A field report from 3,200 km on the road — where women’s suffering is not a symptom, but a system.
The highway has a way of stripping life down to its essentials. Over 3,200 kilometres from Delhi to Kerala as part of the Ride for Mental Health project, I expected only casual conversations about stress — perhaps the usual mentions of “tension” or “overthinking” that spill beyond clinics and counselling rooms. What I encountered instead was something far heavier — a quiet, patterned exhaustion woven into women’s everyday routines. They were not simply dealing with personal distress. They were holding up families, absorbing failures of public systems, and carrying emotional responsibilities that society had carefully normalised as their duty.
This is a report from within that architecture — from the places where women’s pain has become both invisible and inevitable.
Violence as Atmosphere
The first jolt came in Beawar, Rajasthan. The landscape itself felt like a message: liquor shops stood at every turn, more common than schools or health centres. When I remarked on this, a local mental health consultant lowered his voice and said, “You don’t see how this fuels gender violence. No one wants to talk about it.”
Suddenly those shops were no longer just storefronts. They were entry points to homes where women lived with a tightening dread — waiting for a knock, for a drunken rage, for a night that could turn violent without warning. In his surveys, one line appeared again and again:
“We don’t share. We suffocate alone. When it becomes too much, suicide feels like the only door left.”
This was not emotional fragility. It was the predictable outcome of a life engineered around fear, silence, and the impossible task of “adjusting.”
The consequences unfolded far beyond the home. In hostels and urban settlements, mothers mourned sons who had slipped into the same addictions, yet they were blamed for “failing” their children. And in several villages, truck driving had become intergenerational work. Many boys dropped out of school to travel with their fathers by age fifteen. For the women, this meant raising families alone for months at a time — managing finances, caregiving, and crises with no recognition and even less support.
Caregiving Without Recognition
The fear on the streets morphed into something else at home — a strict, lifelong discipline taught to girls early: be patient, swallow frustration, serve without complaint. It hardened into unpaid labour the world imposes as “duty.”
In an old-age home in Mumbai, a caregiver told me quietly, “There is so much irritation inside me. But I swallow it. I remind myself — what if these were my parents?” Her hands never stopped moving as she spoke, as if her body had forgotten what rest feels like. “I do this because it is my duty,” she added, more to herself than to me.
Inside homes across states, millions of women live this way — holding routines together with a silence so constant it becomes invisible. One woman put it bluntly, cutting through every comforting myth:
“Sometimes love without rest becomes punishment.”
In one sentence, she named the grinding truth of India’s unthanked, unseen carers.
Read More: How To Be A Healthy Caregiver
The Third Shift: Smiling Through the Shattering
Even when women step outside their homes, the performance continues. In an office, a young woman pulled me aside. “The workplace has become cold,” she said. “People don’t talk. It’s exclusion based on gender, region — everything. We must cope alone.”
Another woman added, “The disrespect doesn’t stay in the office. It travels home with us — into our sleep, our moods, our sense of who we are.”
Working women were not doing two shifts. They were doing three — the job, the housework, and the invisible emotional labour of smoothing conflicts, absorbing insults, holding families together, and pretending all is well.
For women who were widowed or separated, isolation was total. They were visible to everyone yet supported by no one. Even in affluent circles, a counsellor in Kerala told me, “The women don’t break down because they’ve mastered a different method — they numb themselves. You have to shut down a part of yourself to survive.”
The Crucible of Partnership: Marriage and Crushing Expectations
The emotional labour carried through childhood, workplaces, and homes did not dissolve in relationships; it intensified.
Before classes, I often asked teachers in colleges and universities, “What worries students the most?” The answer was nearly identical everywhere: relationships, social media, and the future.
Though not framed as mental harassment, these pressures often showed up physically — in headaches, insomnia, self-doubt, and withdrawal. And many teachers clarified, often reluctantly, that girls bore the greater weight.
A counsellor explained it with unsettling clarity: “Young women are terrified of what happens after college. But even that fear is nothing compared to what marriage demands of them.”
Marriage had become a crucible of expectations — family pressure, community scrutiny, social-media comparisons, and the obsession with the “ideal match.” In this maze, a woman’s own desires sank to the bottom. Her worth became a volatile currency in the market of proposals.
Read More: Zodiac Husband And Wife: How They Act After Marriage
The Political Weight on Muslim Women
For Muslim women, these burdens took on an additional, intimate edge. Their emotional world was shaped not just by family expectations but by a political climate that shadowed the simplest routines.
A mother told me, “We want to practice our religion. But something holds us back. It’s not faith. It’s fear.”
A college student put it even more plainly: “We are constantly balancing our mind with our identity. It’s no longer just spiritual. It has become political.”
Their anxieties centred on their children — not whether they would succeed, but whether they would return home without harassment. Whether their daughters’ attire would be questioned. Whether speaking too openly would be taken as defiance.
Digital spaces made this sharper. Mothers watched children drift into online rabbit holes of hate and misinformation. “When we try to intervene,” one said, “it only breaks our bond.”
Yet moments of relief surfaced too. When women recognised my name, they softened slightly, saying, “The problems are everywhere. But here [south india]… it’s less.” It was not optimism — just an honest mapping of where fear sits more heavily and where it loosens its grip.
“We Are Socialised to Endure, Not to Be Free”
Across states, the places where women gathered — widows’ groups, mothers’ collectives, Muslim women’s circles, caregivers’ meetings, activist networks — revealed something unmistakable. Their suffering was not isolated. It was patterned, systemic, and shared.
In one meeting, an activist looked at me steadily and said, “We are not taught to be free. We are taught to endure.”
She wasn’t angry. She was simply stating a truth this country has normalised — romanticising women’s strength only to demand more of it. Exhaustion becomes “adjustment.” Silence becomes virtue. Resilience becomes expectation.
With little institutional support, women were creating their own safety nets: whispered solidarities, informal networks, small digital spaces where they could speak without being scolded. Initiatives like Break Free Stories, founded by content creator Rafia Afi, had become lifelines for divorced, separated, and widowed women seeking community and dignity.
Yet the digital world came with its own violence. Muslim women and outspoken activists logged in with emotional armour — prepared for slurs, surveillance, and targeted hate. And still, within those spaces, something vital was happening: women were naming what society had forced them to carry quietly.
They were not asking for pity. They were building a language for survival.
The Road Home
By the time I reached Kerala, the pattern across states had crystallised. Womens mental health is not a soft issue; it is the thread running through the country’s emotional, social, and political unraveling.
Everywhere, women were not merely managing hardship — they were absorbing the shocks of failing institutions, unsafe homes, broken public systems, and impossible expectations.
They are not just silently crying, they are silently surviving.
They don’t just care, they are carrying.
They don’t just adjust, they are enduring.
No number of counselling sessions or awareness campaigns can repair a crisis that is structural. Women’s emotional well-being cannot remain a private burden; it must be recognised as public infrastructure. A society that depends on women’s silence to function owes them safety, time, visibility, and dignity — not more instructions on how to be resilient.
Real change begins with the most basic act we routinely deny them:
Listening.
Listening to the fears they cannot name, the exhaustion stitched into their routines, the grief they carry for others, and the quiet strength with which they hold up families, communities, and entire institutions — often at the cost of breaking their own backs.
Acknowledgments
This journey was made possible by the support of Snehi India and the team that coordinated the field visits. I am grateful to Dr. Asrarul Haque Jeelani for his academic guidance, and to Dr. Ziaul Haque, Shariquea Hussain, and Afroz Alam Sahil for their insights throughout. Most of all, I owe thanks to the women and families across seven states who trusted me with their stories. This work is a record of their voices; I was merely the listener on the road.
Leave a Comment