The sleep of the innocent

We love to watch sleeping children. Just about ten minutes after they have driven us crazy with their resistance to the idea of going to bed, they lie there with their eyes shut and the glow of innocence on them and we want nothing more than to squeeze them in an overflow of emotion. Of course, we don't make that mistake — having learnt through exhausting experience just how cranky a woken child can be.

Our parents, too, indulged us when we slept. Not for them those alarm clocks and the clatter of plates to get us up at break of day to do whatever the rest of the world thought their children should be doing at that time.

No, the house stayed silent and we were left to slumber, especially on holidays. Friends who arrived at our doorstep to ‘play' were turned away. Phone calls were dealt with summarily. Our sleep was sacrosanct.

When we'd finally awaken after we'd slept off our tiredness, they wouldn't be fazed by our accusations and our ‘You should have...'

‘You needed your rest,' they'd say, and that was it.

When I moved into another family I found out that things were different in other homes. If you wanted to sleep, you just went ahead and did it over the clatter of everyday life. Here the television blared and no one made the attempt to lower their voices because there was a sleeping person somewhere. The feeling seemed to be that if you needed your sleep that badly, you'd sleep through anything.

And it seemed to work - if not for us, at least for the next generation. When everyone else was asleep those young adults worked or did what was important to them. And when everyone else was awake, they switched off their body batteries and slept.

One young man carried this a bit too far recently. After a long night of watching matches on television and playing video games with his friends, he waved them off in the pre-dawn dark to collect an early breakfast from the all-night vendors downstairs, telling them he'd be waiting for the food as eagerly as they. While he waited, he flopped down to rest his eyes for a moment.

A very short while later, the friends were back, hot breakfast in hand. They were hungry; they were tired; but no one answered their knock. They pressed the doorbell. It was switched off. They banged on the door — not very loud because they didn't want to awaken the neighbours before dawn.

There was no reply. They called his mobile phone. It rang until it got switched off automatically. They called his landline. They could hear it ringing but they heard no footsteps coming to answer it. Panic buttons began to pop. What had happened to their friend? Had he fallen and hurt himself? Was he lying injured and unconscious? The banging on the door got louder, the neighbours came out, the friend's name was yelled out, other friends and family were roped in to try to figure out what to do.

While everyone worried and waited, an intrepid well-wisher took the law into his own hands. He called the Fire Department. But even the Fire Department couldn't get in through a window in this high rise apartment, so they did the next best thing. They broke the door.

A surge of people entered the flat expecting the worst. But there lay the large young man, curled up on his bed, sleeping like a baby! And when he was finally shaken awake, with barely a couple of hours' rest to his credit on a weekend, his indignation knew no bounds.

Wasn't there anything called the sleep of the innocent any more?

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.