopped apologising for?