Memoirs of a Foreigner

Grandma—don’t fall out of your chair, I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about friends and families and even grown brothers and sisters sharing beds–or more mats on the ground.

In Delhi as in NYC it takes at least an hour to get anywhere, and so I often spend the night with my friends Tenu and Julie who live on the other side of the city to avoid spending two hours in commute. And they let me share a bed with Julie and Tenu takes the floor or the new cot. Last week I said, “I can take the cot.” “No, No,” they insisted. Then it occured to me–they are giving me the prefered place, sleeping with someone. I was talking to another friend of mine about this a few months ago. Soniya is a very progressive and sucessful woman. She moved to Delhi on her own a few years to work in a call center and now is a team leader. She drives her own car and shops at the fanciest malls in Delhi. But for the first two months of living on her own, she had trouble sleeping. She had never slept without her mom or sister.

As I told Tenu and Jule last week, I come from a place where boys at age 11 through a fit if they have to share a DOUBLE bed with a friend. American girls tend to be more okay with sharing a bed even into adulthood–but only for a night or two.

Here I have many friends who share a SINGLE bed with thier sister or mom. I know grown siblings and cousins that sleep one, two, three in a row. We know one family that has a circular bed and the whole family (including 3 kids) sleep on it. This of course has me thinking–how did they keep producing more children when the other children are in the bed with them?

But the thing that’s funny is that though I find this strange, it is normal. We are the ones with the strange culture. My Dad has a t-shirt that has faces of Indian filling it and it says, “Come to India, a billion people can’t be wrong.”

A friend pointed out to me that there is a story Jesus tells about a someone who comes to his neighbor late at night and asks him for bread to feed some unexpected quests. The neighbor says from inside his house, I can’t get up my wife and my kids are in bed (with me). The man insists over and over and finally, the man in bed with his family gets up and gives him bread. This is a parable about being persistant in prayer. As Americans we read that story–but the context doesn’t sink in.

You sleep with the people you trust. I am still uncomfortable with a whole family sharing one bed, but many people have no choice. What are we teaching our children when we insist they stay in thier own bed in thier own room at age 2? Independence is an American virtue, but is it a Christian virtue?