Fragrances

As the Kirana store uncle is almost done billing the items my mother had placed on his table, I reach just in time with three bottles of deodorant in my hands. “What will you do with three?” my mom asks. “It’s 2 plus 1,” the Kirana uncle replies before I can answer. Back then, deodorant bottles were treated like that distant relative who gets the last invitation to the wedding. If the budget allows, they are most welcome. Come with family. Two plus one. But if the budget doesn’t permit it, let’s be honest, nobody’s going to terribly miss them. “We already have a bottle at home,” my mom says in a tone that tells me these relatives are not to be invited. I go back with the bottle family to see them off at their aisle station. “But that perfume was different,” I tell my mom on our rickshaw ride back home. For many years, I did not know the difference between deodorant and perfume. “Finish the one at home first,” my mom replies as if it’s Bournvita. We sit silently for the remaining ten minutes of the ride, smelling the cycle-rickshaw puller.

For our vacations, I have been handed the responsibility of being responsible, while my wife saunters around every damn shop without a care in the world. I sometimes slightly wish for her to get lost in the crowd for a few seconds, so that next time onwards, I at least won’t have to carry her phone in my pocket. A few seconds of panic might make her realize that one should always keep their phone with them. That’s the whole point of mobile phones. To keep it with you when you are mobile. Why else did we move away from landlines? I think my blood pressure is rising while writing these sentences. Anyway, we have just done our immigration check at the airport, and I am keeping the passports back in that zipped folder with the boarding passes like a focused six-year-old who is arranging his first-ever geometry box. This simple task takes me a few seconds, and when I look up, I see that my wife has waddled away like a toddler to the duty-free section. She is looking at some perfumes. I tell her I have packed a deodorant. It’s a joke. By now, I know the difference between deodorant and perfumes. She ends up buying some Issey Miyake. I end up with the task of keeping it in my bag. Over the next few days, I would start loving the fragrance. And over the next few months, I’d start loving everything about fragrances.

In his book “The Perfect Scent,” Chandler Burr writes briefly about how little we know of fragrances and their connection with triggering a memory of years back. Science has progressed enough in the areas of vision or hearing, heck we know what every single receptor or air vibration is doing in our body, but the scientists still haven't scratched the surface about smell. It’s a Nobel waiting to be given. The only powerful smell and the word related to smell we know of is petrichor; thanks to the Mumbai rains and the people living in Mumbai who keep putting it up in their stories. However, when it rains for two weeks continuously the word quickly changes from petrichor to betichod, I wonder why. While there are phrases like smelling danger or this smells fishy or I smell a rat, fragrances have very rarely made it to our daily vocabulary. There isn’t a way of describing a smell that would exactly describe the smell. It’s always burnt wood with rose or something like that. Nobody can guess what the other person is talking about. The reason probably is how we associate those smells with our lives. While it may be burnt wood for some rich guy in France who goes for bonfires occasionally, the same smell can be described as village cooking in an Indian context. The biggest nightmare I had when corona hit me was not the fever, but the loss of smell. I felt vulnerable. “Why can’t I smell the adrak in my tea?” I’d constantly whine. The headache that the tea was supposed to cure was being canceled out by my cry for being unable to smell ginger. I was miserable. In hindsight, there have been many instances where our olfactory senses have superseded our visual or hearing senses. Water is the most basic and apt example. Looks fine, smells bad? No drinky, says our brain. Author’s note: olfactory, not to be confused with Ola factory where all the exploded scooters come for a meet and greet, means something related to smell.

In "Scent of a Woman," when Al Pacino identifies the exact perfume that kid’s teacher was wearing, I clapped. Fleurs de Rocaille. Flowers from the brook. I was fascinated. I wanted to be that man. How crazy would it be if we could identify different smells and describe them in a brief sentence. I’d want that superpower. It’s the true testament of a writer, I feel. Or of a life fully lived. Summarizing the smell in a sentence using a life experience that has been intimate yet relatable. Uff. Devastatingly beautiful. My nose or my words aren’t capable of that yet. Neither they ever will be, I feel. At this point in life, I have realized that all I am capable of smelling is disappointment with myself. In that regard, my nose is fine.

It’s a seven-hour-long flight, and I am wondering to myself if my wife will buy another perfume today. My middle-class upbringing wouldn’t allow me to spend that much money on a bottle of fragrance. But I am secretly hoping she buys it or at least samples it. I want to try a fragrance that was released in 2023 by Diptyque. However, I don’t want to pay for it. Like Jean-Claude Ellena said, “I'm not interested in luxury, but I'm interested in the quality of life that is led by people who are interested in luxury.”