New Delhi, Aug. 2 -- I'm going to be away from home for a fortnight. Like any Mumbai resident, I'm less worried about missing home than what those two weeks in the monsoon will do to my closets.

I'm already imagining coming back to mold-laden clothes, the smell of dampness from every corner, the creeping horror of discovering one odd item after another has caught the bug. The inevitable ritual of washing everything, only for it to refuse to dry because of the very monsoon that caused the problem in the first place.

As a preventive measure, I've been hunting for moisture absorbents across e- and q-commerce apps, only to find them unavailable or out of stock everywhere. The strange thing about this scarcity is that nobody seems to be comp...