What is the perfect pleasure of travel? My choice — the afternoon nap — will be disputed, not least by my younger self. Time is money, and to be spending precious hours of daylight lopped sideways on a sterile couch or bed must rank up there as a form of profligacy. In a Vilnius hostel, a Londoner once asked: “Mate, are you sick or old or something?”
He might have had a point about age, if only he wasn’t double mine then; a youthful 48, despite the pies and chips. Having said that, my general sense is that one of the markers of advancing age is an obsession with sleep. Everything and everyone is a potential ally or enemy: the pillow, the colour of a curtain, the temperature of the room, the crook between your partner’s arm and torso.
As my friends and I hurtle — though some days we dawdle — towards the ravages of our 30s, we find ourselves groggily asking each other, without a hint of irony, “Slept well?” This is never a conversation starter among 16-year-olds.
The second half of the third decade may not be the ripest for memorialising what has already gone down, but like it or not, it is when some of us first become nostalgists. College is not quite a distant memory, but already those impromptu road trips to Goa and Gokarna begin to acquire the pale gold tint of reminiscence. The last embers of feeling for the he or she who got away burn slower and less true.
The dragons of health, ambition and time breathe gently behind us, not fire, but measured, even huffs. All this is background. An apology. Because I have somehow come to think that my need for siesta while away from home is associated with the onset of this early nostalgia. My dreams — involving elements and people from the past and present — increase in frequency and intensity when: (a) I occupy an unfamiliar bed; and (b) it is daytime.
I am reliably informed that I was a particularly prodigious napper as a child, so there may be a Proustian madeleine angle to this whole thing. My college mates will argue that it all started on those back-breaking bus rides from Bangalore to wherever it was we were headed.
Naps and snacks
To be sure, rickety seats in the state transport buses (of the fine states of Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu) have served as perfectly acceptable bedchambers when I was a lanky youth full of hope for the limitless future. Indeed, I have climbed onto these contraptions at Mysore Road bus station, involuntarily closed my eyes even as the daredevil driver was polishing off his rice meal, been entirely unmoved by the lurching ride, and woken up, fresh as a daisy, moments before attacking a breakfast of steaming puttu-kadalai in Kochi.
But those lost nights hardly explain my later fascination for proper naps in proper beds on proper holidays. In the mother of all clichés, I am tempted to trace it all back to four years ago — to an afternoon in the southern Spanish town of Córdoba.
I had spent the morning amidst the arches and altars of the hulking Mezquita Cathedral, a mosque converted to a church after the Christian re-conquest of Moorish Spain. It is a building with a long, wounded history and I had struggled to wrap my head around the hectic iconography and the complex architectural flourishes. I have begun to discern a pattern to my visits to historically charged sites such as this. Initially, there is unadulterated wonder at the magnificence. I want to inhale all of it, the chronology, the characters, the salacious tales. Then, there is a capitulation under the sheer weight of the information, the burden of the narrative. In the end, I am left with an acute awareness of the limits of my own historical imagination.
Water wheel
That afternoon in Córdoba, I ate (tapas) and drank (beer) my despair in a nearby restaurant and set off on a post-prandial paseo by the banks of the Guadalquivir. From a bench, I watched a giant, wooden water wheel of indeterminate age. The wheel was creaking, turning slowly, when I heard the sounds of hooves on the Roman bridge beyond. There were giant red crosses on the billowing flags above eye level. Behind me, there was shouting in Arabic. A history teacher from school was saying, “And this is how WWI started.” Clearly, it was time to totter back to the hotel two streets away. The rest is history.
When I came to, Andalucian evening light was creeping in through the half-open window. It set off the pastels of the azulejos on the wall opposite. The little room was redolent of ripening orange. Waking up in dying light with only a vague idea of where you are and then gradually allowing all the pieces of the puzzle to fit snugly into their rightful grooves — there is something to say for it.
Down at the reception, I was told that the neighbouring room had complained about loud snoring from mine.
The author, a lawyer by qualification and afternoon napper by inclination, is at home everywhere and nowhere.
