The Blue Umbrella

“The umbrella was like a flower, a great blue flower that had sprung up on the dry brown hillside.”

In exchange for her lucky leopard’s claw pendant, Binya acquires a beautiful blue umbrella that becomes the envy of everyone in her village―especially Ram Bharosa, the shopkeeper.

Set in the picturesque hills of Garhwal, Ruskin Bond’s short and humorous novella perfectly captures village life, where innocence, jealousy, heroism, and redemption intertwine in the simplest yet most touching ways.

Ruskin Bond's first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written several novels (including Vagrants in the Valley, A Flight of Pigeons and Delhi Is Not Far), essays, poems and children's books, many of which have been published by Penguin India. He has also written over 500 short stories and articles that have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993 and the Padma Shri in 1999.