Non-Fiction
Scented Worlds
artwork by amina
Sharmila sat still in a corner seat of the subway, on her way home, from downtown. The officials in their shining towers had summoned her for a hearing after she had missed two citizenship tests in a row. So she had expected to find herself before a judge. Instead, she was led to a large testing area and handed a citizenship test. It was their way of having one take the test. Silly official people! The whole thing was s-o-o-o easy. It disappointed her, as had many other things, since she first arrived. What had she really expected of this land? The night before, her husband had urged her to study for a surprise test. Her eight year-old son told her he wanted to his citizenship too. "It's not fair, Mum" he said, "If you fail, I get to fail too!" She had smiled and wondered if he was right. All around her swirled "smells". Smells that revealed the intricate contents of each colorful individual. A wizened looking woman, in a multi-colored green speckled sari smelled of cumin, turmeric and sambar masala. As Sharmila looked at her, the woman looked away, her eyes, like scurrying little mice. The desi kind of mice. The train stopped at Victoria Park. Sharmila wondered if her husband was going to be late again tonight. A girl got on. Youngish, South-East Asian looking. Sharmila could barely detect a smell about her. She put her nose to the stale subway air and pulled in another waft of air to identify origin. The tangerine smells of Body Shop products mixed with the youthful essence emanating from her skin. She was probably born in Canada, fated to lose desi origins. A voluptuous blonde slid into the seat next to the Indian girl. She seemed to be around thirty. Barbie doll curves. The kind desi men dreamt of, but rarely dated. Sharmila once overheard two desi men in a bus, "These angreezi girls spend too much money and they want you to understand them. And they want to be seen around with you. The desi variety is definitely better." This blonde did not seem to be Canadian. This was definitely the sensuous European kind, with an oil-based perfume and a look of utter disdain about her. All the other women appeared to blend into the background and they looked away from the blonde; the men however stole covetous glances at her. Sharmila wondered if he would glance too, if he were here. The smell of their unrequited desires made the place warm and humid. The subway carriage was suddenly a lush torrid green jungle and the blonde a rare colorful bird of paradise. Sharmila sighed to herself. The gift, or one could call it, the curse, of her nose. Her nose translated everything she sniffed into words, images and unearthly visions. Sharmila's family doctor in Toronto thought she might have a mild case of Synaesthesia, a rare neurological peculiarity in which one's sense perceptions blended into each other with startling results. "Not to worry," he had said, "Many painters and writers who have this call it a gift." Sharmila's station appeared at the end of the dark tunnel. Warden Station. As she walked down, she noticed that everyone was running by her urgently, while she climbed down the steps, one at a time. It was like a scène from a Bollywood movie, in which she was from another time zone, walking in slow motion, while everyone else seemed to be running frantically in search of something. Sharmila seemed to have more milliseconds to experience things around her. Sharmila thought to herself, "O ba ba! What were they running for?" These people were running in search of Time! As Sharmila pushed open the door at the bottom of the stairway to go to the Warden station parking lot, the Toronto air brought in the warm smell of the breath of her Nani, calling her across the light years from inside her grandfather's bungalow in Sylhet. She was suddenly eight years old again and listening to her Nani, a retired schoolteacher, telling her about the meaning of Time. The tin-roof crackled as the metal contracted in the cold. In the distant dark corners of the ancient forest, a jackal howled to his comrades. "Come, darling, lie beside me." "Nani, O Nani!" Sharmila jumped up on her Nani's lacquer polished four-poster bed, under the cotton mosquito net. Her fair, round-faced Nani ruffled Sharmila's plaited hair with her fragile fingers. "Nani, what will I look like when I am old? Will I look like you?" "Darling, Time will beat all of us in the end. The only things that will remain are your faith, patience, good deeds and the way you help other people to find the Truth." "Like the Buddha?" "Yes, darling. Like all great men and women such as the Sufi Shahjalal and Mother Teresa in Kolkata." Sharmila hugged her grandmother and went to sleep. Sharmila was home at last. It was a Bengali home with Canadian touches. There was her mother's brick red and white embroidery on the wall, with elephants and peasants. Her plants emitted warmth and a friendly green odor that told her how joyous they felt at her return. Perhaps they would usher in prosperity and wealth in this new land. Sharmila twirled around the brown carpet, touched the harmonium with reverence and ran into her bedroom. There was nothing electronic in her bedroom. Her husband had declared, a long time ago: "No television, no telephone - only me and you." In the beginning of the marriage, when they went to bed, he would not let her face any other way except towards him. And look at him she did, the dutiful, obedient wife. Pretending a bit now and then. There were times during her pregnancies when she could not bear the male smell of him. Only when her children were born was she allowed to turn the other way. Her babies were breastfed, and as she lay in bed feeding one or the other, he lay on the other side, smelling her neck, waiting, on cold Toronto nights; she had often thought that heaven could not come closer than this. It was the freezing sleet on the windows outside and the warmth of the desi Tantric within. The warm, tantalizing mist of the humidifier took on the various manifestations of their desires, shaping them at will, at times intense, at times sleepily tranquil. Perhaps this was one of the Truths that her Nani had spoken of. People got married to keep themselves toast-warm on bone-chilly nights and also to keep out the great smothering Darkness. Once, on a cold night, she had come face to face with a homeless person in downtown Toronto. She had been shocked, horrified! The odour of the homeless woman was overpowering. It twisted like an angry cobra through her nostrils, flaring her insides. Suppose she became like one of them. It was too easy, too easy. Suppose her husband lost his job or became disabled? Or even abandoned her? Oh, why was she so afraid of being alone here? She pictured herself on a desolate Canadian landscape: A Canadian winter night.A clean sweep of sparkling snow. Grey streets lined in white chalk.
The whispering lingering white fear
The dark silent promise of a terrifying, easy death.
A crystallized white corpse in the morning downtown streets.
It was that easy. It was that easy Sharmila shuddered. She shook her head to chase the thoughts out, like errant children, out and away from the inner chambers of her mind. She walked to her closet and looked at her collection of colorful saris. They were her pride and joyous pastime. She loved to touch them, to caress them. The smell of her saris took her back to a time of reading and listening to classics on Nani's gramophone. There were the cotton Kota saris, the Tangail thread-work saris, the Rajshahi silks, the Mirpur Katans and the ubiquitous Jamdani! She took out a Jamdani sari, eggshell white with crimson touches. Would she be daring and sport a sleeveless blouse with it? What would her husband say? Would he notice this sari on her or would he not? Or would the Toronto tiredness be in his eyes? Before they came to this country of cold rocks, they would read poetry to each other: soothing Tagore, fiery Nazrul. Now all those poems had become icy dangling modifiers; syntactic structures that were unpronounceable tongue twisters in the northern hemisphere. A long time ago, they would sit on their veranda of their house in Bailey Road and gaze at the full moon. A book of poems would complete this occasion. It was time for her to start the cooking. Out had come a Bengali cookbook. Her aunt had given her this book when she had got married and set up house. "This is for you, so that your husband doesn't starve to death". They all cared more about her husband than her. No one had ever given him a book about anything. Yesterday, her husband had demanded a desi vegetable dish, so she decided to give it a try. Potoler dolma. She had gone to the desi shop on the corner of Markham and Eglinton yesterday. The sign proclaimed proudly "HALAL BANGLADESHI, PAKISTANI, INDIAN MEEAT SOLD HERE". There were familiar smells inside the shop: Tibet soap and Tibet vanishing cream, half-burnt samosas, chanachur. She had picked up some fresh coriander leaves and some green chillies. A few of the vegetables, like the half-dried pumpkin and the coveted potol, lay shriveled up in a corner. The dish that her husband had demanded was not possible. The vegetables had not been fresh enough. Sharmila hoped nervously that her husband could not mind. So it would be simple Bengali fare. Dal, rice, bhaji, fried fish and of course chicken, the constant without which the meat-eating fiends would howl. "Fish, fish, again fish! O Mummy, I want Bangla curry chicken." How warming, on kulfi-cold nights, was Bangla food prepared from scratch. None of those fancy French names, just plain semi-vowels and Bengali fricative consonants thrown in to make it sound pleasurable. Hot steam was escaping from the frothing Basmati rice on the electric stove. It was almost done. Sharmila still cooked rice the traditional Dadi-Nani way, by letting the rice boil in the water and then straining the starchy water away. The steam now began to form patterns above the sink. She read the lines of her life in the steam as easily as a fortuneteller reads tealeaves. The change in him had come slowly like the acrid smell of gas seeping from an ancient oven. Even the comfortable husband smell had changed into a scent that she could no longer define. At first it had been the despair of never finding a job. And then the miracle! A corporate job! But then his eyes changed. At a corporate party, he kept away from her, as if he was almost ashamed of her! He laughed easily with the bleached corporate cougars whose nips and tucks squeaked at every laugh. He looked at her but once, with a certain annoyance at her desi sari. Pain seeped in as it always did, little by little, in droplets. Fluid, nascent, pungent. It gripped her by the throat and scraped away her throat cells. Hurting, she wanted to grip a knife and slit away her pain. Pain also swept in the smell of the homeless woman and fear jabbed her throat. How was she to keep it all together? Her other self? Her family? This new city? As Sharmila washed her warm face at the kitchen sink, she could hear the wind-snow flying at the windowpanes. She hoped that he would not notice her swollen eyes at the dinner table. Her hands shook a little. The steam had now dissipated into domestic ether space. The rice was done.
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