Megan Dhakshini
You are endowed with a misfit of an olfactory organ- a wide bulbous triangle that can be mistaken for a sign of almost-beauty if viewed from the side. You seem to remember, acquire countless allergies and indulge in the pleasures of lust and gluttony in equal measure, with the help of your disproportionate facial flaw. You decorate your gift in silver large enough to complement it. Sometimes, what your heart tries to forget, your nose, unfortunately, remembers.
The salt of the sea is encrusted permanently at the moist edges of your nostrils. You take the sea with you to bed, to work, to dusty corners of cacophonic cities- for good luck, for comfort, for a piece of home. The sea smells like life before birth. It also carries the unmistakable odour of fear and fantasy. On the longer nights when the shadows are closer to your chest and your breathing is shallow and otherworldly, the sea swallows you whole in its tar-like belly and you smell only rotting flesh and burning oil. When you follow the moons cycle and grow and wane like she does, you smell the rusty summer sea in the red wetness smeared on your underwear. On others, the sweet scent of monsoon on the beach catches you off-guard as you snag a whiff of his early morning sweat. The ocean dwells in the corners of your eyes and in the darker patches of your morning pillow.
When you fell ( and how deep, oh how deep!) in love again (and again and again), you smelt it on him long before he could find the courage or the required level of skill to mouth the words out loud. Love scents the folds of your skin in a heady mixture of cake-shop aromas and something burning; the after-scent of rain and the embers of a winter log fire. Lust, on the other hand, smells moist and merciless. Lust is pungent.
The water that soaks your pillows when it is neither light nor unlight, when only gods and devils and artists stir, exudes the perfume of moist earth. Sadness and melancholy smell like storms. Grief, like the remnants of incense and camphor in a long-abandoned room.
You find your family sometimes, in the simmering aromas of cumin and coriander from clay pots and in the vanilla waft of burnt sugar. Christmas time is the scent of brandy and spice-soaked raisins and preserved ginger and fresh coats of paint and lacquer.
The dusty cologne of old books and the inky freshness of new ones give you the olfactory pleasure that only matches up to the titillation of last nights’ musk. You inhale the first few mouths of food before your fingers and saliva have a chance to do their work. Food is medicine, indulgence, sustenance and poison all in one and your nose registers memories in a directory of aromas linked to what you ate, when and with whom.
Your offspring smells of innocence. Her hair knotted in your silver each morning, fragrant with cartoon-dreams and purity, gives you purpose.
You smell like sin. And restlessness.
And sometimes of dishwater.
And in darkness, like a forest at dawn.
Tomorrow smells like a warning. Ashes watered down and left in a storm on a beach.
