Umbrella morals, revisited

It was on a monsoon evening that I ventured out without an umbrella. It was bright and sunny around four o’clock in the afternoon. But rain it did as I started walking back home, first, large raindrops on my head and suddenly a cloudburst, and it was raining cats and dogs with me wishing comically that it was raining umbrellas instead.

Not that I have never bought an umbrella for unseen emergencies. I owned an array of them acquired during my various travels from Buenos Aires to London. But one by one they have all disappeared from the rack where I used to keep them. You can blame my forgetful nature that resulted in not only umbrellas but house keys and coin purses doing the vanishing trick. Invariably the umbrella gets lost in transit while I am traipsing around the city in auto rickshaws.

Picture this. Clutching the said object in my hand I climb into my seat while I place the appendage in the seat next to mine, "which you should never never do," admonishes my sister. "The umbrella should always lie in your lap," she says. She is right. No autowallah up to this day has appeared at my doorstep with or without a grin to return my lost property. The flip side of this argument points to the number of colourful parasols that must be hanging like Divali decorations in any poor rickshawalla’s abode!

When I was in college we had an essay called Umbrella Morals written by the English humorist, A G Gardiner. As we all know, an Englishman and his umbrella are inseparable just as much as his opening topic of conversation inevitably is the weather. Gardiner’s argument is directed especially to club members who ‘inadvertently’ pick up new umbrellas from the stand leaving behind old worn-out ones for the latecomers. Gardiner would point this out not as ‘theft’ but only refers to them as umbrella morals. Indeed this can lead to comical situations at times.

In E M Forster’s Howards End, the rich lady at a Beethoven concert inadvertently (here a genuine mistake) picks up impoverished Leonard Bast’s tattered umbrella and walks away in the rain. Bast, seated next to her at the concert, finds her address on the left-behind-umbrella and walks up to her upscale home to return it. Thus starts a friendship that ends in a tragicomedy.

Well, coming back to the deluge I was caught in, I finally had to take refuge in an idling rickshaw at the stand. The driver refused to drive me home in the downpour, since his auto had no side screens and driving in it would be as bad as waking in the rain. I sat shivering as it had gone cold; the driver turned to me from his shelter under a tree and chided me for having ventured out without an umbrella. Touché.