1
The Inheritance
His nose woke up first.
It shook Samir from his slumber, and he sat upright in bed, sniffing out the storm before it began. Sliding out from underneath the mosquito net covering his four-poster bed, he walked up to his window and opened its shutters. Ominous clouds had begun collecting, the moon camouflaged. Staring up at the firmament, he cupped his chin with both hands, resting his elbows upon the windowsill. It would arrive shortly, he could smell it; it would materialize out of nowhere with a crack of bright light and thunder. So he waited, for it was impossible to sleep through an imminent storm.
Ten years earlier, when he had opened his mouth for the first time—a crying, breathing, living being—the bedroom window had flung open and a gust of wind had swept into the room, where it was swallowed completely by the newborn. Samir, his parents would name him. Samir, meaning a gust of wind. Samir, the boy who’d swallowed the monsoon.
Now, as the dark skies parted, he welcomed the rain shower that had unfailingly graced his birthday each year since his birth.
“Hello, friend,” he spoke into the night.
If asked, he might not have been able to explain how he knew of a storm approaching before it actually did. Water was an odorless substance, and so rain had no smell of its own. It married odors everywhere, smelling eventually of the land where it fell. In Lahore that morning, the rain smelled predictably dusty yet fresh. But Samir, eager to smell past the curtain of precipitation, held out his perceptive nose and followed its aquiline slope down his neighborhood, meandering through streets and homes.
There were many ways to smell. The seat of smell was located in the nose, and so, naturally, he smelled first and foremost from there. But the way that gave him most pleasure, how he felt most physically and intimately connected to any smell, fragrant or foul, was by smelling it through his gut.
With his gut, then, the boy pressed against the open window frame, smelling musty moisture-soaked walls, moss and algae, dung cakes, damp wood, lemongrass, and lotus flowers. Assembling this bouquet within his atlas of smells, Samir returned to bed one year older and many smells richer.
* * *
Like clockwork, at 5:30 a.m., fragrant smoke drifted into Samir’s room from underneath the door, and he knew that his uncle was awake in the next room, ritualistically lighting the morning agarbatti. The rain had subsided and the world resumed its calm. Samir got out of bed and dressed in a pair of brown shorts and a blue shirt. He quietly opened the door and walked down the corridor to the tall earthenware pot placed at the end. He splashed cold water on his eyes and wiped down his face. When he looked up into the mirror hung on the wall, his uncle was standing behind him, smiling. Samir turned around and touched his feet.
“Taya ji,” he addressed his father’s elder brother.
“Jinde raho, mere puttar,” Vivek replied in Punjabi, placing his hand affectionately on his nephew’s head. “May you live a long life. Ten years old today, how time flies.” He laughed.
Together they climbed down the stairs to find the rest of the family preoccupied with the morning routine. Samir walked across the stone aangan to where his grandfather sat, an old man of seventy. Som Nath was hunched over the day’s newspaper with a magnifying glass as well as his spectacles comically positioned at the very tip of his nose. Upon seeing Samir, his face broke into a smile and he hugged his grandson. Samir’s mother, Savitri, came out from the kitchen, an opal-pink sari tied around her frame, covering her head. She was holding a tray with four tall metal tumblers of lassi, and, handing one to Samir, she kissed him on the forehead.
“Saalgirah mubarak, my child,” she wished him, before placing two glasses down for Som Nath and Vivek and calling out to her husband. Mohan emerged from the room and took a seat beside his father. In the wake of the early-morning storm, the daylight seemed crisper and bluer than usual. Raindrops clung to the bright green leaves of tulsi planted at the center of the courtyard, and the jasmine lining both sides had thrived in the midnight shower, swathing the entire house in their fragrance.
“Tayyar, ready?” Mohan asked the birthday boy. “Shall we leave?”
Samir gulped down the last sip of frothy milk. “Yes, Baba.” He took his father’s hand.
* * *
The Vij family lived deep in the heart of the Walled City of Lahore. Though the city had existed for centuries prior, it was under the reign of Emperor Akbar in the sixteenth century that it truly gained prominence. The emperor ordered the building of a palace, around which a defensive wall was constructed, built with thirteen imposing gates, each unique in its design. Over the centuries, many of these majestic gates were destroyed, though the Shahalmi Gate had survived, and it was in its neighborhood that the Vij family built a home.
Their two-story brick house, Vij Bhawan, its name proudly engraved on a stone plaque, stood on the corner of the wide Shahalmi Bazaar Road and the narrow kucha Reshmiya. The silky, delicate, gossamer word Reshmiya never failed to make Samir giggle as it slid off his tongue. His grandfather would often tell him the story of how the family had once dealt in the textile trade and how their work in ittar had begun just a few years before Samir was born. Som Nath would extract an embroidered handkerchief from the pocket of his crisply ironed kurta and offer it to the boy as a sample of their once well-established familial craft.
“Back in our day, this is how neighborhoods were formed.” Som Nath would gesture with his frail hands, taking his grandson on a journey. “Why, you can trace communities, religions, clans, and people through the names of the streets they live on. Like us, on kucha Reshmiya, named after the silky resham cloth we traded, or gali Dhobiyan, after the washermen. There is a gali Kabootarbaaz, lords of the pigeons, and kucha Faqir Khana, named after the Faqir family, gali Achariyan, the picklers, and my favorite”—he would clap his hands together—“the gali Kababiyan, on which live the makers of delicious kebabs!” Grandfather and grandson would both burst into laughter, and this became a ritual between them, for no matter how many times Som Nath narrated the tale of the entwined streets of their ancient metropolis, Samir loved to hear it.
“Where do the perfumers of Lahore live, Dadu?” Samir would ask. “Why don’t we live with them?”
“Well, puttar, there is a community of perfume-sellers who live and work in a neighborhood called Dabbi Bazaar, not far from here. Their shops are clustered around Sunehri Masjid. And you know you’re near even before you spot them because the entire street is bathed in extraordinary scents. You can always visit them”—he paused—“but remember, this is the home that your ancestors built. Whatever you do, Samir puttar, whoever you become, however life changes, this is the place where you belong. This is home.”
* * *
As Vivek, Mohan, and Samir walked through Shahalmi, smells of the first chai being brewed—tea leaves, cardamom, ginger, tulsi, milk, and sugar—wafted out of windows, sounds of morning prayer and daily chores rang out, and men and children emerged from winding lanes onto the main street, all making their way to the eastern edge of the old city. Some were dressed in straight pajamas with knee-length cotton kurtas; some wore dhotis with the folds of cloth secured tightly at their waists, reaching down to mid-calf length; and a few, like Vivek, were dressed in the more Western pant-and-shirt combination. Most men donned turbans of varying heights and styles, leaving a tail of fluttering fabric.
In silence, the Vij men walked through the city to its outskirts, not speaking until their destination was in sight, until the mighty, legendary Ravi greeted them. The wild, mischievous river had, in the last many years, changed its direction as it willed and broken its banks open in flood when it desired, indifferent to those who resided close to it. That August morning, people strolled around it in pairs or groups; some sat at its edge, some bathed in its depths, while others devotedly performed their prayers and salutations.
As the waters of the Ravi rose and fell, relaying thousands of years of memory and myth, the Vij men settled down on its sandy banks. It was on these very banks that many saints and holy men had prayed to the mighty gods for enlightenment. It was here that the Sikh Guru Arjan, after five days of torture by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, had bathed his last, disappearing completely into its stream and passing on to the next world. It was here that the remains of Leelawati, the grandmother Samir never knew, were once scattered. It was here, just a few years ago, that Jawaharlal Nehru had declared purna swaraj, the demand for complete independence from the British Raj. And it was here, on the banks of the historic river, on what would prove to be no mere weekend excursion, that the tides of ten-year-old Samir’s days would be altered forever.
* * *
Through the long walk, a vial had sat safe in Vivek’s front pocket, and now that they were seated, staring ahead at the river that nourished their city, he extracted it and placed it on the ground before his nephew. A small glass vial with an oval bottom and a thick neck, secured shut with a glass stopper. Against the sand it sat, a deep ruby. Samir observed it for a few seconds until his father gently nudged it closer.
Smiling, the boy picked it up and uncorked it, and even before he had a chance to bring it up to his nose, the fragrance struck him. It was absolutely extraordinary, more evocative that anything else he’d ever smelled. During the course of his short life, his eager nose had smelled many things—flowers, leaves, the barks of trees, an assortment of kitchen spices from sweet to spicy, dry stones, wet stones, mossy stones, small insects and domestic animals, and even some of the ittar bottles from the shop if no one was watching. But never had his nose felt so arrested as it did now; never had it come into contact with anything so divine. He’d never smelled it before, and yet for the briefest of moments, he felt as if he were being reintroduced to something long forgotten, as if he’d once been enveloped by this magnificent smell, its memory emanating from deep within.
As the childish smile disappeared from his lips, Samir realized that some smells would affect him in ways different from others. When he was five years old, his uncle had formally introduced him to his first real ingredient, khuss, the essence of vetiver. The deep emerald liquid had instantly reminded Samir of the fragrant grass woven into the curtains of their haveli during summertime. Even at that age, he’d been able to recognize the smell of vetiver from memory, but was never drawn to it in quite the same way that this new aroma invited him in.
His gut was aroused. Desperate, yearning, hungry. Tightening his grasp on the glass stopper in his left hand, he closed his eyes and deeply inhaled the contents of the bottle. Uninhibited, untrained, he concentrated only on smell, as far as his gut would take him. Everything else could wait, had to wait. All that surrounded him—the river, the legends, the sand, the breeze, the morning light, even his family—dissolved. Everything solid melted into air. What remained was a canvas of velvety opulence. It was creamy, fresh, intoxicating, honey-like, yet sharp and dark altogether.
When he opened his eyes, they were lined with tears. And even before he had consciously connected all the dots, the tears began trickling down his face. Unsettled and almost embarrassed, he placed the bottle down and reached up to wipe his eyes. But Vivek held his arm tightly.
“Don’t,” he began. “You will need those.”
Samir looked at his father, the pools of tears now moistening his eyelashes.
Mohan brought his hand to his chin, rubbing it pensively. “How strange it is,” he contemplated, “that you should somehow inherit an organ from a man who acquired it completely from his environment. That the nose of your uncle and all its talents be bequeathed to you…” He paused. “Incredible.”
Vivek smiled knowingly. Since the day he was born, the boy had smelled just about everything he could extend his nose to, making it clear that his destiny was entwined with perfume. But what fascinated Vivek was that someone so young could be provoked so deeply. For a moment, he felt a twinge of jealousy, a wish that his nose would have dictated his decisions earlier than it did.
Clearing his throat then, he inquired about the tears.
Samir shrugged. “I–I don’t know, Taya ji. They just appeared.” He didn’t understand how and couldn’t explain why, but felt certain he shared a history with this smell.
“What did you smell?”
“I didn’t expect it to be so…” He paused, trying to find the words.
“But puttar, what did you smell?” Mohan repeated the question.
“The night,” he began softly. “I smelled a beautiful, endless night.” Though this was an accurate description, Samir felt the words fall utterly flat when compared with the smell itself. Was it meant to be reduced this way, described in words at all?
Vivek pointed to the vial. “This is the essence of tuberose, or rajnigandha. It blooms at night, and is incredibly precious and difficult to extract. Tell me, what did you feel?”
Samir felt almost silly as he said, “Safe, the smell made me feel safe. Like I was lying in a bed of stars.”
Mohan shot a look at his older brother, and the perfumer smiled. “Smells can produce visceral, physical reactions in our body—pleasant, unpleasant, or simply intriguing.”
“Like the tears, you mean?” Samir asked, eyes wide.
Vivek pursed his lips and nodded.
“It was like a storm erupted in my heart.” The child’s voice was painted with an ache unnatural for someone his age. “I felt the smell in my heart. Yahaan, here.” He placed his palm on his chest.
“But remember, you don’t smell with your heart, you smell with another organ.” Vivek touched his forefinger to the tip of his nose.
Samir’s eyebrows knit together. Surely one could smell from the heart. He had, he did—from his heart, his gut, his nose, even his fingertips. From his whole body, in fact. But these thoughts were interrupted by his uncle’s pragmatism.
“Whatever effect a smell has on your heart is simply one prescribed by memory. When you smell something beautiful, you feel awash. You are taken in by its tide. It’s so powerful that you can’t explain it and allow yourself to…” His voice trailed off.
Copyright © 2022 by Aanchal Malhotra
