India Gate, Delhi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don’t sleep well. Perhaps I have unquiet dreams. But I think it has something to do with the man who blows a whistle outside my window all night.

When I first moved to Delhi, I thought it was a drunk blowing a whistle at three in the morning. Or a madman. It was a football referee’s whistle, and he was blowing it hard, really going for it, and I thought he was going to wake the whole neighbourhood up, and that in a few moments I would hear angry voices. But there was nothing, just that whistle, all night.

When I asked the next day, it turned out he was being paid to blow the whistle. By my neighbours. And by me, in fact. He is the chowkidar, the nightwatchman, employed by the Residents’ Welfare Association of the block where I live, and paid out of our monthly dues. He’s there to make sure that no one tries to break into any of the flats or steal a car.

I thought I understood. There had been an intruder, and the guard was blowing his whistle to raise the alarm. But no. He was at it with the whistle again the next night. And the night after.

“Why does he keep blowing the whistle?” I asked my neighbour after another night of burying my head under the pillow. “Can’t we get him to stop?”

“Oh no,” my neighbour said. “The other residents wouldn’t be happy. He is supposed to blow the whistle.”

“But why?”

“So that we know he is awake.”

But we’re awake too. Some nights he doesn’t start till late, and, lulled into a false sense of security, I fall asleep only to be woken a few minutes later by the sound of that whistle starting up. Brrrrrr. Brrr-rrrr-rrrr. I moved. The whistle followed me. In the neighbourhood where I live now, there are two guards and they blow the whistles to each other across the street, trying to see who can blow the loudest. Brrrrrr! Brrrrrrrr! BRRRRRRRR!

I’ve lived in Delhi eight years and I’ve come to love the city and its ways. But one thing I still do not understand is the whistle. I cannot understand why you would pay a man to keep you awake at night. Many people have tried to explain to me, but it’s always the same explanation. People feel safer if they know the watchman is awake.

But what are all these watchmen guarding us from? Every residential neighbourhood in Delhi has them, every neighbourhood is gated. Where a friend lives, they recently put up razor wire to stop people climbing in over the fence.

But this is not Johannesburg. In my eight years in Delhi, I’ve never heard of a break-in.

I’ve often wondered if there’s something more to it. If people in Delhi have some deep-seated distrust of quiet: if they, in fact, sleep better when there’s noise outside.

Or is it a hangover from some time when knowing that the watchman was awake really was a matter of life and death, some practice from the old badlands around Delhi, which were the haunt of bandits not so many decades ago, that has crept into modern urban life?

Whatever the reason, after eight years in Delhi, I still haven’t got used to it, and I still have long, sleepless nights, haunted by that whistle.