(Published yesterday...)
They said it would rain; then they said it would not. And it has not. Maybe the plains in Spain are as soggy as we should be right now, who knows. But as we wait – in vain, so far – we can take time off to contemplate the higher things in life. Like the dry skies above, karma and that sheltering canopy over our not-yet-drizzled-on heads: the umbrella.
I feel occasionally a bit like Renuka, wife of the sage Jamadagni, who got into a bit of a contretemps with the sun – she took too long to retrieve his arrows one hot and sunny afternoon and blamed the God Surya and his scorching rays for the delay, the Mahabharata says. Being a rather testy kind of chap, the sage shot an arrow at the sun who, a trifle nervous at an attack of this sort, offered the lady an umbrella. And thus was born that now ubiquitous shelter against sun and rain alike. It is seen through the world as a symbol of honorific or royalty, from the ancient Siam to Egypt, from South America to China, Africa and beyond. Locally, Maharashtrian culture salutes the umbrella, used to endow deserving folks with the honour of royal lineage or god-like qualities, and has the title of Chhatrapati, or Lord of the Umbrella, for the Maratha prices – Shivaji among them.
Many years ago, when I was a mere child, I decided I would play with my mother’s parasol. It had that typical Japanese curve and shaded from the palest cream into a peachy pink. For a small girl, it was fascinatingly pretty, and for a child who took things like clocks and pens apart to see what made them work, it was a surefire magnet. Waiting for Mother to look the other way, I managed to grab the parasol, open it and, to the orchestration of youthful caterwauling, got my hand stuck in its mechanism. There was blood and tears and lots of ice cream, but thenceforth there was also a lifelong aversion to anything that even faintly resembled an umbrella.
So when the monsoon threatened to arrive this year, it came time to check the general state of protection in our household. Since I travelled more by car than any-how else and since an umbrella would be more convenient than a raincoat for my morning trek to and from the gym, I had to find one. I found many that were…well…boring. You could take a walk down any street in the rain and see many of these bobbing above your head. The names were familiar – Stag from Ebrahim Currim, Sun, MH International, Shree Datta and more. There were newsprint umbrellas, and candy-striped ones, Disney cartoon characters, clear plastic, polka dots, block colours and an occasional rainbow swirl, all priced between Rs99 and Rs450. I gulped as I gazed at a Burberry classic umbrella for ‘price on request’, which generally means that you would not want to take it out in the pouring rain. I found a neat confection that had a little light inside it that you could switch on to read with – why would you want to read in a rainstorm, I was asked. I dug through the lofts at home to locate a laquered bamboo piece from Japan via Geneva that would probably melt in the rain, but would make a great fashion statement. I even checked out a story about a young woman who custom made umbrellas with unique designs and prints at a feasible price of about Rs500, but she had not set up a sales strategy yet, I learned.
At the neighbourhood department store I saw an elegant shades-of-grey umbrella (Rs495) that would match perfectly with my car; but why would my car need an umbrella, I wondered. I found a long magenta umbrella (Rs295) that made my face look decidedly bilious when I held it over my head. There was even a bright yellow and white one with the silliest smiley faces all over it (Rs560) that made me grin, but didn’t endow me with any vestige of adulthood. So my choice was mass market ‘safe’ blah. I finally picked a folding umbrella that I just knew would collapse pathetically over my head in the first blast of monsoon wind. But at a wonderfully low Rs99, and though made of nastily cheap fabric that showed no signs of being durable or even waterproof, it didn’t matter. It was a bright and almost fluorescent red, made my face glow and my mood lift and the wet that would envelop me didn’t seem at all important.
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