Osmagogic Varanasi

Turning onto the road that leads from Hyderabad colony (where my flat is) to the rest of the campus I am each morning enveloped by the sweet smell of jasmine. A few yards down and the air is entirely filled with cardamom. Someone has an ilaachi tree in the yard. Sundar (beautiful) and bura (bad) smells are densely, almost archeologically layered here and come on you unexpedtedly, by turns overwhelming and subsiding. Connected to the breath, they have an immediacy that cannot be ignored. I smell the body of the rickshaw wallah exerting himself on my behalf, the aromas of fried dough and spicy potatoes in the street stalls. Saffron in heavenly milk desserts. In crowds there is a more noticeable presence of soap, perspiration and breath than in the States—not unpleasant, more reminders of our humanity as emitters of odors and the trouble to which we go to laminate others on top of them. The reek of rotting food rises from the side of the road, weaker on campus than in the town gutters where trash and dirt collect. The flanks of ambling water buffalo and Brahma bulls radiate a warm, musky aura. Near them is the heavy aroma of dung. In the temple there are the lighter, softer smells of flowers and incense punctuated by the hard, sharp odors of burning and smoke.

The other night I was at a lovely three story hotel above a steep flight of stairs near Assi Ghat. Overlooking Gangaji , it is elegantly remodeled from the ancestral home it once was. Fifteen warmly intimate and warm rooms, all distinct, lovingly fitted out with beautiful Indian furniture and art, collected and commissioned by its owner for whom the making of this wonderful interior is a life project. Here guests are made comfortable amidst artists who gather to perform and work here. While I was there I saw a mural being painted by Suresh Nair, visiting as a professor of painting at BHU, and two of his students. The mural depicts Bharata Puzha, the goddess that inhabits Nila Nadi, a river in Kerala, where Suresh spent his childhood. It fills the upper half of a walll of what will soon be another bedrooml. From her lotus the goddess gazes at us with a slight knowing smile. Great whorls fill out the background around her. These look for all the world like breaking waves, almost Chinese style, but Suresh would only go so far as to say they were energy. From a spacious roofed veranda, one of the common areas a few steps away, one sees the lights of Gangaji, which seems as big as the sea in the dark. Musical performances are often held on this spot.

Several of us were dinner guests of Adam Grotsky, director of the Fulbright program in India (and a graduate of Penn!) who was in town, and his wife Olga, an artist in her own right, who is learning immersion Hindi in a school here. Also on hand were Surej and Ramuji, a musician and singer. Ramuji is a man who appreciates sensuality and pleasure. On this night he was wearing an especially fine embroidered silk salwar kameez of a peach color. When dinner was done and we were standing around talking, we complimented him on the lovely fragrance surrounding him. He pulled out a tiny flask of this magical scent, which he said was saffron and musk, and put it on the wrists of Megan, my Fulbright comrade in arms (with whom I had quite another sort of olfactory adventure recently), and me. Then he then scented our chunris, the scarves of our own far less rich salwar kameezes. He puts on this scent after his morning bath, he said, to keep him fresh in the hot weather. It was transporting, I’m not kidding. Every day since I have indulged my nose in my chunri where it lies folded in the closet bureau. Next time I see him I will ask him if a humble Westerner can acquire that lovely perfume.

It always made me a little sick to smell incense In America, like the reaction I have to the artificial-air smell of a closed up airplane that suddenly opens to admit passengers. The first time I smelled incense in India, it was rich and inviting, like it was in exactly the right place. It seemed to oxygenate the air instead of eating it. American incense must often be of an inferior make, like peanut butter adulterated with sugar, or artificially flavored teas.

Food is relatively cheap here (in Indian terms the prices are alarmingly up after more than a year of drought and worse is anticipated as a result of this year’s late and severe monsoon flooding); spices are relatively expensive. On my kitchen shelf there is a jar filled with fresh whole cumin seeds. Sitting on top in the same jar are pods of bara (big) ilaachi and chottah (small) ilaachi—masala for the vegetable dishes and lentil-mung stew and rice I eat almost every day. Next to it is jar of garam masala, a powder of spices including black pepper, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, cardomom, coriander, bay leaves, nutmeg and mace that flavor food in very small quantities. I use ginger and ilaachi and sugar to make chai or flavored milk tea in a small two-handled rounded basin, the standard form of an Indian saucepan, into which I throw all the ingredients after I’ve smashed them with my heavy mortar and pestle. On the wall hangs a net bag of shallots (piyaz) and garlic (lehsun). Next time I go to the spice shop I’ll get cloves and bay. I have found a good spice shop but have to learn how to make use of it—how much one gets, what the names are. This is fun.

Culturally distinctive smells need no language to be received, but the layers of refinement that go into the combination and presentation of smells are another thing altogether, complex and with their own rules. Like saffron and musk. To return to the breath idea, of all the parts of the sensory apparatus, olfaction seems to best foster the meditative imperative to exist in the present moment.