A knack for losing umbrellas

IN his masterpiece Forgetting, Robert Lynd wrote: ‘I dare not carry an umbrella for fear of losing it. To go through life without ever having lost an umbrella has even the grimmest-jawed umbrella-carrier ever achieved this?’

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The memory of losing my first umbrella is still fresh in my mind. I was then a teenager. It was a monsoon day there were dark clouds in the sky since the morning. It had been raining in fits and starts. The Meteorological Department’s forecast for the day was spot on.

I had to go out to get groceries from a nearby shop. I quickly took the umbrella that my father had inherited from his father. It was a big black umbrella with a cane handle bent at the end like an angling hook. My grandfather used it with much care because it was a farewell gift given to him by the school where he had taught for more than three decades. After his death, the article was preserved in an old tin trunk. Using this umbrella was strictly prohibited. But urgency and the non-availability of another umbrella at that moment, and above all the teenage temptation to do something that had been prohibited, compelled me to violate the inviolable rule of our family in my father’s absence.

To my utter shock and embarrassment, when I returned from the grocer’s shop, I discovered that I had forgotten to bring back my father’s heirloom. It was partially because the fickle weather had deceived me. I had not needed the umbrella when I left the shop as the rain had stopped by then.

I was not only scolded but also thrashed for losing the umbrella. We left no stone unturned to find it, but in vain. My father was so deeply hurt that he did not talk to me for a couple of days. From then on, I did not dare carry an umbrella with me for a long time.

When the monsoon arrives every year, my apprehension of losing an umbrella resurfaces and I always try my best to avoid using it. I wear a raincoat while riding a motorcycle. But it is difficult to carry a raincoat on every occasion.

Fortunately, umbrellas of substandard quality are now easily available, and that too at very cheap prices. The price of a strip of antibiotics to deal with the common cold caused by getting wet in the rain is higher than that of an umbrella sold on the footpath. Besides, I get all our broken and almost discarded umbrellas repaired just before the monsoon, exclusively for my use. Of course, most of them eventually disappear, lengthening the list of my lost umbrellas.