Patchouli, Wood, Musk, Amber, Rose, Ylang Ylang, Jasmin
FREEDOM — in a perfume.
There’s a perfume that my family got from my aunt when I was a teenager.
I can smell it now, blending with the smells of a country evening as I hurry away up the quiet country road from the farm where I was born. It’s Friday evening and I’m on my way to town. I’m wearing jeans, a grey mohair sweater that I inherited from my cousin and a gorgeous leather saddlebag that also came from my aunt’s hotel.
She would send “stuff” to us that guests at her country hotel had forgotten and I commandeered this perfume and the saddlebag. I loved the perfume and used it sparingly until it was all gone. It had patchouli in it.
I remember Ken, my parachuting instructor, standing in front of me, real close, checking my harness, telling me huskily that he liked my perfume. Normally nobody got that close to me unless I’d had a couple of drinks, but this was life or death.
In my naivete, I didn’t imagine, you know…
Or that less than an hour later he would be peeling my fingers away from his own shoulderstraps as I begged him:
“Jump with me, Ken. Jump with me!”
I must have asked hundreds of cosmetics assistants in the course of the years about it and each time I got the same answer:
“We don’t sell it anymore in this country”.
Then one day I found it in a 5ml bottle in a bundled box of tiny perfumes in a duty-free shop abroad.
Jasmin, patchouli, basil, these scents jettison me immediately into an undercurrent…
Jasmin is the smell of death for me now, a corpse laid out on a stainless steel table behind a hospital in the Southeast Asian heat, a woman who needn’t have died.
Even the memory overwhelms me now, the overpowering smell of jasmin. Jasmin which used to be so delicate and fleeting.
My landlord’s sister gave me a jasmin flower when I moved into his fabulous apartment in Pimlico, London. Then the jasmin was barely detectable on the air. I would have to breathe deeply when I came home from my (excruciatingly dull) job in the city to detect it.
Patchouli is all about the thrill of the evening to come, the musky promise of excitement, of sweaty dancing crowds and the hope that a country boy will kiss my lips.
Thank you Ayesha Talib Wissanji for inspiring this.
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Thank you so much for reading this far, it means more to me than you could imagine. It’s all I’ve ever wanted; to be heard, to be listened to, to have my words read.
