Townies is a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities.

As a travel writer for a luxury magazine, I get to sleep in exotic locations on top of memory-foam mattresses with 800-thread-count sheets. It is a major indulgence, since for most of my childhood and my early teens, I slept on the floor on wet sheets and a rubber mat.

I grew up in a town called Garividi, on the outskirts of Visakhapatnam, a steel port city on the eastern coast of India. Garividi was slightly more advanced than a village because it had an iron ore factory that brought businesses, schools and a hospital there when I was a kid in the 1980s. But it didn’t have pharmacies selling Pull-Ups or doctors providing medication for chronic bed-wetters like me. And so, four to five nights a week, until high school, I woke up with a wet blanket under me and guilt over my head.

We lived in a small one-bedroom apartment, next to a noisy movie theater and opposite a dairy farm. My father, a college professor and the head of the household, occupied the only bed we had while my mother slept next to my little brother and me on the floor. She wanted to make sure we didn’t feel neglected. But before she put me to sleep, she gave me a nightly warning, “You better not be lazy and wet the bed again!”

Almost every morning she woke up cursing. After sending my dad off to work, she dragged the soaked linens out and washed them by hand while the neighbors watched. Everyone knew about my “condition.” “Who would marry someone who wets the bed every night?” she’d ask me. As loving as she was, staying up late to help me with my homework and cooking my favorite meals, she was just as harsh about my humiliating nocturnal habit. Neither of my parents could understand that I had no control over it.

Kaye Blegvad

The older I got, the harder it became. My best friend, Niru, who was among the few who accepted me, had no clue why I could never sleep over. I rarely spoke up at school, never played sports, failed at singing and dancing, sat in the back of the class and hid my low grades from my parents.

Then, when I was 15, my family moved to the United States. During the weeks we spent packing our things and the long hours on the plane, I convinced myself that my condition wouldn’t be a problem in America. Somehow the change in time or climate would solve it. I was eager to leave my past behind. When we moved in with my mom’s older sister — my pedamma — in Astoria, Queens, my mother warned me: “Don’t shame our family here. They don’t know about your problem. If they find out, they could kick us out sooner than we could afford to leave.”

For the first few weeks, things went smoothly — either because I was too scared of falling asleep or I was hardly drinking any water. Yet, one night, when I crashed on my aunt’s lavish living room couch after a long day of exploring the Museum of Natural History, my bladder emptied itself. There was no rubber mat underneath to stop the urine from seeping through the fancy, cream-colored cushions. I woke up early and panicked, rubbed the soiled area with a wet cloth, sprayed air freshener and flipped the cushion upside down, praying no one would find out.

But that afternoon, as I was reading the latest horror by R.L. Stine in the Queens library next to my dad, who was browsing the help wanted section of the newspaper, his cellphone rang. “They found what you did and we must go home immediately,” he told me.

“Who would marry someone who wets the bed every night?”

Blood rushed to my head and my cheeks burned. My secret was out. I sweated through my blouse during the 20 minute walk of shame back home. Both families sat down around the dining table to discuss my problem. My mother’s gaze was hotter than the chai she poured into our cups. Then Uncle Murthy, a generous man and my only sympathizer, looked at my sorry face and broke the silence. “How come you never took her to a urologist?”

We had come from a place where it was hard enough to get a doctor to take care of the most serious health issues, let alone something as private (and embarrassing) as bed-wetting. The doctors in our extended family just told my parents to be patient until I grew up, when my bladder would be bigger. But my uncle’s words gave me hope.

The next week, I took the 7 train to a clinic near Flushing to meet with a urologist my father had found. After running tests and taking my medical history, the doctor diagnosed primary nocturnal enuresis, involuntary nightly urination that continues past the age of 5. I was one of only a few adolescents to have this condition continue into the mid-teens.

Since behavioral-based treatments like nightly wakeups failed and bedwetting alarms held little hope at this later stage, the doctor put me on a common drug used to curb bed-wetting. Within a few months, I started to wake up dry.

The relief that came with the end of my bed-wetting era afforded me a new life. I started feeling more confident; I made friends; I joined moot court. Teachers started to like me, and encouraged me to apply for college scholarships. When I got into Fordham University, my parents couldn’t have been prouder. It seemed all my problems were behind me.

Upon graduation, I moved to Berkeley, worked for the Sierra Club, and eventually went back to school with hopes of becoming an environmental lawyer. Through an Indian outdoor group, I met and fell in love with an aspiring software entrepreneur. Although he came from a completely different world, growing up upper middle class in Silicon Valley, with an Indian father and a white mother, we bonded over our progressive values and love of nature.

But after we had dated for two years, he cheated on me, and then said he couldn’t marry me — he had always imagined that his wife would be white as well. I was devastated. I felt like my mother’s warnings had come back to haunt me. One morning, instead of waking up with a wet blanket underneath me, I woke up with a dark cloud above. The mild depression I had suffered for years turned clinical. I dropped out of law school when a mental breakdown landed me in the hospital.

This time, my family came to my rescue. They didn’t criticize me for my “condition.” They didn’t think it was my fault. They flew out to California and brought me back to New York, to their new home on Long Island. And this time they sought medical assistance. They took me to a psychiatrist and waited patiently for my recovery. They were everything they weren’t when I was growing up. My father said he believed in me when I was struggling to find a job in the tough economy. My mother listened and offered to help when I worried about my law school debt. Some nights, when I couldn’t bear to fall asleep, she would get in bed beside me and tell me Indian folk tales. My favorite one was about a father who teaches his sons that a single twig is far easier to break than a bunch of them together.

Five years later, I’m happy and healthy, and still in New York — the city that became my family’s home; the city that saved me twice.

A version of this article appeared in print on Dec. 11, 2011.

Lavanya Sunkara writes about travel and the environment.