Don’t Need Alarm Clocks in India

The walls and windows of our room are very thin. Every click of someone’s heel or stomp of someone’s bare foot can be heard from inside our bedroom. I bet we can hear a pin hit the cement outside if someone dropped one. At midnight we can hear the street dogs jam their out-of-tune lullabies, or should I say we can hear them chasing away all the ghosts. The constant honking does not stop. The pigeon’s abode, which is right next to our AC, rattles once in awhile. At 5 a.m. in the morning the roosters alarm everyone that the sun has risen and we need to get up. Then bicycles start to cycle, people start to chatter in Bengali and the sound of honking wakes us up by 5:45 a.m. We don’t even need an alarm clock it seems. We have our free, man-made alarm clock – and if we sleep in it can only be until 8:30 a.m. at the next because the maid needs to come to our room to fold our blankets – YES, to FOLD OUR BLANKETS, as if we couldn’t do it by ourselves.