Sunday, December 13, 2009

Sleep My First Love

I loved sleep. I would play a lot and somewhere in there I went to high school and college, but come 10PM I was out and nothing could wake me till I had worshiped Hypnos for 8-10 hours. I was very religious about it. Weekend the worship was an extended one, taking as long as 12 hours. I can see that my older one has taken after me. She once did not get out of bed till 1PM in the afternoon!

You know how people drop in on you in India without calling first. Well the reason they did that was very few people had telephones then and cell phones had not yet been invented. It was not like we had much of a life outside of home. So people knew that they could expect someone at home more often than not and the few times you travel a couple of hours to find out that your friend is not at home, you go back cheerfully.

C'est la vie and all that you know.

Well this one time, about 25 years ago, a good friend of our parents, Mr Venkatachalam and his wife Girija came to see us and no one but I was at home. Figuratively speaking, of course. I was physically present but my mind was lost in the dream world. They rang the bell but the result was not conclusive. It was not as if I was far away from the bell. Moreover these are Indian ones built with a strong sense of purpose. I mean they were definitely not build to be polite as in please wake up. No; they were loud and shrill; capable of waking almost everyone but the dead. They told me later that after ringing the bell futile for 5 minutes they took to banging on the door.

Our neighbors got into the act and together while one banged on the door the other yelled loudly. This is not unusual in India at least when I was growing up. Finally after a quarter hour of various attempts at rousing me; most folks would have given up after 2 minutes; they left a note and went back home. A hour later when my parents and sister came back from wherever they had been, they discovered the note and got in and woke me up.

Mr Venkatachalam was a lot of fun to be around. I am sorry to use the past tense. He died last year when I was in India. He was very funny and could tell a joke well. He had a good singing voice and was an amateur Carnatic vocalist. He had a good knowledge of the scriptures and would frequently recite the old shlokas to my parents and their friends and bring out the meaning behind them. He never talked down to you; he was capable of engaging me in a conversation as well as he could my parents. I could argue with him which I could not with my dad. Whenever I met them later in life, he and his wife would remind me about it and we would have a good laugh over it. I think of him often and miss him.

Back to my sleep; fatherhood did nothing to diminish my passion for sleep.

And then I started working for a company that had developers in India in 2006. Well it is simple; to get work done, one need to engage with the resources in real time. People think that you can send emails during the day here and gnomes in India (and other places) would scurry around and do the work. It is mostly collaborative and regular conversations are required to iron out details. Well with the time zone differences of about 10 hours, the best way is for folks in US to work very early and folks in India to work late. So I started getting up at before 6AM.

Before 2006, I do not recollect seeing Helios ride out in his chariot, since then I have taken to reprimanding him for being late to work! It has gotten so bad even if I sleep very late, say at 1AM , I still end up getting up by 7-8AM. I cannot sleep more than 6-7 hours even during the weekend!

I am sad, my first love has deserted me.