Smell

Smell is the first marker of what to anticipate when you walk into a room. Think about it.

What’s the first smell that hits you when you walk into your mother’s kitchen? I get the smell of friend onions and tomatoes usually; my mum uses it as a base for most of her curries.

When I visit my aunt every once in a while, I get this damp sort of smell when I’m in her living room — almost as if the house has been shut for a while. She doesn’t clean up very often, which explains the smell.

When I visit my mum, there’s no smell in the living room (I sleep on the couch). But when I turn in at night, and lay a sheet on the couch with a quilt on top, I get the smell of detergent mixed with fabric softener. It’s comforting - not the smell, but the feeling of being wrapped in a quilt. The quilt was a saree my grandmother once wore and then discarded and turned into a quilt. I feel good holding onto a part of her.

Like rooms, people too have smells. My best friend smells of strawberries and all kinds of fresh things. She thinks I smell minty. Someone I knew smelled musky, not the good kind.

Some people smell of sweat and salt, others of smoke. Babies smell of milk (and occasionally of poop).

Beds smell of our partners when they’ve left them and we’re still in. They smell warm and syrupy, the kind of almost ripe smell that can come only from a person who has just woken up.

Death smells weird. The one time I witnessed it was just after my grandfather had died. He had died of a heart attack. They had to change his clothes and because he had soiled himself, there was an unbearable stench in the house. It doesn’t make for a pleasant memory because in my mind, it is the smell along with people bawling, howling and crying.

When you cremate someone, you can smell the burning of human flesh. They have electric furnaces these days but in the days when wood was used for cremating bodies, the smell was terrible. If the skull wasn’t completely charred, they’d poke it with a stick to make sure it crumbled.

Of all these smells, death has the worst smell. Or maybe the smell of death triggers the worst memories.