Smells Can Take You Places: A Gentle Reflective Piece

A reflective piece brimming with memory, sensory association, and nostalgia.

Smells - A Thought

Smells can really take you places. For most of us, our vision dominates how we perceive the world. But sometimes, when you attune yourself to your environment, living and breathing spaces, a smell can take you on a stroll down the memory lane. Or even to visions of the future. Sometimes, an oracular realisation of a philosophical message. It may even ground you better in the moment by cultivating presence.

An Experience

A simple recent experience triggered this thought. That evening, the sky seemed to be clearing a bit after a gentle downpour. The air scented of petrichor, which I seemed to be relishing. I enjoyed getting my feet wet in pools of water, trying to thoroughly soak in the sublime experience. As I walked past scrubs and bushes having bathed in water, I could simply not resist the mellowing curiosity to examine pearls of water crowned on leaves. Oh, the rustic joys I delightfully indulge in! It is at this moment, a faint sweet smell caught my attention. I was immediately summoned by my senses to the fore. The smell had a distinct old-world charm to it. It instantly transported me to my grandparents’ place, not anywhere close to the countryside, but an urban town. However, the place does still embody the essence of slow meaningful living.

The air there smells soulfully of nature in its unadulterated forms and everything else we associate with slower, meaningful living. Like, baked goods! Yes, the art of baking pulls alongside skills of precision, patience, detail, and a spoonful of love. All reminiscent of meaning-making by smoothly and purposefully gliding through life, not sloth. And it would be inappropriate to not mention the rich aroma of butter, cocoa, sugar, milk among others, that seldom fail to appease the sweet-toothed. Why am I mentioning all of this? For a bakery lies nearby my grandparents’ place. And it’s a bakery typical to towns in the South of India, like the famous “Iyengar’s”. There’s nothing five-star and suffocatingly polish about these bakeries, just a characteristic experience of slow living, unique to the small towns of India. Although I do have a proclivity for grandeur, I do sometimes appreciate spaces that breathe life and meaning, irrespective of where they’re located. And mind you, the Indian rural can get chaotic and densely populated, and when that happens, you have no choice but to bid adieu to romanticised tranquil living (!).

A Realisation

The air smelled heavily of baked goodies. Indians proudly love baked goodies. And a cup of tea or coffee (depends on whether you’re closer to the equator or not!) accompanying it, is sure to leave anyone and everyone pleasantly appetised. And as I tried to make sense of why the smell brought along a sense of comfort and saudade, my intuitive mind dropped an answer. It was all the while taking me back to my grandparents’ place.

This makes me wonder how the very experience of living, is a unique and irreplaceable one. How perception drastically varies from human to human. I’m not even sure, if the ones running those bakeries feel this way! But this is what makes the experience of life distinctly unique for each one of us. This is what makes lived experiences meaningful, not a random series of unrelated events.

I realised that this experience also mirrors my unconscious longing for places charged with solitude. Also, that even though achievements and big days are often used as a metric to ‘measure’ the purposefulness of one’s life, I strongly believe, that these little experiences also shape memory, the lens of perception and what meaning we ultimately attribute to the grand scheme of things.

Gaurav Chandra Tuli