Where jackets walked, umbrellas danced

THE mist in the 1990s had its own authority. It rolled down from Jakhu, slipping through the pines, draping the Mall until even Scandal Point dissolved into whiteness. We walked by sound, not sight — a cough here, a laugh there, the peanut seller’s cry stretched thin: “Garam… garam… moongphali!” Shimla in our bachpan wasn’t a city, it was a school play. Jackets were costumes, umbrellas props, and every foggy morning a fresh performance.

Jackets were never bought; they were inherited. A brother’s windcheater, a father’s corduroy, a cousin’s discarded blazer — handed down like winter folklore. Each carried history: a scuffed elbow from a tumble near Lakkar Bazaar, a letter forgotten in the pocket, the faint smell of someone else’s perfume that lingered. To wear such a jacket was to wear memory stitched in wool and corduroy.

Each day, we set out in the proud uniform of hill culture. Amit wore a faded bomber from his cousin, Neeraj twirled a black umbrella so wide it announced him before he arrived, and I carried my oversized corduroy jacket with a modest chequered umbrella that looked borrowed from a retired headmaster. In Shimla, walking was fashion, not function. Umbrellas and jackets weren’t accessories; they were identities — subtle hierarchies stitched in cloth.

We strutted through the mist like we owned it. My pockets rattled with toffees or a folded Ritz ticket, Amit’s jingled with coins for peanuts, and Neeraj insisted his jacket hid a stitched-in lucky charm — though we suspected it was only an old handkerchief. Umbrellas — well, they were for style, fencing duels on the Mall, walking a girl home under a shared canopy, and, on desperate afternoons, became weapons against monkeys lunging for our softy cones from Loveena.

It was play to us then, heritage in hindsight.

Years later, when the Himachal High Court recalled Shimla’s vanishing “umbrella-and-jacket culture,” it was like watching an old photograph develop in water. They weren’t talking of fashion, but of a way of life — our long walks, our collisions, our laughter.

Cars may have conquered the spaces where umbrellas once clashed and jackets once strutted, but those mornings survive — pressed in memory like a rhododendron petal in a diary.

Walking was never just transit, it was belonging. Jackets were diaries sewn in fabric, umbrellas flags of childhood. The true heritage of a town lies less in its buildings than in the sound of footsteps in the mist. Cars may take us farther, but only walking ever took us home.

The high court is right. In the hills, an umbrella was never just for rain, nor a jacket just for cold — they were how we carried our childhood on our backs. And like every school play, the stage remains in memory long after the curtains fall.