Sniff Stuff

Who nose why just a smell can take you down memory lane? Is it that a particular whiff, inhaled through the nose, enters our bloodstream, hits our head, our heart, and makes itself an eternal part of the life rushing through our veins - keeping us human, keeping us alive, helping us remember?

I have always marvelled at how a fleeting smell can transport me back to an entirely different setting. I have to pick up the pieces and set the memory in place, even as the transient scent has already gone, leaving me with my eyebrows raised, my eyes squinting in concentration, and my footsteps slower. My nose on alert to recapture that elusive trigger, I try and put into thoughts what my heart and mind have already remembered and reconstructed.

Just yesterday, I was walking along Hill Road (where the hilly experience is defined by the number of potholes and not by sylvan views of mountainous splendour - this is Bombay after all) around 11.30 am. A bad time to be a pedestrian. Dodging cars, bikes, dogs, people, streetvendors. The stretch of shops I walked past were gloomy coffin-makers, frame-shops, shady jewellery stores, and dingy upholstery displays. The winter sun warmed us even as the jammed vehicles poisioned our veins.

And suddenly in the middle of it all I smelt (so quick that I may have imagined it, but why would I do so?) gulaal, or the powder colours used to play Holi. You know it don't you? That hot, synthetic smell that tickles your nose? And snap! I was back in time. Holi happens around March. The time of exams, the time of fears, the time of winter-turning-summer when you are never sure how hot or cold to feel. And I was in school uniform again, it was a Delhi winter on its way out. I was worrying about completing my revision on time. Long phone conversations on the sly where friends confessed how bad their preparation really was. Dodging flying water balloons on the way back from the bus-stop. Passing by shops selling pyramids of colour to brighten up the fading dull of winter. Half-empty school buses because everyone didn't have an exam every day. Getting to sit. Aware that the new school year would mean new faces and some missing faces.

Bombay went on all around me and I walked back home, treading a time bubble that burst when an impatient driver honked at me.