Among our
senses, smell is perhaps the most under-appreciated by me.
Unless
characteristic, like cardamom and cinnamon announcing that mom’s making
biriyani, I seldom pay attention to the broad spectrum of scents and stenches
which brighten the canvas of my life with their subtle presence. I rarely notice
the next-door hibiscuses peering over the compound wall or fruity traces of
shampoo in my freshly-washed hair.
But there’s
one smell that never fails to hold me in place; to make me pause and inhale
deeply. To make me smile.
Open the sturdy
brown shelf in the hall upstairs, and you’ll get a whiff of that smell as well.
It is a musty one, rising slowly, sluggishly from the crowd of paperbacks and
hardbacks. A smell so thick, so heavy, that you can almost taste it. But I
doubt whether it holds the same meaning for you as it does for me. Because, in
that instant when I open the bookshelf, I also fling open the doors to many
other worlds… and a lot of memories.
That rich musty
smell transports me back in time, to when I was only five, a girl almost
collapsing under the weight of her aunt’s gift: a brightly-coloured picture
dictionary. Its glossy pages smelled
fresh and clean and new, inviting me to drown in them, in the waves of large
red titles and little black letters.
Fast
forward: my first steady step into the world of fiction, my first Enid Blyton
book. Like a patient mother, it watches proudly as I begin to speed up, to jog,
to run, run with blazing speed. Not uttering a word even as I condemned it to
the farthest corner of the shelf, forgotten in old age.
Over the
years, the mustiness has accumulated a hundred sounds, a thousand different stories.
It echoes
the crackle of new paper and the quiet rustle of old, well-thumbed ones. In it,
I hear my disbelieving gasps at a particularly mind-blowing plot twist. I feel
the dampness of my cheeks when a beloved character dies. I sense my growing wonder as I discover tidbits of knowledge from my quiz books.
And when
the musty odour embraces my nostrils, I think of my best friends. Malavika.
Amritha. Emilda. I think of how our mutual love for books forged and tempered
the bond between us. I remember all the Social Science classes during which we read storybooks instead of being rocked to sleep by our textbook.
The smell reminds me
of the time I was incoherent with rage, for my sister had torn the first page
of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
The smell
of my bookshelf is also the smell of rebellion and freedom – the smell
of my city on the day it welcomed me with arms wide open as I went to TBS, alone,
to buy a long-coveted book.
It is the
smell of love and loss, the smell of The Fault in Our Stars. It smells
like the celebration of words in The Book Thief. It is mythology reborn
in the pages of Percy Jackson. It brims with the fear and adrenaline
pulsing in Divergent. It is the hope burning in A Thousand Splendid
Suns. It is the blood and gore in A Game of Thrones; the greys of human lives painted vividly across the pages of The Casual Vacancy.
For you,
the musty smell maybe just one of the myriad nameless perfumes on earth... but
for me, it is a fragrance sweeter than the best of all roses.
Written for Ambi Pur India's Smelly to Smiley Contest on Indiblogger, in which participants talk about the memories they associate with different smells/fragrances in their homes.
