I know this sounds extremely crazy. But well… smells matter.
I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine. She came smelling of espresso and I was immediately tempted to have some espresso then and there!
The smell of coffee in the morning is a major wake up call for me. Sometimes I wake up telling myself that, ‘If I wake up now, then I can enjoy my coffee a little longer’.
I have once been woken up by having a mug of coffee put under my nose…. “Ok baby, wake up now! We need to pack up and MOVE!!!” trust me I was up within half a minute. Cold coffee in the morning doesn’t work well you see…!:-)
But other than my favourite smell of coffee, the smell of good food damp earth, rains, mild perfumes – these things draw me out and make me smile.
Some smells are just so comforting – like my mother’s smell. I know that smell. She has smelt that way ever since I remember her. It’s not something I can name, its just there. Comforting and nice. The familiarity of it all makes me smile with a very deep pleasure.
The smell of wet earth reminds me of paper boats I used to make with my sister and let them float on the puddles in the building. It used to be so much fun. We used to see how long the paper boats last. And whose goes furthest…. An innocent version of the all-consuming boat race that we face in our daily life now….
Then there are other smells… the extremely unpleasant smell of the Koovum river as you enter Chennai by train in the morning. Before you reach Madras Central station, you have to cross the Basin Bridge station which has the once beautiful river which is now a gutter and a natural alarm clock – the Koovum river. This river stinks so bad that even in the deepest of slumbers; I wake up and say, ‘Ah! I have reached Chennai!’
Another smell that has always been completely disgusting, yet a part of homecoming to me is the smell of Mahim creek. I think it beats even Koovum. It has a distinctly industrial waste kinda smell along with the various other unnameable organic smells that accost us as soon as we enter this hot, humid and vibrant city of Mumbhai.
After the air conditioned cool air of the airplane and the airport, once you get your baggage and cross customs, you realize that you have a cold or a blocked nose. Once you are in your taxi/auto and steaming in the traffic, you are trying hard to deep breathe and unblock your nose. But once you are near the Mahim creek and you take a deep breath and hey presto! Your nose gets unblocked and you breathe easy….. Or maybe not!
But well… Shah Rukh Khan put it well enough in Dilwale…. ‘In big big cities, such small small things happen senorita!’
