NONFICTION
Today Smells Like India
A personal essay in the smoke of a forest fire
We forgot to close our bedroom window last night, and India snuck in. She wafted through the air, sunk into our sheets, and invited herself into my dreams.
I fell asleep in Ottawa. I woke up in Mumbai.
Our window screens were designed with mosquitoes in mind. They were never intended to repel a wall of smoke one-thousand-miles wide. Two hundred forest fires are burning across the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. I am not one of the ten thousand that have evacuated their homes, but jet stream has brought smoke to my front door.
An orange hue is sitting on top of Canada’s capital. It’s as if I’m seeing the skyline through my old ski goggles.
City officials are insisting that this is a bad smell. Ottawa’s air quality is now the worst of any major city in the world. Air advisories have been issued. Citizens are being told not to breath in unless it is absolutely necessary. People walk the streets in face masks, as if we’ve been thrust once more into to the bad old days of the pandemic.
Baseball games and dragon boat races — the usual staples of June evenings in Ottawa — have been cancelled. Patios are closed. Netflix and chill has become the purview of every sensible taxpayer.
Not me. I’ve never been very sensible. I’m going out.
“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
Paul Romer, Stanford economist.
Every new inhalation is saturated with nostalgia. I am awash in old memories today, faces and places my fantasies have forgotten as my time in India fades further and further into my rearview mirror.
When you first land in Hindustan it smells like something is wrong, like New Delhi is burning down. Only the casual aspect of the Indians reassures you that this chunky haze is business as usual.
The developing world has a distinct smell, a potion made from the diesel exhaust of ten million trucks and tuk-tuks mixed with the dusts of eternal drought. Then the sun falls, and the slum candles spark. Imagine a hundred-thousand cooking fires contained in a hundred-thousand rusted metal drums. The smell of a million suppers, mingling into the fat mist of a poverty-stricken megacity.
It all amounts to an unforgettable ether; an air you can chew.
The famous perfumer David Seth Moltz once said that a great scent is a keyhole into another realm. This morning I sat on my balcony, closed my eyes, and breathed. Suddenly I was back at the gates of the Amber Fort in Jaipur, watching elephants ferry tourists up to the old stone walls. I breathed again and I could see the shisha bars in Mumbai, where scooters pull into the patio for a quick puff before they vanish back into traffic.
Another breath, another memory. A rooftop breakfast in a dilapidated hotel in Varanasi; the back of that tumbledown tuk-tuk in Dehradun; the frenzied spice markets of New Delhi, where open cloth bags full of herbs in reds and yellows brighter than I ever believed reach out to every horizon.
India is a land of antipodes, and the best stories are all too often born from the ugliest extremes. To say that India smells like a forest fire sounds like an insult, but I as I sit here smelling the big smoke, I crave a return to the crowds and the chaos. For now this smell will have to be my stand in — a little slice of India without the airfare.
I can very well understand those who say this smoke is nothing more than a looming monster, a hardship that the wind has carried in to ruin their week. For me, the smell is a promise that tonight will not be normal, that all that is average will be sprinkled exotic, and the strange hazy apparitions that always spurn the best stories will be lurking on every corner.
The spirit of India is in the air tonight, and that is a terrible thing to waste.
For a look into my sillier side:
