How much can you miss a place where, to begin with, you never spent much time? But suddenly, you find yourself standing in a mall holding a bar of soap to your nose, and the bottom drops out of the depths of your desolation.
Sights and sounds keep well; they hang in state in the pillared galleries of memory, etched in stone or as delicate watercolours that fade at the touch of a breath. Voices and noise and music play through concealed speakers and set the score for our lives, the tempo that we move by. They are retrievable, they are concrete in memory; they are rarely lost, only sometimes misplaced.
Smells and touch are elusive, but I am made afraid by the intensity of emotion they induce. Some are innocuous whistles warning the approach of a new train of thought. I sit in a college bus that runs from the hospital to campus, and the route is mapped in olfactory imprints. A coffee-steam X marks the spot where we start, driven away by the insistent shove of yesterday's fish as we drive by the fort. Wait for the clatter of bloody silver to die away, and it is replaced by the hawker-cry smell of beef pakodas at Lakshmi theatre. Or we may drive by the bakery on a Friday and the smell of freshly-baked bread will follow us down the street. We turn the corner near the jail, a little way away from college, and a dark green smell accompanies the degree's drop in temperature.
You can spend a night enveloped in it, and in the morning it will linger on your skin, on your clothes. But skin is renewed and clothes must be laundered and all you are left with is the remembrance of its existence. You feed for a year off a week's memories, tease them apart and hope you missed something, pray they will survive until they can renew themselves. Leave them to settle into the crimson morass that raises itself up and changes shape, muddy your feet over and over again as you wade in to recover them. And you can think that you have let them rest, sung them to sleep with the fishes. And then you let yourself be split open by the rasp of hair against your cheek, and alien smells like lilacs will run down a street framed in archways and call to you.
Turn away to go back to the smells of your life: the jasmine chains and hair oil, the sandalwood talc and beef pakodas by the road, the distant cologne and the shower gel, the antiseptic smell of hand-sanitiser and the cow-dung cakes of fuel. But the nighttime musk of remembrance has made you nauseous with longing, and the split between the worlds is all at once true and insignificant.
There is no world to return to, only an immediate environment and the larger truth of my reality. Dichotomies merge to lead me here, standing with a bar of soap in my empty hands.
A CHANGE OF ADDRESS.
10 years ago
