I am put in mind of umbrellas because, as I write, there is a Singaporean gentleman wearing a white paper-mask and a long shirt embellished with the hotel emblem over his loose Punjabi pants, who is bringing down the canopies of the sturdy pool umbrellas all around me. The sun is warm and glares still at the swimmers in the pool who squint at its dazzle. Surely, I think, this is just a scheduled chore and little to do with the need for shade for patrons in this place to protect them from the red setting-sun.
In the drowsy twilight it is a joy to reflect on umbrellas, which speak for themselves sometimes: trendy, or torn with spokes exposed, tri-colour sometimes, but more often just black or brown and uniform in a crowd which resembles a tilted dark cloud heading home at the end of a working day in the rain, with heads bent to the wind—and sometimes they are seen comically whipped inside-out in that wind. Often, they are printed in patterns, and beautifully designed with matching spokes, once in a while showing dogs on leashes reminiscent of the 1930’s with long-frocked women leading those long-faced dogs—the epitome of femininity and fashion in days gone-by and a delight to behold. The mind’s eye remembers Japanese parasols embellished with designs intended to delight with their beauty—rarely in bold deep colours of sunset, though sometimes they are beautifully adorned with light sunrise colours… pink and yellow and peach. And it is impossible to forget the umbrellas used so effectively in Visconti’s Death in Venice—matrons, holding pastel-hued and fringed parasols, symbolically out of control, as the wind changes and Mahler’s overture heralds an inglorious-end for poor obsessed Von Aschenbach.
And in an instant, I am transported back to before this place and this time. I am in Nairobi, and my location is a magnificent art deco, turn-of-the-century, hotel where large-canopied white umbrellas, supported by thick varnish-protected timber poles and spokes, remain up all day and all night—a permanent fixture in a perfect bower with lofty palm trees and pots of tropical plants beneath—green and white, so cooling and serene. In this place, women wearing long, pale drifting frocks, wide-brimmed ribboned hats accompanied by haughty Afghan hounds, would have belonged perfectly in the shade—once-upon-a-time. That was then, and this is now, but the whisper of the past lingers on in unexpected places and at unexpected times—and often, I have noticed, at the setting of the sun.