Do
you take your bed for granted? I know most people do, like your bed automatically
comes with the bedroom. Well, it’s baked into the name of the room, right?
Maybe I should frame my question better. Do you take your bed-frame for
granted? I know I did. My small bedroom comes with a bed frame fit for a king
size bed. It has a sufficiently large mattress on it.
Nowadays,
people in their late 20s are no longer considered young, and why should we be?
After spending hours hunched over my laptop, I get up from my desk like someone
twice my age. Holding my neck with one
hand and my back with another, rubbing and massaging them, as if that will
alone remove the last spec of ageing from my body, I walk over to the kitchen
for a quick snack. Sitting in the same position makes it harder to stand up and
often when we do, a sound escapes our larynx, somewhere between a sigh and a
groan, almost as involuntary as a sneeze when we have a cold, except the cold
is cured after a few days, but there’s as of yet, no cure for anticipated
ageing, or let’s call it ‘Aetas Vigniti’- Latin for the uniquely dramatic
condition of ageing in your twenties. When we sit somewhere, we hold our knees
before lowering ourselves down to the chair, just to curb the pain. Showering
in cold water even in summers can make our backache go berserk.
The
reason for my rant about our over-advanced ageing was simply to drive home the
fact that a normal mattress that would’ve felt heavenly to lie on for 50 year
olds even twenty years ago, feels an assault on the backs of us who are
traversing, rather poorly might I add, the dangerous realm of being in our late
twenties. I was subjected to this mattress and its oppression on my poor back
for the last decade. On the brink of beginning my 30s, it’s safe to say I am no
longer a young woman and sleeping on that mattress generated strong and painful
protests from my ageing back. On most mornings, instead of taking a shower with
warm water, I’d take a shower with a pain-relief spray to make my back feel
less aged.
Witnessing
my pain every morning, my mother decided enough! It was time to get a new
mattress. After careful planning and picking and pondering, my mother and my
uncle decided the ‘memory-foam’ mattress would do justice to my poor, aged back.
Now,
there’s something you need to know about my mother. One project, as simple as
it is of buying a new mattress and disposing of the old one, is not enough for
her. She has a pressing need to squeeze in as many projects into this one project as she can. Once the mattress had been finalised, she decided she
needed, to increase the amount of storage in the divan underneath my bed-frame.
“While you get a new mattress, you might as well get a new bed altogether”, she
announced one morning over breakfast. I was about to pop in my paratha dripping
with butter, and stopped abruptly. What did she mean by a new bed? Soon it
became clear though, that she had a few bed-ly renovations planned, and my need
for a new mattress was the perfect occasion for her to execute them.
I
did not enjoy my breakfast that morning, for my mind went over the size of the
hole this entire assignment would drill in my purse (you see, I don’t wear
pants often because it’s too hot, and women’s dresses don’t have pockets, so the
hole was most definitely going to be in my purse). My mother then suggested we
get the bed frame ready with the extended storage and we can purchase the
mattress the next month. It seemed reasonable to me and arrangements were made
to dispose off the old mattress that had waged a war on my back over the last
decade, and I was officially without a bed in any shape or form. I looked
around my room like it belonged to someone else. Having a huge bed in my small
room all my life had simply removed any concept of floor space from my brain
and the first look after my bed-frame had been dismantled and carried away made
me feel like this is a studio, I can
dance in here! I don’t dance though. But it’s strange what the exuberance
of having more floor space can make you do. It
made me dance! Had my mother caught me in the act, she’d have fainted from
the shock of it- has my daughter been
replaced by someone else?
What
followed were two weeks of pure joy and a lot of dancing (with the door closed
of course!) Although my brain did not quite register the sheer blessing of
having the whole floor to myself, I loved having a single mattress that my
mother had rummaged out of one of the lofts to sustain me while my bed was
being redesigned. I liked the single bed. A
bit too much! I pleaded with my mother to let me keep the single-bed
mattress but she needed her storage, and on any day of the calendar, the Indian
mother’s wishes, fancies and weird arguments win against anyone by a long shot.
My lawyer friends were also sure to lose, had I sought their help. So, for all
intents and purposes, I knew I stood no chance of keeping my floor.
I
spent many a glorious hour on that mattress, propped up the throw pillows, and
brought out my soft toys and cuddled with them while watching movies on my
iPad. And the best part was, I could keep my glasses of water and mugs of tea
right beside me without fearing they would topple over, because the floor was
right there- like a pillar of strength! Or, maybe in this case a floor of
strength. I’d come home every evening and my room would be waiting for me with
all that floor at my disposal, as if to say ‘sit wherever you want, we’re all
yours!’ No invitation from no man has ever seemed so alluring to me, and I hope
those men read this someday and really put in the work to better their skills. The
floor had me floored and how!
One
afternoon, I randomly set up a stack of books by my bed and stuck my bedside
lamp on top of it. Now I had a reading nook doubling as a bed and tripling as a
chill-out corner. With that massive bed eating up my room, my old limbs had to
make the effort to climb the bed; get all the things needed for a long session
of chilling in my bed with movies, and if mother called me from the next room,
my old limbs would have to find the strength to climb back down again. And,
there would be no book stack by my bedside either, which really added character
to my room. Who needs a bedside table when you can have a bedside stack of your
favourite books? Not me!!!
The
floor gave me so much potential to try different things, dancing behind closed
doors being the first. I could buy a bean bag, set up my easel, and have canvases stacked up against one wall on the far west side of the room; I could buy a couple of different beautiful rugs and make the room even cosier, although,
as an unfortunate resident of Kolkata, cosy is not what we need. But, it never
hurts to dream, right? I could buy a huge Lego set and sprawl everything out on the floor to assemble it, only to fail miserably. I could spend my money on all
of this that my mother perceives as useless and be very content. This is why you earn
money as an adult- to splurge on things meant for children. These are all
things I could do, but never did because the villain made a comeback!
That
ominous, gigantic, gargantuan bed-frame was meant to be in my life. I cannot
keep a man, but something about me summons huge bed-frames to my room; and one
evening when I came back from work, there it was, ogling me, mocking me,
teasing me. It might also have eve-teased me, you never know. And the days of
unfiltered joy of having a floor were over. It was like a crazy, whirlwind
romance come to an end, like a farewell to a dear old friend, like... Oh! I am
too full of emotions to be able to put words to them. However, now the new
mattress would come in, and my days of suffering acutely from Aetas Vigniti
would be over. Having cursed my back all my life, had it not been for its
relentless pain, my mother would never have turned the project of getting a new
mattress into a redesigning assignment, and me? I’d have been oblivious to a
great friendship and camaraderie of my life- me, the single-bed mattress, and
The Floor!
-Reva.
(A reflection on what a life without a bed could've been)
