Shreya Sen-Handley | Who's been sleeping in my bed?

Remember the bewilderment of the Three Bears coming home to the mess Goldilocks had made in their woodland cottage? Wouldn’t you feel just as upset if your sleeping arrangements had been changed without your consent?

Our guards are down in our sleep, rendering us vulnerable and afraid. We are also very dependent on it for our mental wellbeing and health.

In Kolkata this month, where the temperature is hovering near forty, sleep is proving elusive for many. My septuagenarian parents, who are like Jack Sprat and his wife, are facing a quandary. My mother likes the AC on in the summer, but my father is convinced it makes him ill. And yet, though she’s struggling to sleep without it, she refuses to desert his side for the comforts of the spare bedroom. This isn’t from an excessive attachment on my mother’s part, but is, in fact, about love. My father sometimes has epileptic seizures at night, so my mum insists on sleeping by his side.

Love and sleeping arrangements have always gone hand in hand. We ‘sleep together’ in every sense of the phrase when we get hitched. But sleeping habits have as much to do with health, history, culture and economics.

The size of our beds has grown over the ages, and that’s as much about evolution as it is about socioeconomics. Humans are larger today than at any other time in history, having soared four inches in height in prosperous countries in the last century. Breadthwise too there’s been abundant efflorescence, with global obesity tripling in the last five decades.

Yet, peek into one of the many beautifully preserved historic homes in Britain, and the beds you see are bijou for other reasons. The Tudors slept sitting up because of the range of respiratory diseases prevalent. As a result, headboards were essential but reclining space, not so much.

Did you also know that folk in the middle-ages rarely slept eight hours at a stretch? That it is the bare minimum anyone needs is a modern belief. With electricity a distant dream, medieval people went to bed at sundown, getting up in the wee hours to do their chores — feed livestock, go to church — before diving back under the covers for another shift. In the hotter countries even today, be it India or Spain, it isn’t considered unhealthy to break up your sleep into an afternoon siesta and a nighttime stint.

Talking of cultural differences in sleeping, Indian families can snooze very differently to their Western counterparts. Although the gulf is not as wide as the strident film Mrs. Chatterjee vs. Norway would have you believe, co-sleeping with your children is undoubtedly discouraged in colder climes, where you’d imagine huddling together to be commonplace.

If concerns over paedophilia drive the unease around it, it is also about drinking habits. The more alcohol you consume, the more dangerous it is to have your baby in your bed, whom you might suffocate or crush in your sleep. I’m guessing this is a smaller problem for cultures that drink less.

As an Ingo-Bongo family ourselves, we chose to take a page out of the best practices of both worlds; we co-slept when our children’s tender age or ill-health, and our own ability to stay alert or take necessary precautions, made it appropriate. But they also slept in their own beds from early on, because as they develop, children need their own space, including at night.

Some co-sleeping with children is understandably down to space and financial constraints. Bunk beds don’t work in rooms with ceiling fans, for example, as we found out on our return to Calcutta from Manila when we were children. Settling back in, sleeping space for the four of us consisted of one master bedroom, and one cupboard-sized children’s room. For the latter, our parents lovingly bought us bunk beds — a ton of fun till Teddy lost his head! Teddy, being a toy bear, could be patched together again, but one of us had to relocate as well, to a cot by our parents’ bed, till the house was extended.

Traditionally, the seriously rich, had not only separate bedrooms for spouses, but depending on their wealth, separate wings in their homes, even different houses! You would’ve seen it on Emmy-winning Downton Abbey if you haven’t anywhere else, where Lord Grantham was sent back to his own bedroom from his wife’s, every time he disgraced himself. The conjugal arrangement of successful pair, film director Tim Burton and actress Helena Bonham Carter was interesting as well. Buying two houses side by side in London, and carving a passage between, they ‘lived together’ happily over a decade. The distance between partners at night, obviously, is as much about the fullness of our love as our wallets!

Yet, tight squeezes can be a blessing, like when our children, each with their own room, still occasionally crash into bed with us on weekend mornings, if only to prod us awake. That our adored canine kiddie, shedding hair and tracking mud in, has never tried it, is equally a relief. Best of all are our weekly family movie evenings, when we grab our popcorn and slushies and pile onto a sofa into which we now barely fit. In these instances, furbaby too jumps in!

Makes me feel richer than Midas, Bezos, or Ol’ Musky!