Dear Reader,Noel is upon us, and all I want for Christmas this year is unlimited lolling time on bed. After a year spent sitting ramrod straight on the chair, dressed in battle gear, staring unblinkingly at the laptop, I want to crumple in a heap, crawl like an earthworm on the floor till I reach the bed, where I will lie curled up till kingdom come.I will snuggle under a duvet smelling of detergent and sunshine, with a pillow by the side and the dog by my feet. The phone will be gagged, the world will be shut out: the only permitted conversation will be with a book. In between reading, I will indulge unabashedly in my other two favourite activities—staring at the ceiling and wiggling my toes. If there is heaven on earth, it is this, I say.G.K. Chesterton has a seminal essay, “On Lying in Bed”, where he recounts the rare virtues of horizontality. He makes the important point that Michelangelo might not have thought of covering the ceilings of Sistine Chapel with all that divine drama had he not lain in bed, pondering the prospects of the roof above his head. I agree wholeheartedly: we get the best ideas lying in bed because the imagination is fired when the body is still. It makes me feel alive as nothing else does. No wonder Marcel Proust wrote In Search of Lost Time stretched out on bed in his cork-lined room.When I am planted firmly in bed, I have a heightened awareness of the life happening around me. The cow says hmmmm, asking for food; the kite circles overhead, crying shrilly; matching the high decibel of its call are the shrieks of the tile-cutting machine in buildings under construction; the cockerel crows for mysterious reasons in the middle of the afternoon; a forgotten Bollywood song plays on the phone of a passing cyclist; cars whoosh past; school buses arrive, disgorging their load of screaming children; the heavy iron gates of rich people’s apartments are dragged over the rails with a deep, earth-shaking roar, shutting the residents in. I hug the pillow, smell the dog’s popcorn paws, and drag the spreadeagled book closer to the chest. Enfolded in the warm, fuzzy winter afternoon glow, I turn a deaf ear to the monsters whispering from underneath the bed. I chant with Sylvia Plath: “Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”As a diehard insomniac, I am drawn to the bed as a Majnoo to his Laila. Insomniacs usually have elaborate bed rituals meant to trigger sleep (mine are the two activities described earlier). Thomas de Quincey, who had a fractured relationship with sleep due to this overactive imagination and laudanum addiction, described the extremes to which Kant, also an insomniac, went in order to court sleep.“Long practice had taught him a very dexterous mode of nesting and enswathing himself in the bedclothes. First of all, he sat down on the bedside; then with an agile motion he vaulted obliquely into his lair; next he drew one corner of the bedclothes under his left shoulder, and, passing it below his back, brought it round so as to rest under his right shoulder; fourthly, by a particular tour d’adresse, he operated on the other corner in the same way; and finally contrived to roll it round his whole person. Thus swathed like a mummy, or (as I used to tell him) self-involved like the silkworm in its cocoon, he awaited the approach of sleep, which generally came on immediately” (From “Last Days of Immanuel Kant”).While the reference to the mummy hints at the association of the bed with death, the bed is more readily connected with sex, in literature and in the visual arts. John Donne’s sexy poem, “The Good-Morrow”, celebrating a post-coital couple waking up to newfound love and tenderness, takes place in a bedroom, probably on the bed, although it isn’t mentioned explicitly.But I would say that the bed-sex link is overrated. It isn’t a patch on the potentials of the bed as a site of leisure, of reading, of free thought and literary creation. Author Nabaneeta Dev Sen wrote lying on her belly on bed. Former American poet laureate Charles Simic said that he produced some of his best works while horizontal.I, however, do not hope to write in bed. Rather, I want to be gloriously unproductive, and so to protest silently, from the comfort of the bed, against the bourgeois notion that one should strive for betterment at all times. I am done with all that Sturm und Drang, which has merely returned me to the nothingness I began with. Now I want to rest, without guilt or shame. And here’s wishing you all a very merry and relaxed Christmas, free from the tyranny of emails and phone calls.See you next week.Till then,Anusua MukherjeeDeputy Editor, FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS