Lullaby Road

For their entire lives, they have slept as the bustle of the streets wrapped them, a watchful slumber that even nightly stillness did not dispel. Then, as the world was locked indoors, it yielded unexpected space. Homeless or merely free-spirited, sleepers grasped at these safe havens: a woman on a flower-strewn, stone-paved courtyard barely ennobled by Roman nomenclature; another on the bared midriff of a thoroughfare; men dossed down atop carts, cars and polished surfaces; a defiant Catalan slaked his exhaustion on a sepulchral Barcelona street. Thus they lay proprietorial claim to their cities, these giant communal beds where there were no sharers.

Photograph by Apoorva Salkade

Photograph by PTI

Photograph by PTI

“…we lie on Mother’s bed; the rising sun in war paint dyes us red; in broad daylight her gilded bedposts shine/ abandoned, almost Dionysian.”

Robert Lowell

Photograph by PTI

Photograph by PTI

“When I’m in the middle of a dream… Please, don’t wake me, no, don’t shake me/Leave me where I am, I’m only sleeping.”

The Beatles