The Sense of Smell

The morning sky was ominously dark but the wind kept the rain to a thin drizzle. I was walking home after running in the park. As I passed under a tall, dark and leafy tree by the school my nostrils caught the whiff of an intensely sweet fragrance. I looked for its source and, sure enough, the wind had carpeted the sidewalk with star-shaped white Bokul flowers from that tree.

The scent transported me back to my childhood in Sylhet many years ago. I was blessed to have two extraordinary grandmothers who instilled in me a love of nature. My paternal grandmother, Dadu, often took me for a morning walk. I would wake at the crack of dawn and wait impatiently for her to get ready. Crossing the large wrought-iron gates of our house in Lama Bazar, we turned left and walk towards Kuar Par. We would stop in front of Shadhu Babu’s house, where a massive tall Bokul tree stood just inside the gate. Here we stopped and I filled my pockets with handfuls of Bokul flowers whose fragrance I loved.

Memories of my maternal grandmother, Nanu, are also replete with scents. Near her house inside the compound of Ahia Villa was a Shefali tree, and to this day, the scent of these flowers – more elegant and refined, less intoxicating than Bokul’s – takes me back to my grandmother’s house.

I also associate scents with childhood festivals. Shab-e-barat smelled of gunpowder because of the fire crackers we waited for all year. A secondary fragrance was that of a special halwa, called Tushar Shinni, which was cooked on that day. Gunpowder – along with grass and mud - was also the smell of hunting trips with my uncle. Never a hunter, I nevertheless loved those trips because of the outdoor adventure. Rather Mela, the chariot day of the Hindus, wore a distinctive leafy smell because that was the day we played Fotang – smashing green pellet-like fruits of the Pishti plant into a bamboo tube and expelling them with great force using a piston. Eid came with its own array of fragrances, including Attar and my mother’s delicious food.

While vision is our most effective sense for learning and acquiring information, it is the sense of smell that takes us across the distances of time and space, tenderly touching our memories. Smell speaks to something deep inside us and cuts through to our emotions. Great authors know and use this fact effectively. For example, Gabriel Garcia Marquez starts his novel Love in the Time of Cholera associating the smell of bitter almonds with unrequited love. Car salesmen also know this: hence the irresistible smell that envelops you when you enter a new car.

Over the years the association of some smells have changed for me. These days, for example, I appreciate the sour rotting smell of garbage which I once despised. That smell means organic waste is decomposing and that is good for our home planet (as opposed to non-biodegradable waste such as plastics.) Other smells attract me as much as they did on day one. High among them is the smell of new books and unopened newspapers.

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