Zzzzz

On what subject(s) are you an authority?

I am a sunshine girl. I wake up early. I open the curtains and windows and switch off the ACs and I have been told that I make a lot of noise while doing my usual morning chores. Usually, my home has the curtains left open for most of the day. Lights, streetlights, loud music, or street noise barely register on my radar and I can fall asleep when my head hits the pillow. Of course, a clean bed also ensured that my head hit the pillow rather than a whole lot of chaos before it reached the pillow.

When I was in college, getting ready included making our bed before we left for class. I don’t remember if I ever got penalized by my parents for not having made the bed, but Dad or Mum would make it before they left for work. Making the bed included folding the blanket and placing it neatly at the end of the bed. I used to walk a lot and when I came back home I would usually find either my older sibling or her friend taking a nap on our beds. I hated my pillows smelling of someone else or covered in drool.

I understood the real meaning of ‘making a bed’ when I was in a hostel. My course started at 7 am and would go on until 7 pm and sometimes take longer. I had been paired with a couple of other girls from my class and usually, we returned to the room simultaneously. My bed was at the door, so anyone who dropped into the room usually squatted on the only ‘made’ bed in the room, mine. I used to walk into the room to find a group of random folks sitting on my bed, my sheets rumpled and dirty paw-prints on them.

A few years later, when I got married, I set up my first house on a budget. I had multi-option seating in the living room. I had mattresses stacked on the floor one on top of the other and a few floor cushions strewn across the floor. As a working couple, we never had time to entertain and barely spent time at home, so mattresses disguised as seating arrangements worked well for us. The one time I brought a colleague home to work from home she ended up sleeping and I ended up finishing the work, because, my house made her feel cozy and comfortable enough to fall asleep at 10 am.

When the kids came around, I remember the first week of school. My daughter had gone to school and returned without taking a nap. She seemed fine and was recounting her day when she reached the diwan. Then, she just bent at the waist and fell across the diwan with her feet still on the floor. It seemed like she was resting her head there, but she had just fallen asleep. Right in the middle of a sentence.

A few years later when we were in Mumbai, I had picked my son up from school and when we came home, he wanted me to make him some milk. While I was busy doing that, he decided to lie on the floor, right outside the kitchen to make angels on the floor. Even before I could turn around, he had fallen asleep, right there. On the floor. Outside the kitchen.

A few more years later, my younger sibling dropped in with her kid for a visit and found that he slept peacefully in my house, without any fuss. Even her kids have often fallen asleep easily in our house. I’ve had dogs falling asleep around me or on my lap. I’ve often been told to turn down my Duracell battery, so I know that I am not the person making everyone around me fall asleep. But maybe there is something in the way I have set up my house that helps induce sleep.

I’ve always had some kind of low seating situated around my living area and have often found that a few of my guests prefer to sit down for a conversation and eventually just fall asleep. Mum used to usually just nap on the day bed or diwan I had placed in my living room. Even today, I have the IKEA Utatker stackable option placed in my living room, which works like a charm. The best part of this arrangement is that I am usually sitting around while people fall asleep around me.

I still remember the day, Mum had to go out to work and had left me in my neighbor’s house under her care. She had left a lunch box for me there, which I ate with less fuss and a lot of relish. Once lunch was done, that aunty had taken me to the guest bedroom and had told me to sleep on the bed. It was a clean bed. The windows were open. The fan had been switched on. But, I had told Aunty, that I did not take naps and would sit on the bed and wait for my Mum. Aunty had agreed and had left me there and had gone to her room and fallen asleep. I know this because I had tiptoed to her room to see what she was doing. I then crept back to the guest room where I had been left, sat on the bed, and waited. It seemed like a really long wait, but Mum did not return. I started to feel sleepy, and for some reason, I did not feel comfortable sleeping on the bed in her guest room, so I crept under it and fell asleep on the floor, closest to the wall. The house was very clean, but the floor under the bed was dirty and had dust motes floating around lazily in the soft breeze created by the ceiling fan. Yet, that was the space I chose to fall asleep in and what seemed like eons later, Mum came looking for me and found me there under the cot, fast asleep. She gently woke me up and much to the embarrassment of the aunty, who never realized that I had fallen asleep under the cot, not on top, Mum took me home.

Maybe it was this memory of not finding the right balance of cozy and comfortable, but this is the one thing I can claim a little bit of expertise on. I know that it may not make me an authority on sleep or one on interior design, but it surely makes me an expert at creating the brightest, safest, happiest spaces in my home, where everyone feels welcome and safe enough to fall asleep right away. And always on the bed.