PERFUME
*
The missing note in her perfume was always the one that bothered him and yet informed all the other notes that filled the fragrant air.
*
He continued to smell her on the corpus of his own body. At times when he longed for her inordinately, he could conjure up her body odour at will, whilst taking a walk or performing some odd errand.
*
He wanted to forget her now. She had tortured him for years, seducing him with her odour and she often stank. He liked to kiss her profusely on her breasts, for he loved the smell of milk, and her armpits, though masked with perfume, were bitter.
*
But during the good days, they loved smelling each other, often in unseemly parts, and would spoil each other with cheap perfume. After they parted, her only remaining request from him was to send her his unwashed clothes.
He had doused his scarf with a perfume she felt most reminded her of him, but the city in which she lived in was not only hot but also humid, a veritable sauna in which all traces of his perfume were likely to rapidly disappear, or at least, it smelt that way. Perhaps his perfume was merely hidden, covered by all the other odour that occupied her life.
*
He roamed the city, capturing her smells, the stench of the river nearby and the smell of incense in shopping arcades that smacked of wood, reminding him of the forest he spent time in as a child, his early wooden days.
*
Not that it was some sort of mid-life crisis–he hardly believed in such nomenclature–but when he was approaching fifty, he found himself living alone and noticed that he had inadvertently weaned himself off wearing perfume, had even begun to reject free samples old friends at perfumeries would share with him. His mother used to tell him on the telephone that even months after leaving home, his room still carried his odour. Of late, however, he only applies a few drops of attar on his wrists, the nape of his neck, behind his ears, and on his hair, an attar composed primarily of frankincense and a hint of ginger, reminiscent of long, lonely wanderings in the desert.
*
As much as he liked her body, her toilette, her soft skin, her large eyes and breasts, he could not bring himself close to her rank mouth.
*
He had reduced her essence to that of smell. Her sudden disappearance from his life was momentous and he had no other recourse. Apart from daily prayer, he enveloped his life with objects that carried her odour, as if blanketed with vetiver, and burnt all kinds of incense in his apartment and washed his hands with fragrant soap, in the hope of hiding his failures. Towards the end, she had already begun to use a perfume that did not pair well with her natural sweetness, smelt instead of burning cardboard in a polluted city.
*
The odour of parting was not just his but he imagined that she, too, must have not bathed in days.
*
He tried not to think of her. He tried not to smell her naval, settled deep in her soft belly, as if in a bird’s nest, smelling. He had not seen her in years, much less smelt her body. What he missed most was what she smelt like when her skin was cold or when she was frightened.
*
Ever since he started wearing a fragrance that smacked of wood, not real wood, she used to say, but rather a confectioner’s wood, she feared that this wood would bury her much too early.
*
She used to sporadically remind him–especially whilst making love–that it was not love, care or affection that guided his impulses but a fixation on her bodily smells. It was in these smells, she often added, that he was able to go back to a place that was vaguely reminiscent of a false home.
GAURAV MONGA is a writer and educator. Much of his recent work looks at the intersection of fashion and literature.