The Red Umbrella

I liked rains, but that was before I came to Mumbai. Also, I hate change. After coming here, though, and seeing Mumbai rain, and how it never stops, never slows down, and just keeps on showering day and night, my preferences for rain have changed. I hate rains now, and I hate the fact that my liking for the rain has changed too.

For the third time in a row, I had been caught in that rain. Like a whining child that just doesn’t stop crying, the rain fell down all around us and drenched us all. The puddles were more dark sludge than the clean mud I remembered from my good old childhood days, and I didn’t want to step into those. On top of that, as luck would have it, I didn’t have my umbrella with me that day either.

I had no choice but to stand under the leaky old bus-stop, waiting for the rain to subside just a little bit, and then venture homewards. As the rain pounded overhead, rattling the corrugated dilapidated tin sheet overhead, wanting to make it come crashing down on my head, all I wished was that I hadn’t forgotten my umbrella at work. So, as I sat there, contemplating the exact reasons and the precise moment when I forgot to pick up my umbrella from the desk, the scarred old dirty man with the bright red umbrella came and sat next to me under the old bus stop as well.

I didn’t pay much attention to him initially. Truth be told, at the moment the mini-vortex in the black stinking water seemed more interesting (but only because it was repulsive and disgusting), but after a few moments, I was bored from watching the dance of the filthy water, bored about the fact that I was stranded and stuck in the middle of nowhere, in a city that I barely knew, and a strange stranger sitting beside me.

There seemed something wrong with that old man there; a manic glint in his eyes, perhaps. He seemed detached from the world, the city, and the storm that surrounded him. I wasn’t too sure if it was the glazed look in the eye, or his bushy unkempt hair, or his dirty matted beard, but there was something sad, and yet almost sinister, about him as he sat there. Almost like a wounded dog, gone wild and unpredictable, and although it broke your heart seeing him there, you dared not pet it for you were sure it would bite your hand if you tried.

As these thoughts ran amok in my head, the man sat silently, staring at me with his smoldering sight. As always in moments like this, panic seized me – was this man capable of reading minds? Had he heard all the things that I was saying to myself about him? Maybe the analogy of this angry old man and the wounded crazy dog wasn’t the best, and I hoped and wished that I hadn’t thought those thoughts. But, of course, it was too late for any of that. I had thought those things already, and he knew exactly what was going on in my mind. His eyes told me about the anger he was feeling, how his hands were itching to strangle me. If only I had known how to shut up, and kept my thoughts bottled up inside, none of this would have happened.

The grey clouds rumbled again, while the grey hair on the old man’s head shook with anger. The lines on his face deepened, like angry potholes aiming for the next set of wheels, desperately trying to break them. His fingers clutched tightly to the red umbrella, and I wished he would leave. He had an umbrella – what did he have to fear?

But he didn’t leave. Even with the red umbrella, held tightly between his hands, he sat there. Even with his mad anger, dripping down like the grey water dripping down his matted grey hair, he sat there. Smoldering in silence, with his eyes fixed on me, he sat there. I was scared, but I dared not look away from his eyes. There was something almost primordial about the way he kept staring, as though he would attack me at the first sign of weakness that I would show. In spite of the chills because of the steady stream of rain water pouring down the back of my neck, I resisted the urge to move even slightly. And thus, we sat, while the rain poured from the sky, and the water gushed through the streets. We sat, motionless, while the mud mixed with the dirt and the filth, and flowed through the sewers. We sat, silent, while the mud squelched beneath flip-flops and sandals, and tied dirty old plastic bags between the toes of the men and women and children running in the puddles, racing with their lives, racing against the city. We watched each other, while the city roared around us, and moved around us, till we became the immobile, absolute center of the city that surrounded us, beneath that old, dilapidated, rejected, near-shattered bus stop.

“I hate this city,” his voice rumbled. He said it softly, but it carried over the noise of the buses as they waded through the water. “This filth, this stench, this knee deep water everywhere. I hate the rain, and the way it never seems to stop!”

“But, you have an umbrella,” I said, while my eyes flitted for the tiniest moment from his eyes to the red umbrella in his hand, and then back into his eyes. Even though we had started communicating, I was still scared of this man, and didn’t wish for him to see my weaker side.

He looked down at the umbrella, but the look of anger didn’t leave his face. Instead, a mild tinge of lost love seemed to be added to it as he looked at the bright red umbrella that could so easily protect him from the downpour.

“Yeah, I do have an umbrella,” he said in the same soft, rumbling voice. “But I wish I hadn’t. And it’s not like I can use it, either – it’s broken.”

A short cackle of laughter followed the stranger’s strange words, as he looked back at me again, the anger in his eyes more pronounced than ever – yet, I knew that this anger was not directed at me. It was an anger aimed at something much bigger. Instantly, I was reminded of that wounded dog again, and I fixed my eyes into his again.

“This is my daughter’s old umbrella. It’s broken, and it’s useless, but she’s not here anymore so she can’t take it back. I wish I didn’t have it with me, though. I wish she had it instead of me, but my wishes don’t come true. I don’t have my daughter anymore, but I have her old, broken, useless red umbrella.”

“What happened to her?” I asked, still not looking away from his eyes.

“She was swallowed by the city,” he said, and he got up. Tenderly touching his tattered feet to the black water that waited just beyond the shelter of the bus stop, he looked back one more time at me, and spat in disgust as the revolting black sludge sucked in his feet, “Swallowed whole by the city.”

He turned away from me, wading into the knee deep water. I waited for him to whip open his umbrella; because I knew even a broken one can give some respite from the rain. He didn’t, though, preferring to feel the impact of the thousand droplets hitting him from all around all at once. And all the while, he kept an iron grip on the bright red umbrella, like a red beacon of sanity and safety in a cold, steely, grey world.

I wanted to call out to him, ask him, plead with him, beg in front of him, to let me have the red umbrella that he wasn’t using, so that I, too, may go home; but I didn’t. I was still too scared of the wounded dog, and didn’t want to stick out my hand to pet him, lest he bite it.

~

Written for Magpie Tales.