Core problem - snore

A friend in Brussels shares a studio apartment with this guy. The roommate is a nice guy. He is fun to talk to and spend time with. But, the fun ends when he starts sleeping.

The studio has a single bedroom. So, they sleep in the same room. The roommate comes back from work at around 4:30 PM. Reaching the apartment, he goes straight to sleep. He wakes up at around 7:30 PM. The friend comes back from work by then. They cook dinner. After dinner the roommate goes back to sleep. Things will be normal and pleasant till the roommate starts snoring. It starts as soft breathing and slowly gains momentum. Friend says that he has never heard or even imagined of such a grand snore in his life. He is sure that the roommate’s snore has supersonic and ultrasonic components when it gains considerable momentum.

Well, everything has got a threshold point. One fine day the friend casually (he had actually planned meticulously to make it sound casual) brought this to the notice of the roommate.
Friend: You know what? You have a quite prominent snore…
Roommate: Really! My dad snores really heavy.
Friend: Oh! Yours too is a bit audible. [Abe… Maine tere ko kharrate ka baap samja… Tera baap tho tere se bhi bada baap nikla]
Roommate: Is it? If I snore too loud, give me a gentle poke. We used to do it to dad.

That trick indeed worked. But, it solved the problem only a wee bit. When the roommate’s snores went unbearable, the friend poked him gently. The snore stopped. But, only for a short time. He started snoring again. As this continued long into the night, the friend’s poking grew stronger. He was afraid that he would one day end up thrashing the roommate black and blue. Also, he had to reach out for the roommate to poke him every time. This irritated the friend more.

As they say, Necessity is the mother of inventions. The friend invented a new trick. He found that he was able to extract the same result by clapping his hands instead of poking the roommate. When the snore got louder, the friend clapped. This broke the rhythm of the roommate’s snore and he went quiet for some time. Sometimes the friend clapped his hands so strongly that the roommate woke up from sleep. The roommate would sit up and start blinking. At those times the friend pretended to be asleep. There were times when the roommate responded to the friend’s claps by himself clapping in sleep. The friend expected the Belgian police would knock at their door one night under the neighbors’ complaints. Luckily that never happened.

The roommate wakes up at around 5 AM and gets ready to go to office. It is after this that the friend gets a few hours of peaceful sleep. The friend is sorry for the girl who would marry the roommate. The friend doesn’t believe in the policy – ‘forgive and forget’. He has cursed that the roommate’s future wife would snore louder than the roommate.

The friend and his roommate are traveling to India tomorrow. Above anything, the friend is happy that he would not have to sleep with scary background music anymore. He is also afraid that he would continue clapping while sleeping at home. He doesn’t want his parent to come to conclusion that their son’s stay at Brussels made him crazy.

He is also worried about one more thing. The roommate would be traveling with him in the same flight. He is afraid of what could happen if the roommate snores in the flight. Could the supersonic sound ruin the flight’s engines? Would the snore make the other passengers violent? Can it drive the pilots crazy? The friend is one scared soul now. He has decided to talk to the roommate all the way through the journey, without allowing him to sleep. If he fails, he has decided to teach the other passengers the clapping lessons.