Bedside story

A good night’s sleep is a Godsend, no denying that. In babyhood, teenage years and early youth all one had to do was shut one’s eyes. The posture did not matter, the noise in the vicinity was immaterial, the bed, cot, sofa, bench, firm ground, any flat surface, in fact, was considered capable. Of lulling a sleeper to sound sleep. 

But somewhere along the way, when niggling backache made its presence felt, the mattress was pinpointed as the culprit. Its softness or hardness was supposed to be the cause of the pain. This in turn was responsible for the interruption in the sleeping pattern.

And so I started exploring the mattresses in the market and what started off as natural curiosity, quickly turned into a full-fledged investigation. The sheer variety of the available product had my head reeling. From spring to foam and from water to air, the list was endless. There were also subdivisions to these, and further super specialised demarcations to those, too. 

The names were exceedingly alluring. The four basic types were called: open spring — where the arrangement was in rows and connected with a thick spiral wire; pocket spring- which was housed in individual cloth pockets allowing them to work independently; latex foam — sprang back to its original shape when you got up; and memory foam — did not retain its original form but maintained an imprint of your body contour.

Then there were mattress toppers. What is that you ask? It is, as the term suggests, exactly like a layer of extra toppings on a pizza. Only, here it did not enhance the taste but was used as an additional covering for the mattress like down feather ones, made from the soft plume of geese or ducks, wool toppers that were resistant to bed bugs and were manufactured from lamb’s fleece, and egg crate toppers that literally looked like a large but empty tray of eggs.

As if all of this was not enough, any query about a mattress would first make the buyer fill out a quiz form that had inquisitive questions like, did you sleep on your back, side or stomach? Would you toss and turn around in your sleep? And then it got more personal. Did you get too hot or too cold while sleeping? Did your partner move around in the bed and wake you up? I mean, why get into such intricate details about a person’s life that most often, they themselves were clueless about? 

Moreover, they had suggestions for free. Like, take your pillow along when you go shopping for a mattress. What would the shopkeeper think said the voice in my head? If the thought itself were scandalising me, how would a stranger react? 

I got to know soon enough. My disturbed sleep pattern had me running to the nearest mattress shop. Concealed discretely, in an enormous shopping basket, was my favourite pillow. 

“Good morning ma’am. How are you today?” the salesman’s voice boomed at me.

“Fine,” I smiled.

“You want to buy a mattress?” he asked.

“Yes.” replied my husband.

“You are together?” he inquired.

We nodded in response.

“Ok, in which position do you sleep?” he queried.

“I sleep on my back, he sleeps on his side,” I said.

“She sleeps on her side, I sleep on my back,” my spouse said.

“Are you married?” he probed exasperatedly.

‘To each other,” we chorused.

“Ok, so let’s do trial by the pillow,” he announced while taking my big bag.