Why Indians have trouble falling asleep

I know this only too well. Worried about my sleep, I got one of the fitness bands that would help monitor it. It ended up adding to my stress. It felt like I was taking a sleeping test every night. Even if I woke up refreshed and happy, it was never good enough for the nitpicking fitness band. “Try going to bed earlier," it would scold me. My deep sleep time was invariably too low. “Don’t strain yourself too much, keep good mood, make reasonable arrangements for work and rest time, and do more exercise to keep fit," it chirpily advised me. I wanted to smack it.

The first time sleeplessness really hit me, I was recovering from jet lag. Every night, no matter what time I went to bed, I would bolt awake somewhere between 2 and 3 in the morning. At some point I thought some mechanism had just broken inside me and I would never get my sleep back. Going to sleep without worrying about it felt like the ultimate luxury.

Now my social media shows me endless ads for pillows, sleep yoga sessions, chewable melatonin tablets and herbal supplements. I had no idea there was an entire cottage industry around getting to sleep and staying asleep. I started measuring my caffeine intake with a tooth comb, watched endless videos of the 4-7-8 breathing relaxation exercise, carefully rearranged my bed for optimal sleeping comfort and tried to give myself a cut-off time with digital devices. But sleep proved to be an elusive creature, sneakingly evading all the traps and temptations I had laid out for it.

When I was a child, no one really read me bedtime stores. My parents would turn off the main light and turn on a bedside lamp. My father would sit and read the paper by the light of the lamp, half-listening to my mother as she filled him in about the day in a low voice. I would lie in bed looking at the strange deformed shadows the bedside lamp cast on the ceiling. My favourite sleep ritual was to pull the covers over me, hug my bolster pillow or paash-baalish, and make up little stories in my head. I would imagine that under that paash-baalish was a secret world where my toys and I could have a picnic. There was something Enid Blyton-ish about the whole affair but it worked like a charm. I would be asleep long before I managed to come up with a full menu for the picnic. Years later someone told me that the biggest sleep-aid I had back then was not my imaginary picnics, but a sense of security about the real world around me. There was comfort in hearing the low voices of my parents, in knowing that I would wake up to them the next day. The murmur of their voices was the white noise lulling me to sleep.

As adults we struggle to find that security in a world which seems increasingly on edge. Work, relationships and our own health all feel increasingly insecure. Sleep is but a natural casualty. “A ruffled mind is a ruffled pillow," the author Charlotte Bronte is reputed to have said. We live in very ruffled times indeed.

When I would wake up with a start in the dead of night at first it would make me anxious. Now I try to make peace with it. Sometimes I stand on the balcony looking at the empty street in an entirely different light, the streetlights almost forlorn and ghostly. I recognise the street dogs out on patrol. The rats come out of holes and scurry around looking for food. A sudden noise somewhere sets off a cawing frenzy among unseen crows. I see the vegetable vendor doggedly pushing a cart of cabbages and tomatoes to set up for the next day. Sometimes a drunk staggers down the street jabbing at his phone probably trying to book an Uber. The young men who work at the cheap restaurant across the street wash dishes late into the night and finally relax, sprawled around the front steps, immersed in the flickering light of videos on their phones. There is a rhythm here too, a soundscape that rustles to life once all the shops are shut and the buses and trams fall silent.

When I think back to childhood stories, the problem seems to have always been too much sleep as opposed to too little. Kumbhakarna, Rip van Winkle and Sleeping Beauty all had sleep disorders but none of them were afflicted by insomnia. Even the Bengali fairytales I read had princesses who kept falling asleep and needed some prince with a golden wand to wake them. Too much sleep was scary in those fairytales. Rip van Winkle woke up after 20 years to find that his wife was long dead and the American revolution had happened. Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on a spinning wheel and didn’t wake up for a century. The story never satisfactorily told me whether she searched for the friends and family she had when she fell asleep or was happy enough with the prince who woke her up.

Sleep is a pivotal part of these stories but also a dangerous twist in the tale. Even shorter stints of sleep felt dangerous like Goldilocks who fell asleep after eating her porridge, only to wake up to three angry bears glaring at her. Snow White bit the poisoned apple and fell into a death-like slumber much to the sorrow of the seven dwarves who put her in a glass casket. That a handsome prince came and kissed the supposed corpse and brought her back to life only made the whole story more creepy.

Sleep could be a perilous undertaking in those stories, a dangerous time when you let down your guard but sleeplessness was never the problem except for that one lonely princess who could not sleep because of the pea hidden under several mattresses. Now that has become the fairytale of our lives. But in our version we don’t win a prince at the end of it. We don’t even want one. Just a good night’s sleep would be prize enough.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against. Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr

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