At Sainsbury's, my wife bought us two collapsible umbrellas so small, they turned out to be useless against the gentle London drizzle. She returned them on her last day there, complaining they were as good as new but unlikely to survive a New Delhi monsoon, hence, she no more had use of them. Not that umbrellas have done any good to us, no matter where we've bought them. They've been pinched by the staff, sprung leaks, disappeared, warped, refused to open, turned upside down, fed a colony of bugs, been borrowed and never returned, so that every time the monsoon comes, we're unprepared yet again for the rain.
New Delhi has a snobbish indifference towards umbrellas, or rain, or both, which is why almost no one else seems to have any. Considering it sits at the edge of a desert, such an unconcern might be understandable. But that doesn't account for people in commercial business districts cowering under laptop bags to keep out of the wet when all the time it's seeping through the feet instead. Yesterday, my daughter waded knee-deep through Gurgaon's gurgling streams that seemed to have replaced the potholed roads to get to her car that she then thought better of driving for fear of getting water in the exhaust. At the same time that she was trying to keep herself afloat, I was looking to borrow an umbrella from someone in office to get to my car, but no one in an office of 70 people owned up to having one.
I buy umbrellas as regularly as people buy groceries, prevailing upon the driver to pick up a few whenever we're close to a market. But they're never around when I need them - not in the car, not at home, and never at office either. "Did you filch it?," I asked my driver once. "I needed it to get home," he said. So why didn't he bring it back the following day? "My daughter wanted it to go to school," he explained. At other times, his wife, or neighbour, or sister-in-law who's arrived from the village, would need it, necessitating his having to part with something that was never his. Nor do umbrellas favour my son, or daughter, who seem to arrive at work, or home, looking like they've run through a carwash.
So it's hardly surprising that we land up at parties bedraggled, wet and barefeet. Hosts have been known to send us umbrellas along with invitations, but wouldn't you know it, the damn things disappear into some black hole from which it might be easier to mine gold than brollies. We've tried replacements - raincoats, gumboots - but they seem to share a similar history of loss. As a result, we've reconciled to an umbrella-free life, no matter the humiliation it causes us.
But this week we didn't need umbrellas so much as aquatic gears, given how the ground in front of our house turned into a lake with every downpour. So sodden was each attempt to get to the car that it began to grow mold inside. Yesterday, my wife refused to make a dash to the porch from the car, preferring to wait for the rain to stop. When it didn't, she rang the cook to ask him to fetch her a cup of tea in the car. And wouldn't you know it, he came screened from the rain by an umbrella that, only moments before, he'd claimed was not be found in the house.
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