Ben Whishaw as Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Tom Tykwer’s ‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer”
I am in the mood to repost something I had written 12 years ago about my strong olfactory sense. So here it is:
July 17, 2011
I am no Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Patrick Suskind’s ‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer’' but I have had my moments. And here I am referring strictly to the olfactory genius of the protagonist of the novel and its fantastic movie version of the same name. What becomes of Jean-Baptiste as he goes about trying to capture feminine fragrances to create the ultimate perfume is revolting and terrifying in a tragic way. Mercifully, that did not happen to me.
Before I began using nasal drops every night to subside my inflamed passages more than 30 years ago, I was gifted with a particularly sharp sense of smell. In a way this runs in the family as all my siblings have demonstrated some degree of elevated sense of smell. For instance, I remember all of us could tell from a mere whiff whether the daal in the neighbor’s kitchen was any more safe to eat. This was before the middle class in India could afford refrigerators.
However,the excessive use of the nasal drops has very significantly blunted my olfactories over the years and I no longer consider myself out of the ordinary. So when I first saw Tom Tykwer’s brilliant 2006 film version of Suskind’s 1985 novel, I thanked in my mind the manufacturers of the nasal drops. Who knows where my sense of smell would have led me?
These thoughts came to my mind while reading an article in The Boston Globe by Courtney Humphries about a growing movement to preserve smells and their history. The movement may also lead to recording for future generations smells that may be lost because of natural attrition. It has been known that while smells are by their very nature ephemeral, they do remain embedded in one’s memory for a long time. “Smell is unique among the senses in the way it is processed by the brain - olfactory information travels directly to a brain region linked with the hippocampus and the amygdala, sites of memory and emotion. Scientists have suggested that the way smell is processed makes smell memories particularly strong and persistent,” Humphries reports.
She also mentions James McHugh, an assistant professor of religion at University of Southern California, who while studying Sanskrit as part of his dissertation at Harvard found detailed olfactory information in ancient and medieval texts. Based on McHugh’s descriptions of some of this literature, perfumer Christophe Laudamiel created “two scents that represented a Brahmin’s ideal - clarified butter, milk, mango blossoms, honey, and sandalwood - and his worst nightmare - smoke, rotting flesh, alcohol, and garlic.”
Despite having lost a lot of my olfactory sharpness I am still primarily driven by smells and fragrances. In what their French makers might consider sacrilege, every morning I splash and spray two or three different kinds of colognes and perfumes. Since their quantities vary randomly, they create a new fragrance everyday. Some of my mixtures sometimes contain a hint of what my wife wears and that invariably brings me great compliments from people irrespective of their gender. One of these days I am going to add a dash of toilet freshener to see what that does.
Speaking of fragrances, let me end today with these charming lines from poet Alam Taab Tashna’s ghazal ‘Voh ke har ahd-e-mohabbat.” The lines go:
मेरे पेहलु में वोह आया भी तो खुशबू की तरह
मैं उसे जितना समेटूँ बिखरता जाए
(Mere pehlu mein voh aya bhi to khushboo ki tarha
Mein usey jitna sametun voh bikharta jaye.)
She came to me like a fragrance, The more I gather it, the more it scatters
Note to self: That’s the power of smells and fragrances. They waft from the ancient to the medieval to the modern and from laboratories to literature to movies to poetry and yet not be fully captivated.