Entry 7 - An Indignant Nose

An Indignant Nose

In preparation for my trip to India, I did a lot of reading and I spoke with many people who have travelled or lived here.  One theme emerged over and over again: India is an assault on the senses.  That is, I was warned, I might find everything to be in an extreme form compared to what I am used to in Canada.  When we were waiting for our flight to India from Toronto’s Pearson Airport (a twelve hour wait, because of Air India pilots on job action, and rebooking with a different airline), I fell into conversation with an Air Canada flight attendant who was between flights; born in India, she was an immigrant to Canada as a child and makes frequent trips back to her homeland and extended family near Delhi.  When she learned I was travelling to India, she re-iterated the same theme: India will be an assault on the senses.  She went on to say that the assault would begin as soon as the door of the plane was opened on Indian soil; I would immediately be overpowered by the smells of India, she told me, and those smells would strike me on a continous basis as long as I was in India.

the flower aisle at the Devaraja Market, Mysore

She was right.  The sense of smell is definitely under assault, as competing aromas, scents, fragrances, different odours, smells and stinks constantly replace one another, rising up from the ground, drifting in the breeze, emanating from the buildings and animals and crowds of people and traffic on the move.  And the smells hit hard, like a full force assault on the olfactory sense.  One might expect a smell, such as the soft, sweet and rich scent of flowers, when one walks into the flower aisle at the market – but it doesn’t quite work that way.  The smells catch you unawares, and surprise you, even when you think you are ready.  As in the flower aisle, when suddenly the air shifts a little, and in the heated air of close quarters, and the seeming freshness of a just-finished rain, the scent of thousands and thousands of flowers – in garlands, loose, in bunches and heaps and piles, roses and carnations and marigolds and a dozen I have never seen before – comes bursting in, rising in a choking, cloying almost sickly-sweet cloud that overpowers the sense of smell.  It is wonderful, but too wonderful, so much so, that, like trying to eat too much rich chocolate too quickly, one feels nauseated rather than pleasured.

Or in a run-down, poor section of the city, where homes are broken shells of buildings, huts constructed of left-over wood and cardboard and plastic tarps held down by frayed twine, palm thatch and literally garbage, I expected the stench of raw sewage in the open drainage ditches, and that expectation was more than met.  And walking past one drainage ditch, the stench of sewage strong in my nostrils, suddenly, wafting on the breeze, the less powerful but still potent aroma of someone’s supper cooking: spice, and curry, and vegetables, and just as suddenly as it had appeared it was gone, and in its place that ubiquitous odour of burning garbage which I never seem to fully escape.

The smells are diverse, and constant.  The common smells include curry, petrol (as gas is called here, in the British fashion), diesel exhaust, garbage and more commonly, burning garbage, industrial and chemical smells (our hostel is on the edge of the industrial area, and one sign outside a factory declares “Department of Chemicals, Ministry of Chemicals, India” – the smell confirms the wording), sewage, flowers, more flowers, curry again, sweat, people, animal dung left by passing cows and water buffaloes or goats or sheep, tea, spices, roasting corn and popped corn, the charcoal that feeds the fires of roadside foodstands, and fresh mangoes, ripe and over-ripe,  piled high on carts at every corner.  Some are pleasant, others are rank, and all are ever-changing.

kumkum powders at Devaraja Market

Just the other day, I was walking through the Mysore city-centre towards the bus station, which reeks of the diesel fumes of hundreds of buses coming and going each day.  The Krishnaraja traffic circle at the heart of the city is a place filled with traffic, vehicular and human, and filled with a thousand smells.  This area is an assault on the senses, including sight, by so much movement.  One’s hearing is challenged, with the constant sounds of hundreds of people talking and selling and trading, buses gearing up and down and auto rickshaws being started and the incessant honking and honking of buses as they move through the station past throngs of people walking under the signs that declare – pointlessly – “no pedestrians here” and conductors blowing whistles and street vendors shouting for business and beggars calling out for alms.  I had almost reached the bus station, and the smell of burning garbage was being displaced by a not unpleasant but potent scent of fruit – a dozen carts lined up with mangoes in different shapes and sizes (Raspuri, Kesar, Mallika, Banganapalli, Alphanso, Sugar Baby, and more); then the almost fermented fruity aroma was replaced again with garbage, and people, and diesel, and suddenly, just for a moment, the marvellous, rich smell of freshly roasted coffee being ground  – just for a moment, and I swam in that aroma.  It was clear, sharp, unmistakable, and it filled my nostrils, my head, my heart, and I drank in the heady scent of pure, rich, uncorrupted coffee.  It was so good, but just as suddenly, it was gone, leaving the bitter dregs of burning garbage in its place.

I will not miss the smell of burning garbage.  I don’t know who lights these fires, or when, or why; I have not yet seen garbage burning, but I smell it and I see the evidence in small piles of ash and the charred remains of abandoned shoes, plastics, paper and a myriad of other things that pollute the cityscape.  Garbage here does not litter the streets so much as it fills them, fouls them, becomes the cityscape.  Perhaps if it were not burned it would pile to unimaginably high levels and just take over.  It is said the that the sense of smell is the sense that is most closely linked to memory.  I am fearful that, in a reverse of this saying, when I remember India, the smell of burning garbage will come back to me, leaving my nose, as Shakespeare expressed it in The Tempest, in great indignation.

Or perhaps, when I am enjoying a cup of rich, full-bodied coffee one day, I will suddenly be transported back to a crowded streetcorner in downtown Mysore, filled with people, flowers, mangoes, buses, and that literally sensational moment when wonderful richness broke through for just a moment; then I may remember that in a developing nation, crowded with people and filled with challenges, there is a wonderful richness which, from time to time, will break through suggesting the promise of glorious things to come.  “You will smell things decaying and things growing,” said the flight attendant in warning: “you can smell death, and you can smell life in India.”  And in that moment, I will smell life.