Member-only story
The Scents of India
How my nose tells me where in the world the plane touched down.
Arrival
When one disembarks at Chhatrapati Airport in Mumbai, the scent of India’s largest city engulfs the traveler before she passes immigration. The second wave assaults your senses once you step outside the air-conditioned terminal into the arrival area. Here, your vision becomes overloaded with colors and shapes and persons of all personalities.
My nose tells me where I landed, even if I did not know it. The scent of India is completely different than the scents that you experience once setting foot on the tarmac in Africa. Each induces a sensory flashback that reminds you of the first time you set foot on the continent or subcontinent.
I imagine that someone traveling from India to the US or Europe has a similar sensation. Our home soil does not smell foreign to us. It evokes no extraordinary motion as we are used to it. It is the exceptional impressions that rattle memory.
When entering India, the olfactory senses are overloaded as much as the visual senses. That combination is supremely potent.
Part of the sensory overload is prior deprivation. When we fly long distances, sensory inputs are purposefully muted. There is no music but noise-canceling headgear; the…
