Forgotten smells and memories

YESTERDAY was a day of wonderment, rediscovery, joy, sadness and yet strangely uplifting. Committed to presenting a few copies to deserving schoolchildren of a book on the epic heroism at Saragarhi, held by me on behalf of its New York-based author GS Josan, I tugged tentatively at rusted memory in my study.

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Wandering slipper-clad, befuddled by the challenge of opening the long-shut cupboards, I felt overtaken; ambushed, bushwhacked by a staggering Proustian moment. In an instant, I was a precocious pre-teen in Lucknow’s byzantine alleys, smelling the heady long-forgotten scents, emotions and memories of second-hand hardbound books that had inveigled themselves in my mind… placing me in a nostalgic happy place.

So what’s a Proustian moment? It’s a seminal passage in literature, a sensory experience that triggers a rush of memories often long past or even seemingly forgotten. For French author Marcel Proust, who penned the legendary lines in his 1913 novel, À la recherché du temps perdu (Remembrance of things past), it was a crumb of his aunt’s delectable Madeleine cake with tea before the children attended Sunday mass that sent his mind reeling.

Graham Greene says with prescience that there is always a moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. For me, that moment occurred as a 16-year-old in 1964, when I first breathed in the magic alchemy of vanilla in second-hand bookshops near Qaisar Bagh; in the chowk’s labyrinthine gullies, in the crowded back lanes of Hazratganj.

Back in the present, I sat eyes closed with a lapful of heaven as I caressed the book covers, their yellowing pages and fading inks. It scarcely mattered that the sweet smell was an irrefutable sign of ageing… the slow breaking down of the volatile organic compounds that comprise the lignin which has a hint of vanillin and is present in all wood-based paper; revealing the life span of books to chemists/conservators.

Though people associate old books with coffee, chocolatey, woody and smoky smells, a 2009 Smithsonian study described old books as a ‘combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness’. Proof enough is available with the 1942 vintage antiquarian bookseller on Shimla’s Mall Road. The lovely smell of old books sweeps you in its pale the moment you enter… To be overcome by the smell of old books is finally a delectable defeat.

Today, we know that smell and emotion are stored in the brain’s olfactory lobe as one memory. We know that from the foetus, whose only fully-developed sense is smell till age 10, when sight takes over, the child registers smells for life; from mother’s smell to other smells children will love or hate.

Research says that women smell, taste, hear, see colours and feel textures more accurately than men. One reason why, when ‘milady’ came in, she smelled rather more than I did, or Proust. ‘Something else here that’s creepy/crawly, also loves wood.’