Beckoning sleep
In a recent conversation, someone remarked — “I can only imagine what it must have been like to be away from home at such a young age”. For some reason this sent me into my own searching. What was the most difficult part of the whole boarding school experience?
Was it the five hour ride to school from home? The looming sound of the bell at 5:00pm when parents had to vacate the school premises or the regimented life that awaited you. The two week wait to call home? The academic life or the demands of the sports field? When I think about it, I quickly reckoned that it was none of these. What lingered in my thoughts is a clear distinct moment, perhaps unconnected to all the rest. It was always undeniably the first evening in the dormitory after you came back from home.
Once you had undergone the car journey to reach school, waited on the clock to strike 5:00, confronted the shrill realization of the bell, whiled two hours in the study hall, dined, changed and settled into your bed in the dormitory, is when it first hit you. A few moments after the lights were flicked off. The entire dormitory shrouded in darkness. You lay there from the exhaustion of the day, yet unable to sleep. At home during vacation, you slept at 10:00. Or at 11:00. But the time now was 8:00. Your body would take a couple of days to sync to this new sleep time. Yet this evening, the first evening, was the most difficult.
After lights out, you could not talk. The warden made rounds to ensure decorum. And while you were in a dormitory of 200 people, you felt immensely alone. The excitements of the day had now faded and you lay with your thoughts — unadulterated. In those moments you counted and recounted the days remaining to the next holiday and the closest town-walk. You also discounted days that would pass easily because of school events. This would give you the net total. You would also wonder if your parents had reached home and what your grandparents might be doing. You would then turn and twist to try a few postures for sleep. And close your eyes tightly shut. You would also try to say the “Gayatri Mantra” in your mind, the prayer your mom had taught you. In junior school, this was the perfect time to weep. You could muffle your cries under the thick quilt and wipe your tears on the bed sheet without anyone noticing. If it was the rainy season the wind would howl on the tin roof. It is hard to put to word that damp scared feeling in your chest. If the winds quietened, you felt comforted.
Maybe this sounds darker that it actually was. After a while when you had tried to beckon sleep and failed, you would lay there more alert then when you had first started. Maybe tomorrow, you will sleep on time. You estimated whether people in the beds next to yours had slept. Sometimes if they were awake you would try to whisper to them while the warden was in the other dorm doing rounds. But eventually, they would start to snore too. This pressured you to beckon sleep faster. But it would not bend to your will. And no matter how you tried to evade thoughts of home, of alternate versions of your situation, you always failed. For some moments you lay without a thought. Eventually, you succumbed first to the battles in your head and a few hours later — to sleep.
What made those few hours so difficult, I do not know. It was perhaps the lack of resources of my eight year old mind to tame its own anxieties or the mere timidity from the sounds of the howling winds at night. Maybe it was the frustration of not having the convenience to snuggle to someone familiar or lacking the vocabulary to explain to them my inner state even if they were to magically appear. Maybe it was the damp scared feeling in my chest. Or maybe it was just the inability to beckon sleep!
