The Blue Umbrella
Knowing the Unknown Desires
While cleaning my book racks this year’s beginning, I came across The Blue Umbrella by Ruskin Bond. I remember reading it before, probably in my early teens. But reading those books again is a different experience.
When you re-read books, you develop different perspectives regarding characters. As you already know the storyline, you see things differently. I always thought movies hit differently when we watch them again as adults. Be it Coco, Nemo, or Brave, they all feel different than they did before. It’s the same feeling with books too.
This book focuses on Bindiya, who lives in a small village with her mother and brother. She once saw a tourist carrying a fancy lady-like blue umbrella and fell in love with it. It was made from silk and decorated with fancy laces. She sold her lucky charm in exchange for that blue umbrella.
Everyone in her village fancied that blue umbrella, as such things were foreign to them. All the village kids and adults were in love with that blue umbrella. But as they couldn’t buy it, they soon started talking badly about it:
“How useless!!”
“A fancy way to waste money!!”
“Isn’t even useful in rain”
“A stupid way to attract attention” etc.
Everyone envies her but not more than old Ram Bharose, a fellow villager. He tried to buy it several times, even when the color faded. In a desperate attempt to acquire it, he planned on stealing but failed. In the end, Bindiya felt sorry and gifted that umbrella to him. He felt ashamed and gifted her with a new lucky charm.
When I read The Blue Umbrella before, I thought the book’s moral was “Be kind and open-hearted”. And villains seemed like bad people who did bad things. But reading again, they seemed just like other humans. Like everyone else, they get envious, jealous, and selfish at times. I guess it’s like how the saying goes; “Seeing people closer, makes everyone look human”.
This book helped me look at things differently or maybe it is us who now see things differently. I don’t think I understood before that being an adult doesn’t change everything about us. Kids and both adults can have desires. Desires that don’t emerge from the usefulness of something but rather the need to just have something for oneself. That saying “because I just want it” is ok. And what others think doesn’t matter as long as you do what you love.
