Essences..

I know what that guy in ‘angels in america’ means when he says that the sense of smell is the most under-rated of all..he says that in a different context, ;) but it did hit a chord in me..it’s been a private obsession with me right from childhood..trying to find the right metaphors for a particular smell..every summer when I visited my grandparents, my nostrils kept hunting for traces of familiar scent-prints, till the identification was complete..it lay in that dark clean storehouse, which then seemed to me, full of adult kitchen secrets, its wall-hugging racks lined with big aluminum utensils storing grains n the expensive scent of rare basmati..n then my sigh would settle on the unmistakable perfume emanating from the wooden crate where alphansos nestled in hay, ripening in the warmth, tantalizing taste-buds long before the fulfillment was due..one emerged from the place smelling of mangoes, haunted..the house was sold a few months and I know what I’d miss the most..the smell brewing in that little corner, filling the room with a sense of summer and all the good things it ‘had in store’ for us..