There was a man who stood outside the Ernakulam junction every evening with a bundle of black umbrellas. He did not sell them. He lent them. You gave your name, took an umbrella into the rain, and returned it the next day. That was the whole arrangement. My college friends thought he was mad.
People must steal them, I said to him once, dripping, borrowing my third that month.
Some, he agreed cheerfully. Maybe one in ten does not come back.
Then you lose money.
Then somebody, somewhere, has an umbrella when they need one, and does not have to think about me to use it. That is not losing.
His name was Bahuleyan. He had worked forty years for the railways and drawn a pension and buried a wife, and this was what he had decided to do with the long empty evenings — stand in the rain so others need not. He kept a small notebook of names. Not to chase them. To remember, he said, that I met them.
I moved away. I came back for a wedding six years later, and it was raining, and the space outside the junction where he used to stand was empty, and I felt the particular grief of a small thing gone.
Then I saw the umbrellas. A young woman, maybe my age, standing where he had stood, a bundle of black under her arm. I asked her, foolishly, if she was his daughter.
No, she said. I borrowed one, years ago, and never returned it. When I read he had died, I felt I owed the umbrella back. But there was no one to give it to. She shrugged, and rain ran off the one she held over us both. So I brought nine more. It seemed the only honest way to return it.
I took an umbrella from her. I gave my name. She wrote it down in a small notebook, to remember that she met me, and I walked into the rain carrying something that had been handed forward so many times it no longer belonged to anyone, which is perhaps the only way a thing becomes truly kind.