Waiting for Morpheus

Dear Reader,

March 15 was World Sleep Day (if this had been a text, I would have added an eyeroll emoji here). PR agents kept bombarding me with mails about this hugely significant day, taking away what little sleep I get. The mails exhorted me to read books like Deepak Chopra’s Restful Sleep or to listen to audiobooks like The Book of Sleep: 75 Strategies to Relieve Insomnia by Nicole Moshfegh. The latter has a runtime of almost three hours—is listening to the book one of the 75 strategies presented by Dr Moshfegh? Incidentally, in a 2018 novel, another Moshfegh—the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh—wrote about a 20-something woman with loads of feline charm and privilege, who, in the hope of getting a new life, quits her day job and hibernates for a year. It was called My Year of Rest and Relaxation and, unsurprisingly, Gen Z readers lapped up the story. 

An inveterate insomniac, I have placed my trust in books to put me to sleep (I was using an eye mask for a while, but my dog ate it). Think of books with titles like Growing Cabbage for Business, Reusing Old Graves, or an essay called “Man the Reformer” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Reading Proust’s interminable sentences in In Search of Lost Time, I can well imagine him writing in a semi-recumbent pose, suspended somewhere between the planes of sleep and wakefulness.

However, in my daily fight for sleep, my trusted companion is This Book Will Send You To Sleep by Professor K. McCoy and Dr Hardwick, who, according to their bio-notes “are both currently asleep somewhere in London”. It has artfully titled chapters like “Railway Gauges: An Overview”; “Economic Statistics from the First Two Five-Year Plans in the Soviet Union”; or “How the Pyramids Were Built”. The last describes the pyramids being built brick by brick by brick—your eyelids are guaranteed by get heavy with this onslaught of description. 

I was recently reading Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder’s book, At Home in India: Stories, Memoirs, Portraits, Interviews. While I love Hyder’s writing, her family saga, Kar-e Jahan Daraz Hai (As the World Turns), translated for the first time in this volume, occasionally made my eyes glaze over with its litany of the achievements of her friends and family members who must have been well-known in their day but are now just faceless names.

But Hyder is anything but a boring writer. Her memoir also has sterling passages that made me sit up and admire her all the more: “Darkness again. A lamplit dinner on a pitch-dark night. At four o’clock in the morning, the hand looms come to life. Thereafter, the sound of the azaan is heard and the blue light of morning, the same colour as Mariam’s blue mantle, begins to brighten the orchards.” Read the well-informed review of the book by Harish Trivedi to know more about this eccentric grande dame of Urdu literature. 

A book that just landed on my desk has a gripping inquiry at its heart: “Is tomato a fruit or a vegetable?” Hopefully, with its help, I will be able to catch a few winks before we meet next time. See you then!

Anusua Mukherjee