Insomnia

Bijoy Gupta

For the past one week, Bijoy Gupta has been making frantic calls daily to the Garden while we exercise. The phone cuts off mysteriously before he can complete the call. Return calls have proved futile because his phone slips into “out of coverage area”.
Nevertheless, from what we have gathered, Gupta is apologetic for not being able to report for the exercises regularly (as he used to earlier) because of a “new bimari”. He says that no matter how hard he tries, he is unable to wake up on time in the morning.
“I am having disturbed sleep,” he complains. “All night I toss and turn in bed and it is only in the early morning hours that I sink into deep sleep. In that state, it is impossible to wake up

It continues to rain outside

for the Garden. I never had this problem earlier.”
Gupta believes that his afternoon siesta and late-evening addiction to online entertainment have robbed him of timely sleep. “Today I’ll watch YouTube in the afternoon instead of the evening,” he says. “Maybe by staying awake all day I’d get some sleep this night and be able to report for the exercises tomorrow.”
His ‘tomorrow’ has not yet come. And clearly, Gupta is weighed down by guilt – to the extent, he is convinced that he has contracted a new disease!
Little does Gupta realise that his is the most common affliction among the elderly. From Shekhawat to Kiran Prakash and Zarina Khan to Naheed Siddiqui, insomnia affects us all. It just proves what (ex-member) Sunita Jajodia used to say, “We were donkeys when we were young, carrying the burden of our families. Now that we are old, we have turned into owls.”
Gupta has another problem. He hates carrying an umbrella. He would much rather not step out of the house should it rain. And of late, there is hardly a day when it does not rain cats and dogs in the morning. Today was no exception.