The Blue Umbrella

Ruskin Bond, in his story ‘The Blue Umbrella’ describes Binya, a young Garhwali girl who successfully fights back against the thief who stole her umbrella, but quickly forgives him and hands him back the umbrella as she is deeply disturbed after the thief is made an outcast by the community. Perhaps this story is representative of the community living in those parts of the Himalayas, who are toughened by a very difficult life, but living in close proximity with nature also makes them very sensitive and spiritual.

I had a live encounter with Binya around 10 years back, when I was still unaware of the above story until it got made into a feature film some time back. On the way for a trek to a place in the interiors of Garhwal, and on the first evening had stopped to spend the night at a small town. Having nothing else to do, I found myself visiting a small village temple in the evening, crowded by local people. Alone, and slightly uncomfortable at an outside having intruded into something personal to the village folks, I tried to partially hide in a corner and watch the proceedings. Suddenly, I found something drop into my hands, it was a large yellow flower. In a flash, the little girl who handed the same moved away and disappeared among the crowd, leaving one flabbergasted and wondering at the possibilities of this encounter. Did she notice the discomfort of an outsider and wanted to console him and welcome him in? One will never know.

I was reminded with shivers of a story, by Maupassant I believe, in which a man is traveling through dense endless forests in a train. In the dead of the night, he sees a fire lit in a clearing and a lone man with a long beard sitting in front of it. In a flash, the scene has passed, but the mystery as to what the lone man was doing in the middle of the forest in the middle of the night remains with the author forever. Coming back to the above trip, later on, the trip ‘was’ successful and I was able to successfully reach the point I had planned to go to. However, it is now diluted in memory, but the impact of the above incident is such that it is still as fresh in memory as if it had occurred yesterday.

There are quite a few people around who have lived their lives focusing on this journey aspect, not caring or having a specific goal. Ruskin Bond may be one, who could have returned to England after the partition and become materially rich and successful, but chose to remain in Mussourie in a modest house, content with the mountain life and simple village folk. Bill Aitken is a strange case, having completed his education in Scotland, and migrating to India he chose to lead the life of a simple villager, working as a gardener, tilling fields, collecting firewood, tending buffaloes in the Kumaun Himalayas and traveling the length and breadth of the country exclusively in second class on metre gauge branch lines when he did leave the mountains. To quote him from his book ‘Branch Line to Eternity’ “Main line traffickings were forgettable, but to enter a branch line carriage was to arouse a sense of adventure and open a door to the unknown”. At another place, he writes, “The biggest problem of all is to convince polite society that what they consider real life is actually only the poorer half of it.” How true.

There are two types of journeys in life, one which have a goal, and others which do not. While having a aim, ambition and goal is considered good, such goals belong to the realm of humans and are created and executed by us, and can also shield us from the infinite possibilities around. For journeys which do not have a goal or a purpose, everything around is an adventure, a discovery. One may not reach anywhere or accumulate much, but that may be a small price to pay for where one is and what one possesses all the time.

Often, we live in our small little houses, but forget to look up at the blue umbrella that houses everyone of us.