by Arshid Malik
Now, the matter at hand is that I am a brilliant (read disgusting) snorer and there is hardly anything I want to or can do about it. It is a natural phenomenon, like a lion’s roar or something.
I woke up to an alarming noise, past night. My first instinct was that a burglar had broken into our home and that was what the whole ruckus was all about only to realize that my wife was up in bed and was yelling my name at me.
“What happened”, I enquired of her. “Is it a robber or an earthquake”? I asked her.
“Yes, there is a burglar and this very burglar is causing an earthquake”, she replied. I could not make heads or tails of her acutely precise story and was forced to interject again.
“I do not understand. What is it that you are talking about”? I said.
“Well, you have been snoring the whole night and that has robbed me of some precious sleep and by all means when you snore, it seems like the earth is shaking”.
I got it now.
It was the usual story that has deprived me of MY precious sleep for so many years. I got out of bed, made myself some coffee in the kitchen and switched on the idiot box. Yes, we have created a pact, me and my wife. She stays awake half the night while I get a good four, four and a half hours sleep while snoring at a top pitch and then she goes to sleep and I myself a cup of coffee and roam around the house like a ghost. I have given my neighbours a scare many a time when they thought there was a burglar in our house and sometimes a ghost. But these incidents are very rare as our neighbours sleep through the night and don’t take turns sleeping, like obnoxious watchmen.
It is a curse, this snoring I tell you. I would never snore until I used to sleep alone in my bed and maybe that is because no one else was there in the room to tell me that I had been snoring throughout the night and had given them sleepless nights, which would imply that I could possibly have been snoring throughout my life, the night times that is and it is a living habit with me or perhaps a chronic problem with my nose.
Anyways, it is not a good thing to dig up old skeletons, as they only end up revealing more skeletons. The issue at hand is that I snore and it is a problem for people who sleep in the same room as me. Well, there is another twist to that.
One night when I had ingested my good hours of sleep and it was time for midnight coffee, I decided to do away with the whole rationing thing. So, I told my wife that I would be better off sleeping in the lobby. And that I did. I slept in the lobby only to wake up in the dead of the night to a biorhythmic body clock. I just sat up in bed and as there was nothing else to do, I made myself yet another cup of coffee, yet another, as I count my half sleep-deprived nights in terms of the number of cups of coffee that I have had in the middle of the night so that I can make up the deprivation in one way or the other.
All said and done, my wife woke up at around 6 in the morning, all cursing and in a pretty bad mood.
“What happened”, was my usual enquiry.
“Well you were snoring all night and I could not even catch a wink”.
I was super duper dazed. I was sleeping in the lobby and she could still hear me snoring. That could either mean that she was hallucinating in her sleep or I was rarely human and more of a bulldozer. The latter case brings in some utility since if I happen to have bulldozer like properties then I could earn some quick dough out at construction sites, and the former would lead us nowhere since my spouse would never acknowledge the fact that she was hallucinating in her sleep.
Now, the matter at hand is that I am a brilliant (read disgusting) snorer and there is hardly anything I want to or can do about it. It is a natural phenomenon, like a lion’s roar or something. I tried various formulas for getting rid of my snoring like keeping a ball under my back which perhaps landed me with a slipped disc and utter back pain. I tried those thingies that you install on your nose to facilitate a consistent flow of air and my bad, I wore them the other way round and woke up almost choked to death one familiar night. I tried all sorts of medications and never used them beyond the first use. My bad again…
The issue at hand has metamorphosed into something new altogether now. Since I and my wife take turns sleeping – as if we are guarding the grand Kohinoor – both of us end up sleep-deprived and that is a major problem. We walk out of our house feeling sleepy and bump into things that cross our walking routes. Good thing, I haven’t learnt to drive yet, otherwise, I would end up “dead” someplace. When we reach home in the evenings we put salt into coffee and our shoes in the fridge. We often bang into each other and end up cursing, she my snoring and me her hallucinating in the dead of the night. And at that time I wish there was a snooze button on life itself.
Well, fortunately, there are a few nights when I do not snore at all and those nights, one or the other of our neighbours has a bash going on.
