bedtime story
The bed is out of action. It finally broke. It's been threatening to ever since we moved in, but we've been buttressing the bed frame with cardboard, tape, even clothes for 11 months now. Finally a couple of nights ago, my most esteemed husband rolled over to go the bathroom and there was a sickening crunch. The plank had finally given out, broken clean in two.
This is a much bigger deal in London than in Delhi because you have to book a 'handyman' through an agency and then pay him by the half-hour whether or not he fixes the thing, needs more material, takes hours to go out and get material, etc.
So I booked the handyman and moved the mattress out into the living room. Which is a much nicer room on the whole, because it has two large windows facing a park just across the road. When we went to sleep on it the next night there was a pleasant summer evening breeze coming in through the open window, along with the wheeze of London buses stopping at the bus stop below, and the wailing ambulance sirens making their way to Charing Cross Hospital just up the road.
We're moving out of this flat in a week's time, so we'll probably continue to sleep this way even after the bed is fixed. (Don't want to jinx it before the homeowner comes back anyway.)
I don't mind the noise. I told the bear to imagine we were sleeping out of doors near a dhaba under a tree by some national highway in an indian autumn. If he were only to open his eyes, he would see the reddish night sky above through the branches of the tree, whose leaves were dancing merrily. A recent rain had settled the dust and made the night air fresh. Trucks carrying steel and carts carrying hay would keep passing us by on the slightly elevated highway, but this particular dhaba, nestled into a mud bank below, was closed for business tonight, and all was well in wonderland.
This is a much bigger deal in London than in Delhi because you have to book a 'handyman' through an agency and then pay him by the half-hour whether or not he fixes the thing, needs more material, takes hours to go out and get material, etc.
So I booked the handyman and moved the mattress out into the living room. Which is a much nicer room on the whole, because it has two large windows facing a park just across the road. When we went to sleep on it the next night there was a pleasant summer evening breeze coming in through the open window, along with the wheeze of London buses stopping at the bus stop below, and the wailing ambulance sirens making their way to Charing Cross Hospital just up the road.
We're moving out of this flat in a week's time, so we'll probably continue to sleep this way even after the bed is fixed. (Don't want to jinx it before the homeowner comes back anyway.)
I don't mind the noise. I told the bear to imagine we were sleeping out of doors near a dhaba under a tree by some national highway in an indian autumn. If he were only to open his eyes, he would see the reddish night sky above through the branches of the tree, whose leaves were dancing merrily. A recent rain had settled the dust and made the night air fresh. Trucks carrying steel and carts carrying hay would keep passing us by on the slightly elevated highway, but this particular dhaba, nestled into a mud bank below, was closed for business tonight, and all was well in wonderland.
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